Foreign Affairs

Women Who Abort Face 81-Percent Increase In Risk For Mental Health Problems, Study Shows

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Women who have abortions are much more likely to suffer mental health issues when compared to their peers who have carried their pregnancies to term, a British Journal of Psychiatry study showed.

“Abortion and Mental Health” studied a group of women — some who had aborted and others who had not — for 14 years to determine if women who had abortions suffered from mental health problems afterward, according to CNS News Thursday.

Twenty-two peer-reviewed studies, 15 of which came from the United States while the other seven were executed in other countries, made up the study’s results. Collectively 877,181 women participated in the study, 163,831 of whom had aborted their babies.

Women who had abortions were 81 percent more likely to experience mental health problems than their peers who had not aborted an unborn child. Of the women who aborted, 10 percent of mental health issues that arose thereafter were positively attributable to abortion, the study showed.

Substance use and suicidal behavior were the most common mental health illnesses that arose after abortions, according to the study. Women who aborted were twice as likely to commit suicide as women who carried their pregnancies to term.

“The strongest effects were observed when women who [had] an abortion were compared with women who had carried to term,” author of the study Priscilla K. Coleman wrote.

“The composite results reported herein indicate that abortion is a statistically validated risk factor for the development of various psychological disorders,” Coleman concluded.

The study was published in hard copy in 2011, but was not published online until January 2018.

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