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Dear BigAlOz,

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Having checked-out the four references you quoted in your recent post for which you provided internet links, I see that the first two refer to articles written by Priscilla K. Coleman, a Pro-Life university professor in Ohio and director of a Pro-Life organisation called “Wecare”.

The second two refer to an OLO article and a Queensland parliamentary submission written by David van Gend, a Toowoomba medical GP and Queensland secretary for the Pro-Life organisation called the “World Federation of Doctors who Respect Human Life”.
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When they were submitted to peer review, Priscilla K. Coleman’s statistics and research were severely criticised as scientifically flawed :

« Researchers were unable to reproduce Coleman's results on abortion and mental health despite using the same dataset, and have described her findings as "logically inconsistent" and potentially "substantially inflated" by faulty methodology. The American Psychological Association (APA) and other major medical bodies have concluded that the evidence does not support a link between abortion and mental health problems, and APA panellists charged with reviewing the evidence were similarly critical of the methodology of Coleman's studies.

The statistical methods Coleman and her co-authors use have been criticized by the American Psychological Association (APA). An APA panel found that studies by Coleman and her co-authors have "inadequate or inappropriate" controls and don't adequately consider "women's mental health prior to the pregnancy and abortion »

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Priscilla_K._Coleman
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The “World Federation of Doctors Who Respect Human Life”, for which David van Gend is Quensland secretary, is an international Pro-Life medical organization advocating the foetal right to life. The federation also opposes human embryo research and in vitro fertilization.

You draw my attention, in particular, to “… the Appendix of his submission to the Queensland Parliament Health Committee inquiry into the Termination of Pregnancy Bill, which you will see was censored by the committee because its members did not want to know the reality of what abortion entailed”. However, I note that it has been far less censored than ...

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... the main body of his submission. Also, there is nothing to indicate that the four brief passages to which you refer were censored “because its members [the Queensland Parliament Health Committee] did not want to know the reality of what abortion entailed”. Perhaps those particular passages were censored simply because the author was employing offensive language, or for some other reason.

In any event, despite those four brief censored passages, I see that the main body of his argument in the Appendix has not been censored at all. His graphs and all his other data have been published, perfectly intact. Whether they are scientifically valid or not is another matter.
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I’m afraid none of this is very convincing, BigAlOz. Unfortunately, it is all very obviously biased Pro-Life and can only be considered pseudo-science. Neither Pricilla K. Coleman nor David van Gend are scientifically neutral. Their work has been discredited. They both have an axe-to-grind. Both are clearly Pro-Life.

But please don’t let me discourage you. If you can come up with more reliable statistics, data and research from reputable, independent (unbiased) sources, I should be delighted to hear of it.

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Banjo Paterson.

If I may, I would suggest to dislodge one of those conditions. To look for an unbiased source. Instead if you want a position to be validated have the condition of it being peer reviewed, or that the results are sampled from another group to confirm the findings.

I say this because in most topics, expecially social topics, the reasurchers are there because they have the strong motivation to seek the answers they are looking for. It essentially means that those who take the time to start a new study are already biased because they believe in it. But if the findings can be peer reviewed, and retested, then who cares if the origional researcher was biased. The truth can be confirmed.

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Dear Not_Now.Soon,

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Pro-Life and Pro-Choice organisations play a significant role in shaping the debate over abortion. These organisations’ objectives are opposed to each other – the former seeking to restrict abortion laws, the latter seeking to liberalize them.

They are ideological organisations whose purpose is to promote their ideology as broadly as possible within the general public and to influence lawmakers, both directly and indirectly, so that they promulgate legislation in conformity with their particular ideology.

Abortion is a highly polemical subject, heavily charged with emotion. Much of the communication concerning it, emitted by the Pro-Life and Pro-Choice organisations and their activists and supporters, is tainted, either overtly or covertly, with propaganda.

It is naïve and unrealistic to expect either of them to “shoot itself in the foot”, as it were, by providing an objective, fully comprehensive analysis of abortion whose logical conclusions turn out to be contrary to their specific ideology.

Also, as Linda Gordon wrote in her book “Woman's Body, Woman's Right”, rev. ed. (New York: Penguin Books, 1990), abortion is by no means a recent phenomenon :

« Over several centuries and in different cultures, there is a rich history of women helping each other to abort. Until the late 1800s, women healers in Western Europe and the U.S. provided abortions and trained other women to do so, without legal prohibitions.

The State didn't prohibit abortion until the 19th century, nor did the Church lead in this new repression. In 1803, Britain first passed antiabortion laws, which then became stricter throughout the century. The U.S. followed as individual states began to outlaw abortion. By 1880, most abortions were illegal in the U.S., except those ``necessary to save the life of the woman.'' But the tradition of women's right to early abortion was rooted in U.S. society by then; abortionists continued to practice openly with public support, and juries refused to convict them … »

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« … Abortion became a crime and a sin for several reasons. A trend of humanitarian reform in the mid-19th century broadened liberal support for criminalization, because at that time abortion was a dangerous procedure done with crude methods, few antiseptics, and high mortality rates. But this alone cannot explain the attack on abortion. For instance, other risky surgical techniques were considered necessary for people's health and welfare and were not prohibited. ``Protecting'' women from the dangers of abortion was actually meant to control them and restrict them to their traditional child-bearing role. Antiabortion legislation was part of an antifeminist backlash to the growing movements for suffrage, voluntary motherhood, and other women's rights in the 19th century »
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Since then, there have been a number of studies on abortion, most of poor quality and many more or less biased. Here is a fairly recent overview that cites two of the most reputable, comprehensive and objective studies that were carried out by the American Psychological Association (APA) in 2008 and the U.K. Royal College of Psychiatrists in 2011 on the subject raised by Madeleine regarding her personal deep regret following her decision to abort :

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abortion_and_mental_health

Here is the link to the American study on this subject :

http://www.apa.org/pubs/journals/features/amp-64-9-863.pdf

Here is the link to the UK study which confirms the findings of the American study :

http://www.apa.org/pubs/journals/features/amp-64-9-863.pdf

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Thanks for the encouragement, Banjo. Instead of quoting at length from pro-abortion ideologues like Linda Gordon and medical bodies which have been captured by the Left, perhaps you will open your mind to the possibility that not only the authors of many of these studies on abortion are biased, as Not Now Soon reminds us, but so are the peer reviewers.

I concede that group think maintains that abortion does not increase the risk of mental health problems, because that would not be politically correct in a world which promotes the choice to terminate pregnancy above the right to life of an unborn child.

One study that details these risks and somehow managed to beat this censorship and get published is a gold standard 30 year longitudinal study published in the British Journal of Psychiatry in 2006 by Fergusson, D. M., Horwood, J.H. and Boden J.M.

A self-described pro-choice atheist and rationalist, the late Dr David M. Fergusson, Professor of Psychology at the University of Otago in Christchurch, New Zealand, undertook his first investigation with the expectation that his cohort data would prove that the apparent link between abortion and mental health problems would be explained by pre-existing factors. Instead, his data revealed that abortion was an independent "risk factor for the onset of mental illness."

The study found abortion increased the risk of suicide ideation by 61%, the risk of major depression by 31%, the risk of anxiety disorder by 131%, the risk of alcohol dependence by 188% and the risk of illicit drug dependence by 185%.

While retaining a pro-choice position, Fergusson's research convinced him that: "Abortion is a traumatic life event; that is, it involves loss, it involves grief, it involves difficulties. And the trauma may, in fact, predispose people to having mental illness."

Continued in next post….