*sigh*

So much for it being a “personal” decision then, huh?

No. The only ones who should be involved in that sometimes complex, frequently very simple decision is anybody the woman wants involved. Her friends, her sex partners, strangers on the street, the people you listed, or nobody but her. That’s what “personal decision” means.

Well, we do things a little bit differently now than we did a century ago. I mean, I’m not saying we’re at the utter pinnacle of psychological understanding or anything, but you’re asking how we know made-up handwaving bullshit is nonsense and basing at least some of that question on the idea that we didn’t know a whole lot about PTSD back when we still thought lobotomies were keen and recommended circumcision to prevent masturbation.

Part of what makes something an actual syndrome or disorder is having a fairly concrete constellation of symptoms. If study after study after study can’t find any significant difference in women who aborted unplanned pregnancies and women who carried unplanned pregnancies to term, and nobody’s seeing any new or unique patterns emerging in post-abortion women who seek mental care, asking “How do you know it doesn’t exist?” is kind of like asking “How do you know unicorns don’t exist?” We don’t–it is possible that the entirety of both groups is hiding out with the Tibetan molemen in Antarctica–but we can say that it’s extremely unlikely that there exists a distinct, diagnosable, clinically unique disorder that’s only found in women who abort a pregnancy.

To go back to the PTSD example, you can be freaked out after a traumatic experience without having PTSD. You can have an emotional, physical, etc. reaction to having an abortion without having to hang a clinical diagnosis on it. Not everything women do needs to be medicalized to hell and back, and not everything that anyone has ever experienced needs to be tagged and given an entry in the DSM.

“Same-sex marriage, yeah, but not abortion – because people do think it’s murder.”

People also think meat is murder, but the vast majority of society feels absolutely no compunction about giving them the finger. Presumably the right to eat meat is much more socially solid than the right to say whether or not one’s body and health are co-opted by another individual.

10G, while I am totally pro-choice, “If you don’t like abortions–DON’T HAVE ONE” is not a valid argument. Same-sex marriage, yeah, but not abortion – because people do think it’s murder. I think they are wrong, but it’s not as simple as you say.

I’m kind of missing why that isn’t a valid argument. The supreme court says it isn’t murder, court precedent agrees, English common law would seem to agree, the majority of the nation agrees, and even if abortion was murder, I can think of a half dozen self defense claims that could be made. It really doesn’t matter if some people think abortion is murder because the guy they pay to interpret the words of their 2000 years dead sky daddy says it is. We don’t take PETA seriously when they say eating a cow is murder, why on earth do we even bother to address the concerns of fundamentalist Christians?

That attitude (and yeah, Shannon’s inclusion of family, doctor, and god into a woman’s choice) is why abortion is so consistently under attack in this country. The battle was won 35 years ago, but for some reason abortion supporters seem to have this pathological need to placate the other side. Why do we coddle these people who, at a very basic level, wish to inflict their religious beliefs onto the bodies of others? Why do we constantly play into their little games? We’re so damn worried about bad PR that we accept every ridiculous, faulty, asinine assumption they come to the table with.

No, someone’s religious belief is not a counter argument for bodily sovereignty. Sorry, thats one of the fundamental building blocks of human liberty.

Yeah – what a shit law. Really. And the US calls itself a democracy? Forcing women to listen to anti-choice propaganda is no better than China restricting people to have just one child.

I picked up on something with the methodology – why compare women having terminations with only “mentally healthy” women? Surely being mentally unwell is a valid reason to have an abortion? (I certainly don’t mean that having mental health issues *necessarily* makes one an unfit mother, rather, if it’s her decision that she is not mentally in a place to be a mother right now, that is a highly valid reason for an abortion).
So the comparison group should simply be a random sample of the female population of reproductive age, with a representative rate of mental illness, who were not pregnant.
Yet since the study showed that there was already no greater a risk of mental illness in women who had abortions – even with the fact that mentally ill women were excluded from the no abortion group, but not those having abortions, which if anything would produce a false result showing more mental health problems in women having abortions – must be a strong result.

Unless women with prior mental health problems were also excluded from the abortion group?

Also – were women who had abortions compared to those who did not get pregnant, or those who continued the pregnancy? Pregnancy and birth can actually trigger mental illness e.g. postnatal depression.