#abortion research

[pro-birth]

Research finds that women seeking abortion believe providers should offer them the option to view the ultrasound. But providers don’t always do so, and abortion advocacy groups (Planned Parenthood Action, NARAL, ACOG) oppose measures requiring providers to do so.

Please note I’m not referring to legislation saying women must view ultrasounds. I’m referring to legislation requiring medical personnel offer women the option to view their ultrasounds — an opportunity they can accept or decline.

[thepro-lifemovement]

https://www.plannedparenthood.org/about-us/newsroom/press-releases/planned-parenthood-statement-on-new-study-on-womens-mental-health-after-receiving-or-being-denied-abortion

So one big problem with the study they linked in their article is they are using the data from the Turnaway study. They claim, "This analysis includes all 5 years (11 interview waves) of data from the Turnaway Study." I have already talked about the issues with the Turnaway Study. The scientific article below explains the many flaws of the Turnaway study:

The Turnaway Study, conducted by abortion advocates at thirty abortion clinics, reportedly proves that 95 percent of women have no regrets about their abortions and that abortion causes no mental health problems. But a new exposé reveals that the authors have misled the public, using an unrepresentative, highly biased sample and misleading questions. In fact, over two-thirds of the women approached at the abortion clinics refused to be interviewed, and half of those who agreed dropped out. Refusers and dropouts are known to have more postabortion problems. In fact, ANSIRH’s own data actually revealed that beyond this first week, the women denied an abortion who actually did carry to term had significant improvements in anxiety, depression, and self-esteem. Indeed, the researchers admitted that they could observe no significant differences between the groups. But this is only admitted in the details of the study, not the abstract, conclusions, or news releases. But ANSIRH’s spin how aborting women did as well as those who gave birth actually includes an admission most damaging to their own ideology. Specifically, ANSIRH’s own evidence suggests that there are no persistent mental health risks associated with women being denied an abortion. In other words, an equally valid headline would read: “Women Denied Abortions Face No Long-Term Mental-Health Problems.” That may help to explain why ANSIRH chose to elevate a single anxiety score accessed eight days after begin turned away from an abortion (including the anxiety of women still looking for an alternative place to get an abortion) into their misleading claim that women who are denied abortions may face more mental health problems than women who are provided abortions

For further evidence on the effect abortion has on mental health:

Women who had undergone an abortion experienced an 81% increased risk of mental health problems, and nearly 10% of the incidence of mental health problems was shown to be attributable to abortion. 

Lastly, three paragraphs of the Planned Parenthood article is them bragging to the reader how great they are. I would take anything PP says with a grain of salt because they have been caught lying many times before and change information to mislead people. There are much better women's healthcare resources available than PP that offer free services, unlike PP.

[ihearthes]

For over 10 years, Dr. Foster and her team of researchers tracked the experiences of women who'd received abortions or who had been denied them because of clinic policies on gestational age limits.

The research team regularly interviewed each of nearly 1,000 women for five years and found those who'd been denied abortion experienced worse economic and mental health outcomes than the cohort that received care. And 95% of study participants who received an abortion said they made the right decision.

[kvarenje]

OK, as an embryologist who has worked in andrology for years before, I need folks to know something.

Vasectomies are NOT 100% reversible.

If you or a partner are considering one, and you think that there is even a SLIGHT chance you might want children in the future, BANK SPERM BEFOREHAND.

When a vasectomy is reversed, you WILL NOT regain your previous sperm count. Most of the time, sperm counts fall dramatically after a reversal, and it will be much more difficult to conceive intentionally without assistance from fertility treatments. Vas reversals can also fail, which would then require surgical procedures to retrieve sperm should you want to conceive later. My clinic probably does 2-6 surgical sperm retrieval procedures a month, and a solid most of them are due to failed vas reversals.

This has been a PSA from your local extremely tired embryologist who wants people to know that "vasectomies are reversible" comes with a couple of big bold asterisks that should be talked about before folks go rushing into it.

[dhaaruni]

All the nice old ladies in the comments section for this piece are making me tear up over my morning coffee

[reality-detective]

President Of The Center For Medical Progress, David Daleiden, Gives Opening Statement At Congressional Hearing On Aborted Baby Organ Sales

“Planned Parenthood's top-level leadership callously negotiating the harvesting & sale of aborted baby body parts”

“Dismembering of babies — industrial scale abortion”

“Babies are worth more dead than alive”

Let that 👆 sink in 🤔

[anamericangirl]

Seems to me that, every pro-abort you wind up debating, eventually reveals that their motivations are rooted in selfishness. They always start with 'I want women to be safe, pregnancy can be so dangerous' and quickly devolve into appeals about their personal sex lives.

And that's because abortion, when you get down to the very foundation of it, is selfish. The act and the ideology is built on the concept of sacrificing someone else's life for your own convenience.

They try to make it about caring about women and other nonsense but when those arguments can't hold up to scrutiny and get called out they can't do anything else but reveal that at the heart of it they're really just pro-abortion because they want to have responsibility and commitment-free casual sex wherever and whenever they want.

As Lila Rose put it "the baby dies for my orgasm."

That's really why they want abortion and they try to mask it with fake concern about women.

[striving-artist]

Technically this is because I saw it in fiction I was reading, but considering the devolving state of American reproductive rights…

A pregnancy is measured in weeks from your last period, not weeks since The Sex™ So in general if you have a 28 day cycle, you ovulate around day 14, have had sex before or around that date, and implantation happens about 9ish days after conception. Some at home pregnancy tests, sometimes, if you’re lucky and your hormones are high, can give a positive reading 3 days after implantation. That would be day 26 of your cycle.

So you’re thinking to yourself, ok, at that point, you’re a few days, maybe a week pregnant, right? Wrong.

If you do all that, are trying to get pregnant and are testing obsessively, and find out earliest possible day, you would be 3w 5d pregnant. Most people don’t test until a missed period plus a couple days. Let’s call it five days late. That person tests, and finds out when they are almost 5 weeks pregnant.

Now lets be realistic. Lots of people don’t have textbook 28 day cycles.

Let’s say you have an average of a 35 day cycle but it’s unpredictable. You’ve got a healthy sex life. You miss your period, wait five days bc you know your cycle is wacky, go get a test on day six after work, and test first thing in the morning (when they tell you to test). You would be 6 weeks pregnant and would already be ineligible for an abortion in some states. You probably have no symptoms or indication other than a late period. Early pregnancy symptoms look a hell of a lot like PMS. It isn’t a movie; you don’t get a clear indicator.

Pregnancy math isn’t measured from implantation or conception. It’s called gestational age, and it’s the infamous Forty Weeks in your head about pregnancy. It’s also why sometimes you go to 42 weeks or later, because the baby isn’t done, because ovulation wasn’t in week 2, it was in week 4. Yes, doctors sometimes adjust dates and estimates after you start ultrasounds. But this weird math is what lots of the strict abortion bans are based on.

In your head, unless you know this already, hearing someone talk about a six week abortion ban sounds like someone had six weeks after sex to notice the pregnancy and make a decision. They didn’t. They might have had a couple days. They may have not even known they were late when they already crossed the line.

If you want to argue about this issue, write about this, protest, scream, pray, whatever; start by knowing what it actually means, and go from there.

(Sorry it’s in red, I’m on mobile)

[see-arcane]

Hey, uh, in light of running through several posts dedicated to deleting period tracking apps and researching local facilities online and a number of other online-centric tips, I think it’s worth mentioning that now is also absolutely the time to turn to physical media when it comes to getting hard/impossible-to-track information. By that I mean,

1. Start hitting up libraries and bookstores. Paper print can’t be spied on. The paranoia in me says if you need to buy a book on Certain Medical Topics, try to pay in cash. Yes, really. I don’t know how far or deep the dystopia hole is going to go in the midst of all this, or even in the near future, but it pays to have absolutely nothing that can reveal digital details to sniff out.

2. GET A PHONE BOOK. AN ACTUAL. PHYSICAL. PHONE BOOK. 

The less info you have to look up online about nearby options, the better. 

I hate sounding like I’m writing while wearing a tinfoil hat, but I’m dead serious when I say that the increasing chokehold the digital landscape is taking on all our information and day-to-day lives is very much a double-edged sword. Yes, we’re more informed now than ever. But so are the cartoon villain-level parties who have more and more access to our private information and search topics.

In anything you can, try to get your hands on a physical method and/or copy. Nothing that can be traced, or that depend on an Internet connection, or demand a subscription. Invest in solid things you can do or hold.

Stay informed. Stay safe.   

[jstor]

In 1971, 343 French women and citizens risked their careers and reputations by publicly confessing to having had an illegal abortion.

[pro-birth]

In 2008, Guttmacher stated that as many as 40% of maternal deaths in Nigeria may be from unsafe abortion. Their source was a 2008 paper by Henshaw et al claiming the same.

Only one of Henshaw’s three sources actually supports this claim: Oye-Adeniran’s 2002 paper. Ove-Adeniran’s sources go back to a 1999 paper by Okonofua et al. which says that abortion may be responsible for 40% of deaths in Nigeria. But Okonofua’s only citation which supports this claim is Ladipo et al. 1989. Ladipo does indeed say that abortion causes 30-40% of maternal deaths. The problem is that the paper Ladipo cites is Liskin 1980 and is talking about not Nigeria but Latin America. The Liskin paper itself is too old to find online, but is using data from the 1970s at latest.

Most remarkable about this is that 40% of maternal deaths in Chile around that time were indeed due to abortion. The problem is that abortion was legal in Chile-and once it was prohibited in 1989 abortion deaths fell dramatically: by 94.2% in 11 years.

[thepro-lifemovement]

Background: Given the methodological limitations of recently published qualitative reviews of abortion and mental health, a quantitative synthesis was deemed necessary to represent more accurately the published literature and to provide clarity to clinicians.

Aims: To measure the association between abortion and indicators of adverse mental health, with subgroup effects calculated based on comparison groups (no abortion, unintended pregnancy delivered, pregnancy delivered) and particular outcomes. A secondary objective was to calculate population-attributable risk (PAR) statistics for each outcome.

Method: After the application of methodologically based selection criteria and extraction rules to minimize bias, the sample comprised 22 studies, 36 measures of effect and 877 181 participants (163 831 experienced an abortion). Random effects pooled odds ratios were computed using adjusted odds ratios from the original studies and PAR statistics were derived from the pooled odds ratios.

Results: Women who had undergone an abortion experienced an 81% increased risk of mental health problems, and nearly 10% of the incidence of mental health problems was shown to be attributable to abortion. The strongest subgroup estimates of increased risk occurred when abortion was compared with term pregnancy and when the outcomes pertained to substance use and suicidal behaviour.

Conclusions: This review offers the largest quantitative estimate of mental health risks associated with abortion available in the world literature. Calling into question the conclusions from traditional reviews, the results revealed a moderate to highly increased risk of mental health problems after abortion. Consistent with the tenets of evidence-based medicine, this information should inform the delivery of abortion services.

[lemonsharks]

The thing that gets me is that, functionally, Alabama's IVF law just defined embryonic personhood as, "an embryo is a person if and only if the pregnancy and the baby it may grow to become is wanted by its gestating parent," because ivf embryos are by definition wanted, and because the process of IVF goes with the assumption that not all embryos will reach the desired end point of "baby."

That embryos will be implanted and fail to result in pregnancy is part and parcel with using IVF to get pregnant.

There's a 2/3 chance of miscarriage with each implantation in normal circumstances. a 1/3 chance in ideal circumstances. Those miscarriages are explicitly protected—if this law were really about embryonic life, the IVF practice and clients would both be criminally liable for child neglect and endangerment for attempting to gestate themselves, or with their own genetic material, rather than making choices (young healthy surrogate, young healthy sperm/egg donor) to maximize the chance of successful pregnancy.

You certainly don't see the Right clamouring to bestow citizenship and it's attendant entitlements upon the pregnancies of undocumented immigrants.

I really, really want this to go before a better Supreme Court than we have. Because "the gestating parent of a wanted pregnancy receives special and unique protections under the law, while fertilized eggs, blastocysts, zygoats, embryos and fetuses are not by definition people until their successfully completed birth" is, I think, one of the best possible compromises we could come to in the current political climate.

Though don't get me wrong, what I really want is an abortion decision based in bodily autonomy, bestowing upon every living person the bare minimum rights of a cadaver. (I.e. to not be used for a purpose you do not consent to or no longer consent to.)

[schizoaffectivejacksparrow]

idk if anyone else is talking about this but we just fought for abortion rights in Ohio and they're already fighting to repeal the peoples ability to fight abortion bans here i fucking hate this place

if anyone else knows anything about this or what to do please add to this. ive never made a post like this before but im just so tired and frustrated

[vroomian]

Sometimes I think about the time me and my mom were arguing about abortion (she’s one of those life begins at conception rah rah types) and I pointed out that no, all the science proved her wrong and she was like well I don’t know anything about that. I was like google is free??? And she dead ass says out loud with her mouth ‘I don’t know and I don’t want to know. ‘

Like. What the fuck do you say to that