Reclaiming Our Children: A Blog About Healing After Abortion

I have to admit reading things like this make me angry….another example of keeping abortion legal at the expense of womens health. It also annoys me that although it is post abortive women themselves speaking out, they always say our pain is being sited by  pro life groups as if we are an entity that does not exist.

If you can, write them and tell them exactly who we are and what we have experienced."abortion" being the

by     Steven Ertelt
          LifeNews.com Editor
          January 11, 2008
         

Washington, DC (LifeNews.com) — The American Psychiatric Association is drawing  jeers from the pro-life community for electing a new president who s a well-known abortion advocate. Nada Stotland, the president-elect of the national organization for mental health professionals, suggests 
abortion poses no problems for women.

Stotland is a member of the board of directors of the Physicians for Reproductive Choice and Health and her position concerns women who have suffered from mental health problems following an abortion.

This 
week, Stotland was quoted in the Los Angeles Times denying that abortion poses adverse psychological issues for women despite millions of women 
who have suffered following abortion and a wealth of research data.

In the interview, Stotland maintained no causal link between abortion and a greater risk of depression and drug abuse has been found.

Pro-life groups have "succeeded in convincing the American public" that abortion harms women, Stotland said.

"It’s 
a rule of thumb that if you want to get a law passed, you have to
  tell anecdotes that grab people," she said, alleging that pro-life groups make up the problems.

However,as recently as December, a new Australia study showed women who have 
abortions are more likely to abuse drugs and alcohol compared with  those who carry a pregnancy to term.

Kaeleen Dingle, of the University of Queensland, reported the results at a 
recent meeting of the World Psychiatric Association at a conference  in Melbourne.

About one-third of the women in the group had abortions and those who did were three times more likely to abuse hard drugs like heroin or meth 
than women who were never pregnant or kept their baby.

The women who had abortions were also twice as likely to be an alcoholic or engage in binge drinking and 1.5 times more likely to suffer from depression.

"So these women, from my findings, seem to be definitely more affected in some ways," Dingle concluded.

Another study, published in January 2006 in New Zealand, found 40 percent of women having abortions suffer from significant mental health problems.

Paula  Talley, a Missouri woman, speaks for many when she talks about the 
problems she faced after her abortion.

Talley 
says she was forced to have an abortion which went against her moral  beliefs by her employer and that her history of sexual abuse and depression  likely increased her risk of a severe emotional reaction to it.

She told LifeNews.com that if laws were in place to give women more information 
about mental health risks after an abortion, "I would have been  spared the years of grief and depression which followed my own unwanted 
abortion."

“The abortion counselor never asked if I was being pressured nor did she 
inquire about my psychological history,” Talley added.

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