Abortion Denials Cause Mental Health Problems for Mothers and Children: 'It's a Burden They Both Ca

(a lengthy, truly chilling read)


Abortion Denials Cause Mental Health Problems for Mothers and Children: ‘It’s a Burden They Both Carry Forever’
8/5/2022 by Laura Fraser, MindSite News


A pro-abortion demonstration in front of U.S. Supreme Court as the country awaited the Court’s decision in Whole Woman’s Health v. Hellerstedt in June 2016. (Jordan Uhl / Wikimedia Commons)

This story was originally published by MindSite News and is republished here with permission.

Hours after the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision overruled women’s civil rights to abortion, Planned Parenthood clinics in Ohio began turning away patients who were seeking or had already scheduled abortions. Sharon Liner, medical director for Planned Parenthood’s southwest Ohio region, is worried about the mental health—and the safety—of the women her clinics are no longer allowed to serve. Ohio is one of many states with so-called “trigger laws” on the books to ban or severely limit abortion—in this case, just six weeks after pregnancy. “We know that domestic violence and abuse can escalate during pregnancy,” she told MindSite News. One in five adult women and about a third of adolescent girls experience domestic violence during pregnancy. And recently, she said, two patients with pre-existing mental health issues experienced a worsening of those conditions as a result of an unwanted pregnancy. “Both described feeling better when they knew they could obtain an abortion,” Liner said.

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But now women in these situations may be unable to get abortions – and many will face serious psychological consequences, she said. Even rape victims are at risk: Ohio just denied an abortion for a 10-year-old girl who found herself pregnant after being raped—a decision that forced her to cross state lines to Indiana for the procedure. The overall effect of the ban on her clients is fear, according to Rebecca Jones, a licensed professional counselor with a private practice in San Antonio County, Texas. “It’s terror they might get pregnant, even those who are not sexually active or asexual. It’s terror of being oppressed and marginalized. It’s hopelessness, helplessness, and despair.” Such overwhelming stress and anxiety “will only increase as access becomes more challenging, especially for our patients with the least resources,” said Liner. Many of those patients will be unable to travel—given the costs, risks of losing a job, or their domestic situation—and will be forced to give birth to unwanted children, she said.

Nada Stotland, a psychiatrist and past president of the American Psychiatric Association, has written extensively about the mental health effects of abortion denial. “The reasons women decide to abort are all mental health factors,” she wrote in a journal article. “These include poverty, lack of social supports, domestic violence, rape, incest, heavy ongoing responsibilities, lack of education, and preexisting mental illness.” Some 60% of women who have abortions already have children, Stotland said in an interview. “They’re thinking about protecting those children and having an abortion because they can’t afford another child. They’re having abortions not because they don’t care about babies, but because they care about the children they already have.”

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The mental health effects of being denied an abortion are not just anecdotal. They’ve been documented in a prospective, longitudinal study conducted by ANSIRH, a research unit of the University of California, San Francisco, focused on reproductive issues. For the research, published in JAMA Psychiatry in 2017, team members surveyed 1,132 women who sought abortions at 30 clinics in 21 states. Some of them would go on to have abortions, but others were turned away because they’d missed the fetal gestational limit set by the clinics, which varied among the sites and states between 10 weeks and the second trimester.

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https://msmagazine.com/2022/08/05/abortion-denials-mental-health-problems-mothers-children-turnaway-study/