THIRTY YEARS LATER: EVIDENCE THAT ABORTION DOES REAL DAMAGE TO WOMEN.(Column)

By Wanda Franz, Ph.D., NRLC President

Thirty years after Roe v. Wade, many people, including researchers and psychologists, are still in denial about the negative effects of abortion.

Fortunately, there is now a growing body of research that contradicts the conventional wisdom that abortion, by comparison, is safer for the mother than childbirth and that there are no negative psychological effects from abortion. In the last year alone, four new studies have been published.

These studies are particularly noteworthy because of the excellent research methods used.

Each of the four makes use of very large samples of established sets of data, gathered by government entities. Moreover, the researchers did not rely on obtaining accurate reports from the women themselves, but instead used objective statistics culled from government files. Taken together, these studies provide new insights into the negative effects of abortion across a number of areas.

The first of these studies to counter the conventional wisdom, published in the August issue of the Southern Medical Journal, examined "Deaths Associated With Pregnancy Outcome: A Record Linkage Study of Low Income Women." Researchers David C. Reardon, Philip G. Ney, Fritz Scheuren, Jesse Cougle, Priscilla K. Coleman, and Thomas W. Strahan analyzed data from California Medicaid records for 1989, using a method called "record-linkage." They matched the 173,279 women who had either an induced abortion or gave birth in 1989 to subsequent death certificates for the period 1989 to 1997.

They found that in the first two years following their abortions women were nearly twice as likely to die as women who carried their child to term. This elevated mortality risk persisted for the entire eight years under study.