Abortion and Womens Mental Health

First, the methodological difficulties of these studies, especially due to confusing factors, not always easy to control adequately, such as the heterogeneity of women’s groups evaluated in regards to age, race, social status and religious beliefs; the presence of psychological changes or lack thereof, prior to the abortion of; the desire or lack thereof for the pregnancy; whether a woman can rely on her partner for help, or the help of her family, etc.. Consequently, we are of the opinion that the presence of many different confusing factors can decisively influence in the heterogeneity of the obtained results. There also exist technical differences, such as the fact that most of the studies that are done are done in retrospect, because the prospective studies, due to obvious ethical reasons, are difficult to study. To these difficulties we must add fundamental ones, and within these reasons we have the fact that the specialists who emphatically defend the existence of a post abortion syndrome, do it in many cases using data from the patients. These patients arrive seeking psychological help after having aborted, and studies are not performed on the patients who do not demonstrate any psychological alterations, but demonstrate instead a high degree of wellbeing after having had an abortion.