Those who support abortion claim that it is a necessary option to help women, and yet studies show that women who have abortions are more likely to commit suicide. From LifeNews.com:
Researchers in Finland interviewed 600,000 women for a study that showed that women who became pregnant and had abortions were six times more likely to commit suicide than women who carried their pregnancies to term. Women who aborted were three times more likely to commit suicide than those who had not been pregnant. The statistics show that rather than increasing a woman’s chances of suicide, carrying a baby to term actually decreases them. Also noteworthy was the fact that the study was based not only on interviews but also on medical records. This reliance on records in addition to testimony helped the study avoid “recall bias.” Recall bias is a phenomenon that sometimes skews the results of abortion related studies because many women who have had abortions are not willing to talk about them and will not reveal them on a questionnaire, even when asked.
A related study, in the European Journal of Health, found similar results. This study tracked 463,473 women who became pregnant between the years of 1980 and 2004 and recorded their mortality rates after either giving birth or having abortions. They found that women who had abortions were more likely to die within 10 years after their abortions than women who carried to term. Suicide was a common cause of death for these women.
Another study in The British Medical Journal discovered that the rate of suicide in women after birth was 5.9 out of 100,000. Among women who had abortions, the rate was 34.7. The suicide rate for women who had not been pregnant was 11.3. Again, carrying a pregnancy to term was seen to reduce the suicide rate.
Another study, conducted by David C Reardon of the Elliot Institute, studied 173,000 American women who became pregnant and then either had abortions or carried to term. The survey followed them for eight years after the pregnancy ended. Reardon found that women who aborted were 154% more likely to commit suicide than women who gave birth.. Another survey cited by David Reardon in his book Aborted Women, Silent No More (Springfield, IL: Acorn Books, 2002) discovered that up to 60% of women who had abortions had subsequent suicidal feelings, with 28% actually attempting suicide.
The magazine Women’s World reported a study of aborted women in which 45% said they had thoughts of suicide following their abortions.
The statistics are even grimmer for teenagers. One study found that teenage girls who had one or more abortions were 10 times more likely to commit suicide than those who never aborted.
Another study revealed that the rate of psychiatric hospitalization for teenagers who had abortions is three times higher than that of other teens.
But statistics only tell part of the story. Numbers do not convey the anguish of individual women. A teenager identified as “Nelly R” describes being coerced by her boyfriend into having an abortion. She says:
“I remember when they started the IV and how I looked up and told one of the nurses to tell me what was the sex of the baby and to tell the baby that I loved it and I had no choice. from there I don’t remember anything but when I woke up in the recovery room crying and checking my stomach to see if it was a horrible dream. I remember screaming from the top of my lungs and saying I wish I could die too. I fell into a deep depression and I bearly [sic] made it to senior year. I tried to commit suicide. I didn’t care for my self [sic] or anyone else at the time I was a murder.[sic] I remember going to the police station and saying that I had murdered someone and saying that I killed my own baby. I thought that I would never be happy again.”
Another woman shared her story on the John Ankerberg show. She said:
When I was examined the doctor said that he had been mistaken, the baby was far more advanced than he had thought, and that it was 15 weeks, and I was really just in shock. Within a minute, I was aborted, waited a few minutes, and then I got up to get dressed. And when I went over to the dressing room, I saw bucket of blood. And, my baby was in the bucket of blood, and the baby was not an inch big, the baby was as big as my hand, and it was a real baby. All I could think of was that I had murdered my baby… I started deteriorating emotionally that night. Over the next month, I cried, not normal cries, I cried from the bellows of the earth. I remember just leaning at the top of my staircase, just wishing I could throw myself down to the bottom. I remember thinking of jumping on the roof and jumping off. I thought of every method of suicide, I tried to consider doing. And I cried so deeply, so constantly, and so deeply, it was like the wail of a newborn baby when they cry and their fists are clenched, and they just cannot control the crying and somehow I thought I must. It was the most extraordinary crying I could ever see myself doing.”
