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Since its inception in the mid-1980s, \u2018post-abortion syndrome\u2019 has become an invaluable arrow in the pro-life quiver, allowing arguments against abortion to be presented from the standpoint of protecting women\u2019s health. Post-abortion syndrome lacks a specific definition, but does not lack for pseudoscientific arguments.<\/p>\n
A new paper<\/a> in Bioethics<\/em> examines the career of David Reardon, an engineer who \u2014 according to news sources \u2014 earned his PhD in bioethics from an unaccredited online correspondence school. Reardon has generated more than two dozen articles claiming links between abortion and, among other things, psychiatric admissions<\/a>, breast cancer<\/a> and drug use<\/a> during subsequent pregnancies. Reardon\u2019s work isn\u2019t exactly inconsequential: the US Supreme Court cited his work in its 2007 decision in the case of Gonzales v Carhart<\/em>, which upheld a ban on partial-birth abortion in the US. Alberto Gonzales, US attorney general at the time, had submitted five of Reardon’s studies as evidence.<\/p>\n When a Reardon study linking abortions and depression<\/a> appeared in the British Medical Journal<\/em>, a number of criticisms<\/a> of the study appeared in the subsequent issue. One pedatrics professor wrote that the paper \u201cdo[es] not address the stated hypothesis. No results indicate whether prior psychological state is equally predictive of subsequent depression\u2026 regardless of whether [women] abort or carry to term\u201d.<\/p>\n Pro-life advocates, for their part, have taken issue with studies that do not match their cause. Priscilla Coleman, one of Reardon\u2019s collaborators, told<\/a> Lifesitenews.com, criticized a study<\/a> from the Guttmacher Institute (founded by a former president of Planned Parenthood) that found no link between abortion and depression in teenagers. Coleman said that the sample size of the teenagers who had abortions (69, of a total of 292 pregnant teenage girls) was too small to be of use.<\/p>\n It\u2019s puzzling that the sample size issue would bother Coleman. She had no problem using the exact same data set in one of her own studies<\/a>, which found a correlation between abortion and marijuana use.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Image by AnyaLogic<\/a> via Flickr Creative Commons<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Since its inception in the mid-1980s, \u2018post-abortion syndrome\u2019 has become an invaluable arrow in the pro-life quiver, allowing arguments against abortion to be presented from the standpoint of protecting women\u2019s health. Post-abortion syndrome lacks a specific definition, but does not lack for pseudoscientific arguments. Read more<\/a> Continue reading
\nThe authors of the new Bioethics<\/em> report have found numerous flaws in Reardon\u2019s methodology. In one instance, he surveyed women belonging to a group called Women Exploited by Abortion to establish that 80% of women regret having abortions. This tactic could probably be used as a textbook illustration of sampling bias.<\/p>\n