The Transformative Power of Post-Abortion Syndrome.

If you were a pro-abortionist, or even "pro-choice," what would keep you up nights counting sheep? A new majority on the Supreme Court, mystified that prior justices had so lost contact with the text and history of our Constitution that they'd created, willy-nilly, a "right" to abortion? Near the top, to be sure.

But worse even than having the mythology wrung out of Supreme Court jurisprudence would be if people became persuaded that the "liberator" of womenabortionhad freed no one, and in the process had killed over 48 million unborn children in the United States alone. What would happen if we woke up and realized that the promises abortion proponents offered had long since come due? How would the cultural conversation over abortion be transformed if this failure to deliver became a truth that could no longer be avoided?

To be honest, it took me longer than I care to admit to realize the transformative power of Post-Abortion Syndrome (PAS). As I read our benighted opposition, they are increasingly coming to the same conclusion. They are trying to defang PAS by addressing abortion's extraordinarily negative aftershocks in a semi-serious but ultimately dismissive, even trivializing manner.

To take just one example, there is Emily Bazelon's piece that appeared in the New York Times Magazine just prior to the annual March for Life. The title was, "Is There a Post-Abortion Syndrome?" Bazelon, as it happens, is the granddaughter of pro-abortion judge David L. Bazelon and the cousin of the legendary pro-abortion feminist Betty Friedan.

If I may, let me make just a few salient points about a crucially important front in the battle over the execution of 1.3 million unborn babies every year.

"The idea that abortion is at the root of women's psychological ills is not supported by the bulk of the research," Bazelon writes. This is flatly contradicted by a wave of research that more definitely than ever has pinpointed abortion as the culprit in many women's mental health problems.

Bazelon neglects to mention that in many ways the springboard for a reassessment of abortion's egregious impact on women can be traced back to a study led by David Fergusson. He and his colleagues tracked 1,265 women in a longitudinal study that began in 1977 and is ongoing. Their results were published in early 2006 in the Journal of Child Psychiatry and Psychology.