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1. There was a large number of studies that examined the relationship between abortion and mental health, but many were of poor or only fair quality and most had significant methodological problems.
2. There were no rigorous studies that reliably established the prevalence of mental health problems following abortion that resulted directly from the effect of the abortion rather than other confounding factors.
3. From the studies considered, the approximate rates of mental health problems following abortion did not appear to be greatly different from rates of mental health problems in the general US population, although there was some uncertainty regarding this finding.
4. Some factors appeared to be associated with poorer mental health outcomes following abortion, including the stigma associated with abortion the need for secrecy regarding the abortion, personal characteristics, interpersonal concerns, level of social support and previous mental health problems. Previous mental health problems were identified as the most important factor associated with poorer mental health outcomes following abortion.
5. Within the Charles review, the higher the quality of the study, the less likely it was for differences to be found in the relative risk for adverse outcomes following abortion when compared with a group of women with an unwanted pregnancy. The converse appeared to be the case for lower quality studies.
6. When only higher quality studies were included in the analysis, the relative risk of mental ill health was no greater following a first-trimester legal abortion than following delivery at full term of an unplanned pregnancy.
7. A meta-analysis of the studies in the Coleman review suggested that abortion was associated with increased risk of mental health problems across different comparison groups and different diagnostic categories. However, previous mental health problems were not controlled for within the review.

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There were no rigorous studies that reliably established the prevalence of mental health problems following abortion that resulted directly from the effect of the abortion rather than other confounding factors.

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When only higher quality studies were included in the analysis, the relative risk of mental ill health was no greater following a first-trimester legal abortion than following delivery at full term of an unplanned pregnancy.

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From the studies considered, the approximate rates of mental health problems following abortion did not appear to be greatly different from rates of mental health problems in the general US population, although there was some uncertainty regarding this finding

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due to the nature of abortion research no ideal gold standard study exists. First, it would be not be ethical or morally justified to conduct a randomised controlled trial of abortion versus live birth for women with an unwanted pregnancy. Second, as mentioned in Section 1.2, the measurement of pregnancy wantedness is open to many difficulties.

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• The rates of mental health problems for women with an unwanted pregnancy were the same whether they had an abortion or gave birth.
• An unwanted pregnancy was associated with an increased risk of mental health problems.
• The most reliable predictor of post-abortion mental health problems was having a history of mental health problems before the abortion.
• The factors associated with increased rates of mental health problems for women in the general population following birth and following abortion were similar.
• There were some additional factors associated with an increased risk of mental health problems specifically related to abortion, such as pressure from a partner to have an abortion and negative attitudes towards abortions in general and towards a woman’s personal experience of the abortion.

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Originally posted by IngoB:
In general, at fertilisation. More precisely, at the point where God infuses a human soul. Since my concept of soul is hylomorphic, i.e., that of a form shaping the body, this is largely equivalent in biological terms to the formation of a distinct set of human DNA with of the associated cell machinery, which is starting to build up a human body. There are special cases, like twins, where God infuses a second soul at a later stage (or, in biological terms, where an independent entity starts a separate process of development at a later stage due to a splitting of the so far assembled cells).

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Conclusions: Women who received an abortion had similar or lower levels of depression and anxiety than women denied an abortion. Our findings do not support the notion that abortion is a cause of mental health problems.

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While we find no reliable data to measure the phenomenon, it seems unexceptionable to conclude some women come to regret their choice to abort the infant life they once created and sustained.

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Originally posted by Net Spinster:
You covered identical twins (except which twin gets the original soul and which the second) but what happens in the case of tetragametic chimeras (two fertilized eggs but the later on merge and one human results)? Is one of the souls dead or do they also merge? If someone were to clone a human, would the clone have a soul?

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Originally posted by Brenda Clough:

People don't have abortions for their own amusement, any more than they have hip replacements. They have them because they need them.

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Originally posted by Brenda Clough:

Abortion is legal.

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Originally posted by lilBuddha:

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Originally posted by Brenda Clough:
People don't have abortions for their own amusement, any more than they have hip replacements. They have them because they need them.

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No. They have them because something went wrong. If you want to find a surgery that is analogous, it would be the removal of a tumor caused by smoking.

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Originally posted by IngoB:

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Originally posted by no prophet's flag is set so...:
I would hope that the pro-life movement (whatever that really is) loses all appeal with its present focus. It is one of those groups that infuriates me because of its hypocrisy and abject moral failure.

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Such comments are part of the problem, not of the solution. There will be no dialogue unless it is first admitted that the opposing side has some reasonable points, even if one thinks that they are getting it wrong overall. This of course also applies to the pro-life side, and some of the American activists certainly could do with a truckload of nuance. But this is just the mirror image on the pro-choice side.

Step one here is for both sides to admit that pregnancy is a special case. It is not simply a human being who just happens to live within another human being for a while, as many on the pro-life side would have it. It is not simply another piece of tissue that the mother happens to be growing, as many on the pro-choice side would have it. It is a difficult moral problem precisely because it is a special case. It may have one right solution in the end, but if we acknowledge that it is not simple, then we can approach those who disagree with us with the appropriate respect.

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Originally posted by Crœsos:

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Originally posted by lilBuddha:

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Originally posted by Brenda Clough:
People don't have abortions for their own amusement, any more than they have hip replacements. They have them because they need them.

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No. They have them because something went wrong. If you want to find a surgery that is analogous, it would be the removal of a tumor caused by smoking.

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I'm pretty sure hip replacement surgery is also undertaken because "something went wrong". No one would replace a hip that didn't have something wrong with it.

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Originally posted by lilBuddha:

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Originally posted by Crœsos:

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Originally posted by lilBuddha:
No. They have them because something went wrong. If you want to find a surgery that is analogous, it would be the removal of a tumor caused by smoking.

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I'm pretty sure hip replacement surgery is also undertaken because "something went wrong". No one would replace a hip that didn't have something wrong with it.

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Please. Is that the best you've got? Deliberately ignoring the difference?
Why do abortions happen?
Not using protection. This is bad for disease prevention as well as unwanted pregnancy.
Rape and incest. You don't think working to reduce those is a good thing?
Some reasons are not easily preventable. Like health issues.

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Originally posted by lilBuddha:
Prevention is better than the need to cure, regardless of the issue.
Abortion is not in the same category as hip replacement.
At some point after sperm and egg meet, the growing cell mass becomes another person.
Your hip is all you.

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Originally posted by Crœsos:

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Originally posted by lilBuddha:
Prevention is better than the need to cure, regardless of the issue.
Abortion is not in the same category as hip replacement.
At some point after sperm and egg meet, the growing cell mass becomes another person.
Your hip is all you.

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So who is "a tumor caused by smoking"? That's your preferred analogy, but it's not really "another person" either.

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Originally posted by lilBuddha:
I am really not understanding your point. Truly I don't.
What I am saying is that doing your best to prevent something is better than curing it afterward. Do you disagree with that?

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Originally posted by lilBuddha:
You can have a degenerative and/or congenital issue which causes the need for hip surgery. I chose a smoking-related tumor as a better example.

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Originally posted by lilBuddha:
How about not as good an analogy as? Does this satisfy you? How about we stick to the reason I wrote that post rather than whether I properly chose which analogy best represented it?

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Originally posted by lilBuddha:
Prevention is better than the need to cure, regardless of the issue.
Abortion is not in the same category as hip replacement.
At some point after sperm and egg meet, the growing cell mass becomes another person.
Your hip is all you.

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Originally posted by no prophet's flag is set so...:

When a person merges with another person in marriage or when doing la bête à deux dos (the beast with two backs)* are they still themselves though spiritually and physically part of one is within or mingled with the other?

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Originally posted by Brenda Clough:
This.

It probably could be an auto-post, every fifty or a hundred posts in threads like these: Abortion is legal. The law of the land.

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Originally posted by no prophet's flag is set so...:
Unless they think that a pre-born human is more worthy than a post-born (not saying you think this). The morality discussion - before anything about abortion will have any general currency - must deal with ALL human life. It must confront the deaths of children from preventable passive causes such as water and food issues as I noted, but also must confront the direct killing of children by wars and policies supporting wars.

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Originally posted by no prophet's flag is set so...:
Happily in Canada, abortion is not illegal at any stage, and is solely a health decision regulated by the Canada Health Act, administered by provinces. What this means in practice is that abortion is medically regulated only.

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Originally posted by IngoB:
So, are you happy with infanticide as well, as long as it is medically regulated? Up to what age? Toddlercide? Teencide? Or does something magic happen to the baby as it passes through the birth canal, which changes its status?

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Originally posted by mousethief:
How can the pro-life movement have wider appeal? By not resorting to this kind of sarcasm to "win" arguments, for one thing.

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Originally posted by IngoB:
That's not a principle you apply to any other moral or policy discussion, because it is just unworkable. If we require that in order to address one issue all issues will have to be addressed, then we will never get around to doing anything. If you want to argue that we should care first about good water supplies, because it is a more important issue than abortion, then fine - whether I agree or not, prioritisation as such makes sense. But "all at once" is just a synonym for "nothing ever" as far as human realities are concerned.

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Originally posted by mr cheesy:
But we don't hear the same kind of language about the 1.5 billion people who live with intestinal worms. We don't hear religious people talking as if the millions who die from the lack of sanitation are being murdered by everyone else who refuses to provide workable systems. We don't hear condemnations of the "abortion" of post-birth humans from major killers. Truly, it seems, life is only more precious from a RCC (and other pro-life churches) when you are in someone else's womb than when you are actually alive.

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Originally posted by mr cheesy:
Here are some of my assertions against this nonsense: human embryos are not human lives. Abortion is not murder. The fetus has no soul until birth. Until the embryo can survive on its own, there is no more a moral problem with abortion than with amputating a limb - a serious medical procedure nobody does unless absolutely necessary. Of course, I can't prove any of that, but neither can IngoB prove his religious assertions. The difference is that I'm not left with a whole heap of vulnerable women who the church has decided are murderers.

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Originally posted by IngoB:
Once more, it is just plain nonsense to heap up the ills of the world and claim that one has to solve them all (or a choice selection thereof) before one can say anything about abortion.

The reason abortion is higher up on the agenda is the same why war is higher up on the agenda. These are human actions that directly lead to human death, where we can isolate the problematic act and attribute culpability for it. Whereas diseases may in part be caused by human activity, but generally not in a direct manner. Rather, these are systemic problems that are difficult to isolate and where moral culpability is diffusely distributed. It's the same reason why if you kill your neighbour, you get thrown into prison, but if the purveyors of soda drinks contribute to the accelerated deaths of billions, they remain respected business people.

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There are certainly parts of these statements that are not "provable" aside from a shared faith. However, this is much less clear-cut than you seem to think. Your assertion "human embryos are not human lives" is objectively wrong, and you will have to withdraw from it or contradict really basic biology. You will have to assert a more defensible position, like "human embryos are not human persons."

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Your statement "The fetus has no soul until birth" is objectively false for certain conceptions of "soul", and hence requires an additional definition of what you mean by soul.

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As mentioned, in a hylomorphic conception "soul" is just what one calls the form of a living thing. And since it is undeniable that a foetus has some kind of form (indeed, a lot of structure which we know about through biology), consequently it is undeniable that a foetus has a soul from conception in a hylomorphic sense. Here you would have to argue more specifically that it is the attribution of "specialness" (an incorporeal, God-infused aspect of the human soul) which is not present in the beginning, or ever.

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If you claim that the moral status of an embryo is different because it cannot survive on its own, then you have to defend other applications of this principle. For example, a baby cannot survive on its own. Neither can a toddler. The age where a human being becomes "self-sustained" in any practical sense is earliest about 6-8 years old. A child of this age may survive fending for itself, both in the sense of surviving in the wild and of surviving in human society. Are you saying that children up to this age may be killed with moral equivalence to amputation? Many people who are sick, old, or severely disabled are clearly not capable of sustaining themselves without continuous help from others. May they be removed from existence like a diseased limb?

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FWIW, I would not consider abortion "murder" in spite of the killing of an innocent human person due to the special circumstance that the mere existence of the growing child imposes on the bodily integrity and autonomy of the pregnant woman. There is a genuine and automatic clash of "rights" here that is not present in regular "murder", hence one cannot simply consider them equivalent. But the mere fact that a lot of people are doing something, and that some of them are vulnerable and may be doing it under grievous pressure, does not decide that this act must be morally licit.

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Originally posted by IngoB:

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Originally posted by mr cheesy:
Here are some of my assertions against this nonsense: human embryos are not human lives. Abortion is not murder. The fetus has no soul until birth. Until the embryo can survive on its own, there is no more a moral problem with abortion than with amputating a limb - a serious medical procedure nobody does unless absolutely necessary. Of course, I can't prove any of that, but neither can IngoB prove his religious assertions. The difference is that I'm not left with a whole heap of vulnerable women who the church has decided are murderers.

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There are certainly parts of these statements that are not "provable" aside from a shared faith. However, this is much less clear-cut than you seem to think. Your assertion "human embryos are not human lives" is objectively wrong, and you will have to withdraw from it or contradict really basic biology. You will have to assert a more defensible position, like "human embryos are not human persons."

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FWIW, I would not consider abortion "murder" in spite of the killing of an innocent human person due to the special circumstance that the mere existence of the growing child imposes on the bodily integrity and autonomy of the pregnant woman. There is a genuine and automatic clash of "rights" here that is not present in regular "murder", hence one cannot simply consider them equivalent. But the mere fact that a lot of people are doing something, and that some of them are vulnerable and may be doing it under grievous pressure, does not decide that this act must be morally licit.

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Originally posted by mr cheesy:
In my opinion, there is a quantifiable difference between refusing to give people adequate sanitation and supplying fizzy drinks. Or even cigarettes. The former is very clearly a dereliction of humanity, in my opinion, affecting the poorest of all. I'd put it as at much higher moral position than abortion. But y'know, YMMV.

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Originally posted by mr cheesy:
An embryo neither has the status or the abilities of a human child, therefore it is not a human life, unless you define life in ways that I don't. I withdraw nothing.

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Originally posted by mr cheesy:
You are using objectively in a strange way here.

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Originally posted by mr cheesy:
I'm not using that definition of soul.

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Originally posted by mr cheesy:
Before a certain gestation period, an embryo cannot survive outside of the womb. So the rest of this is humbug.

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Originally posted by mr cheesy:
OK, that's fair enough, but you'll presumably concede that a very large number of people who talk about abortion from a religious viewpoint are using the language of murder, even if you've redefined it as some other morally illicit category.

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Originally posted by IngoB:
Exactly. But I do. So your counter-assertion does not grip. We basically are thrown back to a more fundamental discussion of terms (and possibly to making assertions about those).

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Originally posted by mr cheesy:
I've no interest in discussing further your idiosyncratic religious views and genuinely believe it is time to stop giving them any notice at all. We should just nod sagely and say "fine, you are entitled to your religious view" and take no notice of it whatsoever.

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