Do women who choose to have an abortion live just as happy and healthy lives as those who choose to keep their child? The pro-choice side argues yes. In fact, having an abortion will make them better off, they would say. But we’ve written many times about how abortion is not only bad for the child but also bad for women.
A recent study out of Quebec investigated this question anew. It concludes that “abortion is associated with an increased risk of mental health-related hospitalization in the long term” (emphasis added).
The study analyzes 1.2 million pregnancies in Quebec from 2006 to 2022. The authors followed 28,721 women who had an abortion and 1,228,807 women who gave birth to see if these women had any differences in mental health-related hospitalization. And they looked at the long-term effects of abortion on mental health, tracking outcomes for up to 17 years.
Both the size and location of the study are significant. Many of the other studies examining outcomes for women after an abortion are relatively small or focus on just a sliver of the population. For example, one study looked at just 325 patients in the Netherlands. Another study considered more than 12,000 women in Finland, but only teen pregnancies. A Danish study examined over 74,000 cases, but only women with no history of mental disorders.
A strength of this Canadian study is that it examines a massive number of women (1.2 million) and pretty much the entire population (of Quebec). The larger the sample, the more confident researchers can be with their results. Furthermore, the more representative a study sample is (e.g. how closely it matches the real world), the more reliable the results. This study checks both boxes.
This is also a Canadian study. While there are commonalities between women seeking abortions around the world, there are also important differences in different countries. Canada is the only country in the world with no legal restrictions on abortion, making attitudes towards abortion different from, say, the United States. On the other hand, Canada provides less social assistance than, for example, the Nordic countries, so more women might feel financial pressure to have an abortion. The closer to home a study is, the more applicable it is to your own country (all other things being equal).
So what are the results of the study?
The study concludes that women who have an abortion are far more likely to be hospitalized for a mental health condition than women who choose to keep their child. Overall, women who had an abortion had a mental health-related hospitalization rate two and a half times higher than women who kept their child (104 vs 42 mental health-related hospitalizations per 10,000 person-years).
And this pattern of post-abortive women having a higher likelihood of mental health-related hospitalization holds for any mental condition. They have higher rates of hospitalization for bipolar disorder, depression, anxiety, eating disorders, psychosis, and personality disorders. They also have higher rates of misuse of alcohol, opioids, cannabis, cocaine, stimulants, hallucinogens, sedatives, and other illicit substances. Hospitalizations from suicide attempts were higher, too.
Because of the sheer number of women included in the study and the magnitude of these differences between the two groups, these differences are statistically significant. In other words, they aren’t due to chance. And they are very unlikely to be due to other factors, as the authors already controlled for other factors (e.g. age differences or preexisting psychiatric conditions) that might be the real cause of the differences. Having an abortion was correlated with these mental health-related hospitalizations.
Furthermore, the women in this study who opted for an abortion were not all that different than those who chose to keep their child. The data simply doesn’t paint one group as desperately needing an abortion and the other as comfortably able to care for a child. Looking at the descriptive statistics, the women who chose an abortion were more likely to be under 20 years old compared to the women who gave birth (11.1% vs 2.1%) and have a preexisting mental condition (11.3% vs 6.3%). But they were also less likely to have a comorbidity (2.8% vs 5.2%). The rate of material deprivation (23.6% vs 20.0%) was similar for both.
As the study simply tapped into an existing dataset, the researchers couldn’t ask all these post-abortive women why their mental health worsened or why they turned to substance use at higher rates. But the most likely answer is that, deep down, these women know they made the wrong choice. After all, as feminist Frederica Matthewes-Green said, “There is a tremendous sadness and loneliness in the cry ‘A woman’s right to choose.’ No one wants an abortion as she wants an ice-cream cone or a Porsche. She wants an abortion as an animal, caught in a trap, wants to gnaw off its own leg.” This is something that wood floors and comfy chairs can’t fix.
Time can help, though. The study found that mental health-related hospitalization for post-abortive women was most frequent in the first five years after having an abortion, but that this increased risk declined over time. By the end of the study’s follow-up (up to 17 years later), having had an abortion was no longer associated with a mental health hospitalization.
At the end of the day, this new Canadian study bolsters the pro-life movement’s claim that it is not fundamentally anti-women or anti-choice. In reality, we are pro-women and pro-the-right-choice. And we want women to have the best mental health outcomes possible. That means choosing life over abortion.