A groundbreaking new study has found that the vast majority of women undergoing abortions in the United States have pre-existing risk factors such as coercion and pressure to abort but are not being properly screened before the procedure.The study, appearing in The Journal of Hippocratic Medicine, attempted to learn if it was possible to identify women who are likely to experience serious emotional distress after an abortion before they went through with the procedure. The discovered that not only is this possible, but that slightly more than 82% of the women in their study would have screened positive for multiple pre-existing risk factors that should have alerted clinicians to do more than simply have a woman sign a consent form.
The research involved a random sample of American women ages 41–45 in what’s known as a “topic blind” survey – meaning the survey was not advertised as being about abortion. Of the 1,000 women tested, 226 (22.6%) reported having had an abortion.
Researchers then devised an eight-point checklist of risk factors for these women – including emotional attachment to the pregnancy, feeling the abortion conflicted with their maternal desires or moral beliefs, wishing they had more support for the pregnancy and greater financial security, experiencing significant pressure to abort.
In other words, a woman who scored “0” on the scale had none of these risk factors and those who scored “8” had every warning sign present. Researchers found the highest risk scores for those women who were being coerced (6.68). The more the abortion conflicted with what the woman actually wanted, the more pre-existing risk factors tended to be present.
They then compared the risk scores with actual outcomes and found that the women with higher risk scores tended to report substantially worse outcomes afterward.
This finding led authors to conclude: “Failure to screen for these risk factors is medical negligence.”
Lead author, David Reardon, director of the Elliot Institute, adds: “A woman who is facing pressure and threats from others may say she is certain she needs to have an abortion, but that is a far cry from saying she truly wants an abortion to satisfy her own needs and desires. Abortion counselors need to ask probing questions, not just obtain consent.”
There is also the possibility that abortion counselors who fail to properly screen their patients could face legal accountability.
As this article, appearing on The Elliott Institute website explains, “Under landmark medical malpractice precedents like Canterbury v. Spence and Carr v. Strode, a physician has a strict legal duty to disclose personalized, individual risk profiles that could affect a patient’s treatment decisions.”
Father Tadeusz Pacholczyk, a senior ethicist at The National Catholic Bioethics Center, urged physicians “to provide full disclosure of the risks and side effects to their patients.”
“The long list of bad mental, emotional, and health effects that regularly arise in the wake of an induced abortion should give pause to anyone seeking, or counseling, abortion, especially when it comes to medical professionals who themselves need to be fully informed regarding the seriousness of these risks,” Pacholczyk told EWTN News.
Michael New, a senior associate scholar at the pro-life Charlotte Lozier Institute said he was not surprised that physicians performing abortions rarely screen for coercion. “Many abortions are done in high-volume clinics where abortion doctors spend very little time with women seeking abortions.”
Kelsey Pritchard, a spokeswoman for Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, agreed that the abortion industry does not prioritize women.
“The abortion industry prioritizes profit,” Pritchard told EWTN, “not women’s well-being, informed consent, or health, the overwhelming evidence shows.”
Screening patients for factors that could increase the risk of adverse outcomes is a routine principle of medicine. This new study raises the question of why this isn’t being done for a woman in what is surely one of the most vulnerable moments of her life.
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