Three years ago, newspapers in the US and UK were full of headlines such as “<a href="about:blank">Most women do not regret their abortions, study finds</a>” (Guardian Jan 13 2020) and “<a href="about:blank">The majority of women feel relief, not regret, after an abortion, study says</a>” (CNN Jan 15 2020).
The lead author of the research cited, based on the ‘Turnaway’ study, where women were recruited at abortion clinics to participate, <a href="about:blank#:~:text=%E2%80%9CAll%20the%20claims%20that%20negative,of%20obstetrics%2C%20gynecology%20and%20reproductive">asserted</a> that “All the claims that negative emotions will emerge over time, a myth that has persisted for decades without any evidence to substantiate these claims, it’s clear, it’s just not true.”
Regret or other negative emotions or their absence may in fact tell us something interesting about the morality of abortion. For, if our emotions can be signs through which we are made aware of ourselves and of moral reality, then they may (albeit fallibly) tell us something about the morality of abortion also.
Those opposed to abortion often cite emotional harm as a reason for restricting access to it. According to the Turnaway researchers, however, such claims should play no significant role in debates over abortion legislation.
Yet the Turnaway data-set, compiled by the abortion advocacy group Advancing New Standards in Reproductive Health, is itself highly questionable. As researcher David Reardon <a href="about:blank">points out</a>, “over two-thirds of the women approached at the abortion clinics refused to be interviewed, and half of those who agreed dropped out. Refusers and dropouts are known to have more postabortion problems.”
Despite these issues, the Turnaway data-set has been used to generate an enormous number of papers on the subject of women’s reactions to abortion, flooding journals and gaining widespread coverage in the media.
<a href="https://www.cureus.com/articles/146123-the-effects-of-abortion-decision-rightness-and-decision-type-on-womens-satisfaction-and-mental-health#!/"><strong><em>Just a month or so ago, however, a new peer-reviewed paper in the journal Cureus paints a very different picture. </em></strong></a>The participation rate of the survey used is three times higher than that of the Turnaway Study. The<em> Cureus</em> study, unlike the Turnaway Study, randomly selected an older group of women (ages 41-45) who were describing their abortions with the benefit of hindsight.
This more nuanced study of women’s considered reactions to abortion found that “33 per cent described their abortions as Wanted, 43 per cent as Inconsistent [meaning, inconsistent with their own values and preferences] 14 per cent as Unwanted and 10 per cent as Coerced.”
Such figures, reflecting the experiences of significant numbers of women, have received no mainstream media attention at all.
Why should this be? Don’t all sides of the abortion debate agree that coercion in this area is reprehensible – and that it is deplorable if women are having abortions that they think are morally wrong to have?
A well-established position in moral philosophy is that the worst kind of harm one can inflict upon oneself is moral harm, while going against conscience is a paradigmatic form of moral harm. For nothing can be more obviously immoral than to do what you yourself think is morally wrong. Socrates famously states, in <em>Gorgias,</em> that “It is better to suffer wrong than to do it” and gave witness to this truth right up to and including his death. If a significant percentage of women think that the abortions they are having are morally wrong, then why are people not being made aware of this? Anyone who cares about women’s welfare should surely be alarmed by this finding.
A further <a href="about:blank">paper</a> by some of the same researchers involved in the <em>Cureus </em>study, out last month in the <em>International Journal of Women’s Health</em>, found that, “Abortion, compared to live birth, is associated with a higher risk and likelihood of mental health morbidity during the reproductive years. The differences are larger for inpatient treatment than outpatient, and women with first pregnancy births have more, not less, mental health problems before the first pregnancy. Abortion is associated with a greater incidence of subsequent mental illness than birth, and the difference is not explainable by prior medical history.”
You will not read about these studies in the mainstream media which so readily regurgitates dubious research based on the Turnaway data. Moreover, research based on that problematic data-set and published by the same researchers in the same journal as the research which garnered the headlines above, is given far less publicity when it<a href="about:blank"> finds</a> that 96 per cent of women who were refused abortions did not regret having their child 5 years on (and the figure is 98 per cent for those who were raising the child).
We are frequently told that we need to listen to women on the issue of abortion. Yet women who regret their abortions or who were coerced or pressured into having them against their better judgement are being ignored. Given that the harm concerned is moral harm, the worst kind there is, we need to ask ourselves why such silence. A culture insensitive to moral harm is not a culture which respects women, let alone the pregnant woman, a symbol of everything that culture seeks to deny.
<em>(Getty Images)</em>
