When pro-abortion activists were fighting to make abortion legal, one argument they tried to use was that women who were denied abortion would kill themselves. Even before Roe V Wade, psychologists granted abortions to women who claimed that their pregnancies would drive them to commit suicide.
Dr. Bernard Nathanson, former abortionist and co-founder of the pro-abortion group NARAL, who later became pro-life, said:
“Women do not kill themselves and never have as a result of being pregnant. Interestingly, when we were pushing abortion – we, meaning the high command of the National Abortion Rights Action League, including myself, (Larry) Lader, (Betty) Friedan, in the late ’60s, we asked the Medical Examiner of New York City to go through his files to discover, to give us a figure on how many women who were pregnant had killed themselves, were suicides as a result merely of being pregnant…The Medical Examiner was unable to give us even one case, one case, where a woman had clearly committed suicide because she was pregnant…this was in New York City – so we were chagrined and never, of course, publicized that finding.”
Testimony before the Court of Queen’s Bench for Saskatchewan in the Borowski case (Borowski v. The Attorney General of Canada, Transcript of Evidence and Proceedings at Trial, page 409, Regina Saskatchewan, May, 1983)
Another report found the following fact: In the city of Birmingham, with a population of 1,250,000, there was only one case of suicide of a pregnant woman over a twelve-year period.
Sim and Neisser (“Post-abortion Psychoses: A Report from Two Centers,” in The Psychological Aspects of Abortion, eds. D. Mall and W.F. Watts, University Publications of America, Washington, D.C.,1979)
However, based on two studies using medical records, there is a 6-7 times higher suicide rate for women who have abortions. For teens, it is 10x higher.
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