Now, a group of public health researchers are studying how abortion really affects women.
For the past four years, researchers from the San Francisco-based Advancing New Standards in Public Health have followed the lives of nearly 1,000 women who have sought abortions in clinics across the country, interviewing them about their physical and mental health, their careers and finances, their relationships and social lives, and their feelings toward abortion—one of the first studies of its kind.
Most of the women in the study secured the abortion they sought (and 97 percent did not regret it
82 of them were turned away because their pregnancies had advanced past the gestational limit in their state. Ninety percent of those women carried the pregnancy to term and began raising the kid—a pro-lifer’s dream.
And how were these women doing one year later? Annalee Newitz of io9 spoke with the researchers about their study (which is still ongoing).
They found that a year after the event, the women who were turned away from an abortion were more likely to rely on government assistance, more likely to be living beneath the poverty line, and less likely to have a full-time job than the women in the study who had obtained abortions.
They also registered more anxiety a week after they were denied an abortion and reported more stress a year out. They were no more or less likely to be depressed.
And women who gave birth suffered from more serious health complications—from hemorrhaging to a fractured pelvis—than the women who aborted, even later in their pregnancies.
Happy home lives also failed to materialize. The women who were turned away were more than twice as likely to be a victim of domestic violence as those who were able to abort. The researchers found that “a year after being denied an abortion, 7 percent reported an incident of domestic violence in the last six months,” compared to 3 percent of the women who received abortions.[/B] The researchers concluded that this “wasn't because the turnaways were more likely to get into abusive relationships,” but that “getting abortions allowed women to get out of such relationships more easily.”
Carrying an unwanted pregnancy to term helped abusive men stay in these women’s lives, but it didn’t encourage delinquent new dads to stick around:
