NOTE

NOTE: Versions of this article also appeared in: the Windsor Star, Edmonton Journal, Vancouver Sun, Ottawa Citizen, Calgary Herald, and the Kingston Whig-Standard

PUBLICATION: National Post

DATE: 2003.05.13

EDITION: All but Toronto

SECTION: Canada

PAGE: A12

BYLINE: Sharon Kirkey

SOURCE: CanWest News Service

DATELINE: OTTAWA

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Study links abortion to risk of mental illness: Controversial findings: Lead researcher also authored anti-abortion book

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OTTAWA - A controversial new study in Canada's top medical journal links abortion to a higher risk of psychiatric illness in some women.

One critic called the study, published today in the Canadian Medical Association Journal, "outrageous."

Its lead author, Dr. David Reardon, opposes abortion.

Critics say the article is the latest example of the "post-abortion syndrome" tactic in the anti-abortion movement's arsenal. An accompanying commentary in the Journal calls the study misleading.

The researchers found that women who terminated their pregnancies were 72% more likely to be hospitalized for psychiatric problems such as "adjustment reactions," depressive psychosis and bipolar disorder in the first four years after their pregnancy than women who carried their pregnancies to term.

The biggest difference in admission rates occurred in the first 90 days, the study said: Women who had an abortion were nearly three times more likely to be admitted to hospital for mental health problems than women who delivered.

But, in an accompanying piece, Dr. Brenda Major, a professor of psychology at the University of California at Santa Barbara, wrote: "To compare the mental health of women who give birth (typically of a planned, wanted pregnancy) to those who have abortions (typically of an unintended, unwanted pregnancy) ... is to compare apples to oranges."

Dr. Major said it's equally possible the reverse is true, "namely, that psychiatric problems cause women who become pregnant to feel less capable of raising a child and to terminate their pregnancy."

In an interview, she called the comparison "outrageous," the data "muddy" and questioned the bias of Dr. Reardon, co-author of Forbidden Grief: the Unspoken Pain of Abortion, and director of the Elliot Institute, a Springfield, Ill.-based organization devoted to researching the "after effects" of abortion.

In a 1992 article on the institute's Web site, Dr. Reardon wrote: "We must never forget that our long-term goal is not to make abortion simply illegal, but also unthinkable ...

The new study comes at a time when abortion rights are under increasing attack in the United States. In Canada, pro-choice groups are lobbying for more abortion providers, more training in medical schools and fully funded abortion clinics in every province.

In the study, U.S. and Canadian researchers examined California Medicaid records of more than 56,700 low-income women aged 13 to 49 who had an abortion or gave birth in 1989 and compared psychiatric admission rates for both groups over four years. Women who had been hospitalized for psychiatric treatment in the year before they became pregnant were excluded.

Overall, psychiatric admission rates were higher for women who had had an abortion compared with women who had delivered, in the short and long term. The risk was highest closest to the abortion. "We would have thought relief was strongest immediately afterwards," Dr. Reardon said in an interview.

"But women who had abortions still had two and a half times more admissions than women who had post-partum depression."

The risk for both those who aborted and those who delivered was extremely low: About one per cent of the women who aborted were hospitalized for mental problems within the study period, compared to 0.6% of women who gave birth. But Dr. Reardon said that if the numbers in the study are extrapolated to the 1.3 million women having abortions in the United States every year, it would mean more than 6,000 additional cases of psychiatric admissions per year "that might be attributable in some way to the abortion."

Dr. Reardon, who published a study last year in the British Medical Journal that found women who abort are at higher risk of depression than women who carried unintended pregnancies to term, said abortion clinics and physicians aren't doing an adequate job of screening for women who may be at higher risk for "subsequent emotional problems."

"If you went into a doctor and said, 'I have a lump in my breast, I need a mastectomy' and he said, 'Jump up on the table, I'll take it right off,' we'd call that malpractice," Dr. Reardon said.

Marilyn Wilson, executive director of the Canadian Abortion Rights Action League, said suggestions that abortion causes mental harm to women are "part of efforts of anti-choice groups to try to link abortion to cancer, infertility and a number of different conditions that have not been proven scientifically."

She said she was surprised the CMAJ published the article.

"I would be totally suspect of someone who authored a report who was anti-choice in view."

According to Statistics Canada, Canadian women obtained 105,427 abortions in 2000.

CANADIAN MEDICAL ASSOCIATION JOURNAL

CMAJ • May 13, 2003; 168 (10)

RESEARCH

Psychiatric admissions of low-income women following abortion and childbirth

David C. Reardon, Jesse R. Cougle, Vincent M. Rue, Martha W. Shuping, Priscilla K. Coleman and Philip G. Ney

http://www.cmaj.ca/cgi/content/full/168/10/1253