Most blue states have laws allowing post-viability abortions to protect the woman’s mental health, but a newly released report suggests that such procedures are making things worse, not better.
A peer-reviewed study released Monday by the pro-life Charlotte Lozier Institute found that women who terminated their first pregnancies saw larger increases in mental health treatment than women whose initial pregnancies ended by giving birth.
“Abortion is associated with a greater incidence of subsequent mental illness than birth, and the difference is not explainable by prior medical history,” said the study published in the International Journal of Women’s Health.
The research found that women whose first pregnancy ended in abortion were 3.4 times more likely to have outpatient visits, 5.7 times more likely to have inpatient hospital admissions and 19.6 times more likely to have longer hospital stays for mental health services.
The study, “A Cohort Study of Mental Health Services Utilization Following a First Pregnancy Abortion or Birth,” comes as pro-choice advocates are raising alarm about the importance of abortion care in guarding women’s physical and mental health after the fall of Roe v. Wade.
The researchers examined claims data for more than 4,800 Medicaid-enrolled women from 1999-2015 in seven states “where state taxpayer funds were used to pay for abortions and where all claims for the whole period were submitted.”
The claims data examined during the 17-year period came from Connecticut, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, Vermont and West Virginia.
Lead author James Studnicki, a veteran public health scientist and the institute’s vice president and director of data analytics, said previous studies from Finland, Italy, China, Germany, South Korea and the United States have linked abortion to increased anxiety, depression and suicide.
“Some researchers insist that any limits on abortion to protect mothers and children create ‘mental health harms,’” Mr. Studnicki said. “Our study using years of claims data adds to an extensive body of international, peer-reviewed science showing the opposite — abortion itself has a significant negative impact on several measures of mental health.”
New study on claims for 4,800+ Medicaid-enrolled women over a 17-year period:
Women whose first pregnancy ends in abortion have much larger increases in mental health treatment compared to those who had a live birth.
Learn more: https://t.co/zwgXS9qKc6
— Charlotte Lozier Institute (@LozierInstitute) July 10, 2023
Interestingly, the study found that women who gave birth in their first pregnancy had higher rates of mental health services before delivery than those who underwent abortions.
“Following a first pregnancy abortion, however, women have significantly higher rates of mental health utilization than do women in the birth cohort,” said the paper.
The Lozier Institute said the researchers were the first to use 17 years of anonymous Medicaid claims to track the first pregnancy outcomes, which allowed them to avoid self-reporting problems such as low participation, failure to follow up and recall bias.
“The evidence is clear that abortion of a first pregnancy is associated with substantial mental health harms to women,” said Tessa Longbons, Lozier senior research associate and the study’s co-author. “Women have a right to know this and to understand the extent of these harms before they make such a life-changing decision.”
Planned Parenthood has disputed that having abortions leads to worsening mental health, citing a 2017 study by University of California San Francisco Bixby Center for Global Reproductive Health researchers that found women who received versus being denied abortions reported similar mental health outcomes after five years.
“These findings do not support policies that restrict women’s access to abortion on the basis that abortion harms women’s mental health,” said the February 2017 paper in JAMA Psychiatry.
Since the Supreme Court overturned Roe in June 2022, red states have increasingly moved to impose restrictions on abortions, including eliminating mental health exceptions.
Blue states that allow abortion until viability, typically 22-24 weeks’ gestation, typically include a post-viability exception to protect the mental or physical health of the woman — an outlet that pro-life advocates say essentially permits elective abortion until birth.
The study population in the birth cohort was on average 14 months older than in the abortion cohort. The women were all Medicaid-eligible, and “as a result, the findings may not be generalizable to a population with different sociodemographic characteristics,” said the paper.
Using the same Medicaid data, the researchers found in a previous study that women who aborted their first pregnancies “had more pregnancies, more miscarriages, more than four times as many abortions, and only half as many live births as women whose first pregnancy ended in a live birth.”
