Whose Choice Anyway

Because Britain allows abortion later than any other Western European country, there has always been a stream of women arriving from abroad willing to pay for an abortion. The impartiality of the counselling they receive is dubious, even if the clinics could provide an interpreter for every nationality. It is doubtful whether any medical notes are seen. Late abortion carries a complication rate as high as 10%.

We are exporting women who are uninformed, and at risk, every day from the abortion clinics. Private clinics carried out nearly 88% of all late abortions in 1986.

And of the 8,276 abortions in 1986, 45% were on non-resident women. By performing these abortions, which would be illegal in the women's country of origin, we have truly become the back-street abortionists of Europe.

At the time of writing, no national study of post-abortion disorders has been completed in Britain, but we can establish something of the scope of the psychiatric turmoil abortionism has fostered by looking at the studies done elsewhere. David, Rasmussen and Hoist tracked all admissions to psychiatric hospitals in Denmark for a three-year period after delivery or abortion. Their findings make depressing reading. There was a 50% increase in the percentage of women admitted to such hospitals following an abortion, compared with those completing pregnancy. Even more disturbing were the results for those women who did not have the support of a stable relationship. The numbers admitted to psychiatric hospitals nearly quadrupled compared to the numbers who completed pregnancy. It is likely that the percentages would be even higher the later the abortion, for from the moment a woman feels her baby move, at about 18 weeks, bonding has begun. In a poll done by Horack and Associates on 22 January 1988, published in the Independent, 79% of women and men said they would feel guilt if they aborted their child after quickening had occurred.

As an American doctor put it, 'You can scrape the baby out of the mother, but you can never scrape the baby out of the mother's mind.' The conclusions of the Danish study state that 'at all parities the women who obtained abortions are at a higher risk for admission to psychiatric hospitals than women who deliver', and yet during the campaign opponents of the Bill said that post-abortion stress disorders were an invention of the pro-life movement and quoted Denmark's abortion on request system as a suitable model for British abortion law.

The symptoms of post-abortion stress are all too common, and all too obvious in some of the letters on the following pages: tears and an overwhelming sense of guilt, the feeling of betrayal of the child and betrayal by a partner and family, or that the woman is not worthy of her partner. Finally there is the constant memory.

What would the baby have been like? But post-abortion stress doesn't stop at the woman who has the abortion. Her partner or parents can also be affected, as can the existing children. McAll and Wilson, in Ritual Mourning for Unresolved Grief After Abortion (Southern Medical Journal, Vol. 80, no. 7, July 1987), gave case reports on such sequelae from the United States. They recommended ritual mourning as a means of dealing with what they described as 'unresolved grief', 'a