We know they’re miserable – we made them miserable!


David Robert Grimes has a piece on the Dublin anti-abortion ads. He points out that it’s not true that abortions tear apart the lives of the women who get them.

Dr Nada Stotland has published extensively on the topic, including a paper for the Journal of the American Medical Association entitled “The Myth of the Abortion Trauma Syndrome” in which the legend of Pas is firmly put to bed. “Currently, there are active attempts to convince the public and women considering abortion that abortion frequently has negative psychiatric consequences. This assertion is not borne out by the literature: the vast majority of women tolerate abortion without psychiatric sequelae,” she wrote.

Unless people see to it that they feel guilt and sadness.

A corollary of the research was that while women did not suffer long-term mental health effects due to abortion, short-term guilt and sadness was far more likely if the women had a background where abortion was viewed negatively or their decisions were decried – the kind of attitude fostered by “pro-life” activists.

This leads to the dark irony that while groups of this ilk claim to support women, they increase the suffering of women who have had abortions – the very women they ostensibly claim to help.

So typical of the church: pretend to be concerned while actually being crueler than the average street thug.

Comments

  1. says

    Well, yeah.

    Same people who are SO concerned about the suicide rates for gay teens. Not about the bullying that is proven to lead to suicide–no, they want that to be a protected constitutional right. But their loving Christian hearts just go out to all those horribly depressed teens and the families torn apart by their deaths. That’s why they open up those counseling centers and camps to de-gay those kids.

    (After all, Jesus helped my beloved Sunday School teacher find me on facebook and he told her to tell me that I was no better than a pedophile or necrophiliac. All motivated by Christian love, of course. She didn’t want to say that or make me feel bad, oh no, she loved me, donchaknow, but when the Holy Spirit tells you to do something, you don’t exactly have a choice.)

    Right.

    Kind of like advertising…create a need or problem than fill it? Except this is a lot more serious than just another “As Seen on TV” gadget.

  2. 'Tis Himself says

    The Catholics are Lying for Jebus™ again. If the truth doesn’t meet your needs then a lie will.

    The Catholic Church appears to have a personality disorder if it lies so frequently.

  3. Ken Pidcock says

    Framing the issue as being about women’s psychological health shifts the conversation away from whether women have a right to reproductive choice. And they’ve become very good at this.

  4. Uncle Glenny says

    I was going to say what EEB did.

    I’ll add that I would imagine that gay parent(s) raising kid(s) with social approbation and/or without proper social support isn’t good for any of them.

    The Church’s relation with many is one of an abusive spouse. (I think I’ve lost whatever accommodationist ttendencies I may have had last century.)

  5. says

    What could a woman reply to the statement that She is evil for having an abortion? Even ignoring it, still works for the anti-abortionists case and any other reply continues the engagement allowing further abuse to be hurled.

  6. Tenebras says

    Hasn’t selling a (terrible) solution to a problem they created been religion’s modus operandi since its beginning?

  7. Stephen Beesley says

    I was going to see if, as a non-citizen, I could make a complaint to the Advertising Standards Authority of Ireland. But it seems that enough people were ahead of me on that one that they put a message on their complaints page:

    RE: Youth Defence Campaign
    The primary objective of the ASAI Code of Standards for Advertising, Promotional and Direct Marketing is the regulation of commercial marketing communications in the interest of consumers.

    Marketing communications that do not have a commercial element and which whose principal purpose is to express the advertiser’s position on a political, religious, industrial relations, social or aesthetic matter or on an issue of public interest or concern do not come within the remit of the Code.

    We have received a number of complaints about the current Youth Defence campaign. However, as this advertising does not have a commercial element (e.g. a fundraising element) and is expressing the advertiser’s position on an issue of public interest, it is outside the remit of the Code.

    We are therefore unable to investigate complaints about this campaign.

    Time for an update to their remit, perhaps.

  8. kassad says

    That’s why pro-choice activists should stay very very vocal. I heard the argument, from the “both-sides-of-equal-value” people that while pro-life activists defend one of their “moral value” (I agree… it’s just a very BAD moral value), it is unsettling to see people defend abortion so much, even if they might agree that it is a woman’s right (thank you very much I guess).
    It stems from the perception, even on the pro-choice side, that abortion is a right, a basic liberty but aways a “bad” operation, the lesser of two evils. It should be defended as a right but we should do anything to reduce the number of procedures type of slogan. Which participate to the guilt.

    The woman that just had an abortion need to hear as much people as possible say that it is normal, a good thing, that she knows what’s best for her better than anyone else. There is no surprise than, even without psychological sequels, a lot of women feel horrible about themselves when most people around say that’s how they SHOULD feel. It might even be worse, since you end up thinking “I feel fine, there must be something horribly wrong with me!”.
    Fuck that.

  9. Steve says

    I’ve said it before in other fora, but it should be obvious that “PRO-LIFE!!!” = pro-misery. Once you get that, all of their propaganda and actions make perfect sense.

    Come to think of it, don’t the Abrahamic death-cults all amount to “You’re supposed to suffer in this life, but if you do a really good job of it, you’ll get pie in the sky when you die”?

  10. ImaginesABeach says

    Please don’t refer to these people as pro-life.

    Most of them do not care about the lives of individuals after they are born.

    They do not support the rights of people to live in adequate housing if that means using tax dollars to help people.

    They do not support the rights of people to live with adequate food if that means using tax dollars to help people.

    They do not support the rights of people to live their lives with people they love if they don’t love the “right” people.

  11. says

    And especially, “pro-life” implies that the pro-abortion-rights side is “pro-death” or “anti-life” – which is, of course, A Great Lie.

  12. kassad says

    Sorry about that. I should have use pro-abortion/anti-abortion rather than co-opt right-wing rethoric.

    Or maybe people with empathy/callous bastards would do the trick, while gaining in accuracy.

  13. Kes says

    It’s the same logic that creationists/young earthers use: Here is the conclusion (The earth is 7000 years old, Women who get abortions are depressed) NOW extrapolate backwards and find evidence fitting the conclusion. Same with fetal pain laws: they don’t want abortions after 20 weeks, so they cast about until they can find some dubious or misread study to support a reason why that would be bad (The fetus can “feel pain”!) Sigh.

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