aTypical Joe: a gay New Yorker living in the rural South

Sunday, January 21, 2007

Is there a post abortion syndrome?

Emily Bazelon has a piece in the Times Magazine today asking, Is There a Post-Abortion Syndrome? Research tells us there’s not, though anti-abortion activists - like Intelligent Design and Ex-Gay advocates - use their own to satisfy their predisposition to believe. Among the consequences:

Eighteen states include in their materials a description of abortion’s psychological effects. According to a 2006 analysis by the Guttmacher Institute, seven of these states describe only harmful effects. South Dakota’s informed-consent law requires physicians to give patients written state-approved information that supplies a link between abortion and an increased risk of suicide, though no causal connection has been found. Both the patient and the doctor must certify that the patient has read and understood the materials; failure to do so is a misdemeanor offense.

Does such a law violate a doctor’s constitutional right to free speech? Robert Post, a Yale law professor, argues that the state should not be able to force doctors to convey inaccurate or misleading information. South Dakota’s law “endangers the integrity of physician-patient communications, because it threatens to transform physicians into mouthpieces for political majorities,â€Â� he writes in a coming law-review article. [...]

Reva Siegel of Yale compares South Dakota’s use of criminal law to enforce a vision of pregnant women as weak and confused to the 19th-century diagnosis of female hysteria. These ideas can make and change laws. The claim that women lacked reliable judgment was used to deny women the vote and the right to own property. Repressed-memory stories led states to extend their statutes of limitations. Women who devote themselves to abortion recovery make up for the wrong they feel they’ve done by trying to stop other women from doing it too - by preventing them from having the same choices.

It’s an important piece. READ IT.