"When many cures are offered for a disease, it means the disease is not curable" -Anton Chekhov
''Once you tell people there's a cure for something, the more likely they are to pressure doctors to prescribe it.'' -Robert Ehrlich, drug advertising executive.
"Opinions are like sphincters, everyone has one." - Chris Rangel
The Morning After: A study in last week's Canadian Journal of Medicine found that California women on Medicaid who had abortions had higher rates of psychiatric illnesses afterwards - specifically depression and adjustment disorders. It isn’t clear, though, that abortion is the cause. Although the authors controlled for previous psychiatric illness, it could be that there are other social factors that are responsible both for the subsequent depression and the abortion. Did the women who had abortions have less social support than women who delivered their babies? Meaner boyfriends (or spouses)? More financial strain? Hard to tell. But, in the long run, perhaps it doesn’t matter. Perhaps in those situations the decision to end a pregnancy isn’t the clear-cut cost/benefit analysis that most abortion proponents make it out to be. Perhaps, there are elments of coercion involved - both implicit and explicit. That’s a study I’d like to see - a survey of abortion clinic clients asking whether or not the abortion was their idea, or their boyfriend’s or parents’. That would tell us someting about the state of abortion in this country - and the amount of personal choice involved in it. posted by Sydney on
5/19/2003 07:34:00 AM
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