By Dave Andrusko
If you think about it, pro-abortionists constitute the original Green Party. They recycle old canards–and recycle and recycle them again. The difference is their findings were essentially waste to begin with.
Put another way, they mine studies that were virtually ore-free to begin with and grow more depleted each time the same misinformation is reprocessed. Or, to switch metaphors, they go back over and over to a well that was bone-dry to begin with.
Enter the “Turnaway” study, the brainchild of researchers at the University of California at San Francisco. As Dr. Randall K. O’Bannon, NRLC’s director of education once put it, “If Planned Parenthood is America’s abortion chain and the Guttmacher Institute its source of statistics, then UCSF has long been the nation’s abortion training academy.”
UCSF conducted a five year “prospective longitudinal” study beginning in 2008 looking at the repercussions of a woman being “turned away” from an abortion clinic.
What you need to know is this. Led by Diana Greene Foster, at least two elements of the UCSF team’s agenda are abundantly clear. First, “prove” that women really are better off economically, physically, emotionally having an abortion, even if those happen to be later abortions, than they would be if they gave birth. (The “Turnaway” refer to women who wanted abortions later in pregnancy than abortion clinics would provide.)
And, of course, they don’t want women exposed to any material that says anything contrary.
Second, abortion clinics should reexamine—and end—any self-imposed gestational limitations they have placed on when they will abort babies.
Dr. O’Bannon critiqued the original Turnaway data that came out in 2013, in a five-part NRL News Today series.
But the “Turnaway” study is like the undead. No matter how much and how deep you bury its findings, it comes back to life.
On Wednesday Dr. O’Bannon debunked the latest “discovery,” building on the “Turnaway” study which appeared in JAMA Psychiatry.
The message of “Women’s Mental Health and Well-being 5 Years After Receiving or Being Denied an Abortion” is as simple as the praise for its thoroughness is misleading.
(1) Any negative psychological reactions to abortion experienced by women are at the least, overrated; in fact, they are essentially non-existent or very transitory.
(2) Although not featured as prominently in some press coverage, the authors argue that state pro-life informed consent laws may not be helpful to women but are more likely detrimental.
The goals of the double-barrel attack? We could list a dozen; here are just two.
First, speed bumps–such as informed consent laws or pain-capable protection laws that set limits on how late an abortion may be performed –must eliminated at all costs. The drive to the local abortion clinic must be unimpeded. Informed consent laws accomplish nothing except to make a woman feel worse about taking the life of her unborn baby.
Second (the universal underpinning of so much pro-abortion propaganda over the years), there is no physical or psychological aftermath–none— for women who abort. What might linger is like a vapor and will vanish in no time.
However drawing on the work of researchers , pro-choice and pro-abortion alike, Dr. O’Bannon demonstrates there is much evidence (to quote one pro-choice researcher) that “Those having an abortion had elevated rates of subsequent mental health problems including depression, anxiety, suicidal behaviours and substance use disorders. This association persisted after adjustment for confounding factors.”
Moreover, something that is obvious to anyone who has worked with post-aborted women, “reactions may not present until ten years or more later–perhaps after the woman has gotten married and is either contemplating having a child or has just given birth to a child,” as Dr. O’Bannon put it.
Please read, or re-read Dr. O’Bannon’s Wednesday post.
As long as the Establishment Media accepts pro-abortion conclusions uncritically–which is likely forever–your critique must, as always, be fact-based and thoroughly accurate.