Category: Women’s Health

Dr. Fred E Mecklenburg, professor of obstetrics and gynecology at the University of Minnesota Medical School and member of the American Association of Planned Parenthood physicians:

“There are no known psychiatric disorders which can be cured by abortion. In addition, there are none which can be productively improved by abortion… [Instead], it may leave unresolved conflicts, coupled with guilt and added depression, which may be more harmful than the continuation of the pregnancy.

Furthermore, there is good evidence to suggest that serious mental disorders arise following abortions more often in women with real psychiatric problems. Paradoxically, the very women for whom legal abortion may seem most justifiable are also the ones for whom the risk is highest for postabortion psychic insufficiency…

When abortion is substituted for adequate psychiatric care – and there is ample evidence to suggest that this is already happening – then there is a distinct danger of minimizing establish psychotherapeutic principles. Unfortunately, it is the distressed woman who ultimately faces the dulling impact of this minimization. She is the one who cries for help, and she is also the one who was turned away.”

Quoted in Thomas Hilger’s “the Medical Hazards of Legal Induced Abortion” in Abortion and Social Justice Editor’s Thomas W Hilger’s and Dennis J Horan (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1972) 40

Dr. E Joanne Angelo, an assistant clinical professor of psychiatry at the Tufts University School of Medicine and a psychiatrist in private practice in Boston:

“Women who have had abortions… may turn to alcohol or drugs to get to sleep at night or to deaden the pain of their waking hours, or throw themselves into feverish activity in an attempt to forget their sorrow, guilt and shame. Deep feelings of loneliness and emptiness may lead to binge eating, alternating with purging and anorexia, or intense efforts to repair intimate relationships or develop new ones inappropriately, or to an insatiable need to replace lost child at any cost.”

In a Special Word to Women Who Have Had an Abortion (National Conference of Catholic Bishops, Washington DC, 1999)

Read about the studies about psychological dangers of abortion here.

Read women’s stories of abortion regret here.