LIFE DIGEST: Abortion-stress disorder link no surprise to Silent No More
- Feb 18, 2008 - comment
Another study demonstrating a link between abortion and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is no surprise to the leadership of the Silent No More Awareness Campaign.
In a study of women who underwent abortions, the research showed a 62 percent increase in the number who displayed symptoms of stress disorder three months after they had the procedures as contrasted with those who showed such symptoms before their abortions. The percentage of women exhibiting PTSD symptoms grew from 11.3 percent to 17.5 one month post-abortion and 18.2 percent three months after their procedures.
“High rates of PTSD [characterize] women who have undergone surgical abortions,” according to the study.
“It’s always good when a peer-reviewed psychiatric study validates what you already know in your heart to be true,” said Georgette Forney, a post-abortive woman and co-founder of the Silent No More Awareness Campaign. “It’s really only common sense, though, that a mother who undergoes the trauma of losing her child, whether voluntarily or under coercion from a boyfriend or parent, would suffer consequences from that trauma.”
The study was conducted of 155 post-abortive, South African women both one month and three months after their abortions. The study appeared in the journal BMC Psychiatry in July, but the results were only recently reported.
Silent No More is a Christian outreach to inform Americans of abortion’s grievous consequences.
Unborn twins’ kicking saves mother’s life
Michelle Stepney’s unborn twin daughters had plenty of kicks for their mother, and they turned out to be life-saving ones.
Seventeen weeks into pregnancy, the British mother went to the hospital with a suspected miscarriage but learned she had cervical cancer, according to the Daily Mail. She also was told the kicking by her twins had dislodged the tumor. Doctors told her, however, she needed immediately to undergo chemotherapy and have a hysterectomy, which would mean aborting her girls.
“When [the doctors] said that the babies had literally kicked my [tumor] out, I just couldn’t believe it,” said Stepney, 35, the Daily Mail reported. “I’d felt them kicking, but I didn’t realize just how important their kicking would turn out to be.
“I knew I could have an operation straight away and it would cure me of the cancer, but that would mean getting rid of my babies and I couldn’t do that,” she said. “I had two lives inside me and I just couldn’t give up on them – especially after they had saved me like this.”
Doctors at London’s Royal Marsden Hospital agreed to treat her with reduced chemotherapy during the pregnancy, and her daughters were born at 33 weeks without harm, except for a lack of hair, according to the Daily Mail. The girls, Alice and Harriet, have celebrated their first birthdays and are doing well.
Stepney had a hysterectomy four weeks after giving birth, and doctors report she is clear of cancer, to the relief of the patient and her husband, Scott, who live in Cheam, South-West London.
Canadian judge stops hospital plan to unplug man
A Canadian judge has blocked a hospital from taking an elderly man off life support against his children’s wishes.
Issued Feb. 13, the court injunction prevents Grace General Hospital in Winnipeg, Manitoba, from removing life-sustaining treatment from Samuel Golubchuk, 84, until a trial is held. No date for a trial has been scheduled.
“We are grateful for the decision the judge made not only for our father, but for all the elderly people and disabled people across Canada,” said Percy Golubchuk, Samuel’s son, according to the Winnipeg Sun. “God is the major doctor.”
The younger Golubchuk and his sister, Mariam Geller, have sought to keep their father on life support since doctors told them in December he would be removed because he had little brain activity, was unable to communicate and demonstrated no signs of improving, the Sun reported. The elder Golubchuk, an Orthodox Jew, has been on life support since November, according to the newspaper.
U.N. moratorium on abortion requested
Silvio Berlusconi, the front-runner in the Italian presidential campaign, has called on the United Nations to approve a moratorium on abortion.
“I think that recognizing the right to life from conception to natural death is a principle that the U.N. could makes it own, just as it did with the moratorium on the death penalty,” Berlusconi told Tempi magazine, according to the Associated Press.
In December, the U.N. General Assembly passed a non-binding resolution that called for a moratorium on capital punishment in member countries that use the death penalty.
A former prime minister, Berlusconi and his coalition are expected to win the parliamentary elections scheduled April 13 and 14.
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