Hello,

I appreciate your reporting of the Oslo research on abortion study that reports more trauma than adoption, however, for this piece to have credibility,please provide the names of researchers and the journal where the research findings are reported.

Thank you.

Patt Blue

My mother was a devout Christian woman who believed abortion was murder! At least, that is what she told me quite a few years ago! When my sister’s eldest daughter got pregnant out of wedlock! My mother changed her mind instantly! She paid for my nieces abortion out of her own pocket! Because she knew an illegitimate child would destroy the girl! The only one who pays for a illegitimate child is the girl! The guy doesn’t! All he has to do is walk off from it! If the girl is lucky he might have to pay child support, but most of the time that never happens.

My daughter got pregnant at 15! She received an abortion as soon as we found out! For a year or two she felt sad over it! But, the older she got the more she realized she was not old enough to be a mother! The child would have suffered as well as she! In both of my relative’s I have not seen any lasting effects of abortion! I personally believe that the guilt comes from “religious nuts” who are bent on making girls who get abortions miserable with guilt! I personally have saw more misery that came out of adoption of a unwanted child than I ever have abortion! That is something I could never in a million years do! Without spending the rest of my life feeling guilty that I had abandoned a child to a cruel world!

I used to do birth certificates in our local hospital. I saw 12, 13 and up girls coming in who gave birth to a child somebody is going to raise! You know it isn’t going to be her! Because she is to young to even be having a baby! As far as I am concerned! Parents who allow such nonsense should be taken out and whipped for allowing something like that to even happen! It’s pure ignorance on the part of parents! In a world that is dying from excessive population! When are people going to get past the religion to realize we are destroying ourselves with over-population! I firmly do not believe that God wants us to destroy ourselves like this! It’s time religion started coming out of the dark ages and realized we have a serious population problem!

Speaking as a person who has had 4 intentional abortions and 3 unintentional miscarriages, my view on this is that the study is pretty damned limited.

I had four abortions because I was too young to deal with a baby and I knew it. I didn't have the economic or psychological resources to handle it.

My three miscarriages struck me as perhaps some kind of malign payback, but I'm not inherently superstitious, so I expect they were due to precisely what the gynos said -- an "incompetent" cervix, which it was what the condition was called back then. I spent the last two pregnancies mostly in bed and I was actually encouraged to drink alcohol because the theory was it would "calm things down" in case my body got ideas above its station or something.

In any case, there was one live birth (the last) but in those days (prior to 1980) there was no way to keep such an extremely premature child alive and it died within about 20 minutes.

I was then advised (by my doctor) to give up what seemed to be a hopeless effort, and I had the tubes tied a year later.

Except for the exertions of my "friends" who encouraged me to mourn and be miserable, I have to say that four abortions and three miscarriages mostly left me cold. It didn't help some of these friendships much, because I object to being manipulated when I'm not feeling well. But on their own merits, these were things I chose to do and as an adult, things I am willing to live with.

Studies that find "lasting" mourning for persons who have chosen abortion are probably finding short-term stuff that these very same persons would discount ten years later. I'd have a lot more confidence in these "studies" if more of the details were known.

How old are these women? When, actually, did they have these abortions? How many of them were interviewed and how were they found?

It's my experience that even in this day and age, people who have had multiple abortions are reluctant to talk about it. I hardly ever do. Who needs the arguments, the accusations, the hyperbole? What? I'm the only person of my age who has sex? And I'm married! It's just too much rhetoric and too little knowledge bundled together.

But I saw these recent headlines and I was immediately catapulted back to some period in the 1970s or early 1980s where it became a matter of faith that abortion led to breast cancer.

It seems there are simply no ends to the fake stories that are going to be propagated about abortion, one way or other.

Those of us who have chosen to end pregnancies in this way are not morons. I have gotten unintentionally pregnant on the pill and on two IUDs. What, exactly, was I supposed to do with my life when these methods failed? Give in to the "inevitable" and have a kid I was in no condition to raise or educate?

Given all the anti-infant diatribes that emanate from the wingnuts about women having children they can't or won't care for,where is the out? Are we just supposed to be beaten up for "getting" pregant, like there's no man involved? Hullo? Where are our "Christian" leaders on this one?

This isn't a story that needs more airing, but it does need a tad more reality. When I was getting abortions it was mostly illegal and in the case of the last one, I was asked to see two psychologists, to be "evaluated". I told the first one that if I couldn't do it in the U.S. I would fly back to Denmark (my previous address) and I told the second one that I didn't know my father so I didn't have a relationship with him. Both those interviews were farces, in their different ways.

This was then the law in D.C. You had to see two psychos. This was idiotic on the face of it. It assumed that anyone who wanted an abortion was in some way mentally umbalanced. I didn't find anything about not wanting children all that unbalanced, but I did find the shrinks sort of on the short end when intelligence was being passed out.

I thought the whole process was moronic, but I got my (only) legal abortion, so today I'm more inclined to think it was all a setup. Those shrinks got money from my health insurance and they certainly knew nothing about me and cared less. And vice versa.

Admittedly, I had to scream at the health insurers but I assume it was good training for learning to scream at health insurers. They paid up.

None of this has to anything to do with regrets, sadness or other emotional fallout. It has to do with being left alone to work out how life is going to be for oneself. No number of "Christian" interventionists is going to change that.

To paraphase George Bush, if I had known then exactly what I know now, I would have done the same thing. What other choice did I have?