By Charlie Butts
Editor’s note. This appeared at OneNewsNow.
Randall O’Bannon, Ph.D.
A study released last week glorifying abortion is seriously flawed, but one pro-life activist encourages Americans to consider where the research is coming from before taking the results to heart.
Researchers at the University of California San Francisco released a study stating that abortion causes little psychiatric effect on women – a claim that is contradicted by existing studies.
Dr. Randall O’Bannon of the National Right to Life Committee told OneNewsNow that the research can easily be debunked – first on statistical grounds, but secondly, he contends that the study only examined the first few years after an abortion … when the emotional problems typically do not surface for 10 years.
“We know women who have gone through abortion who have had enormous difficulties as a consequence of it, who have dealt with different sorts of things like everything from being anxious and depressed to being suicidal and so forth, and they directly attribute that to their abortion,” Dr. O’Bannon asserted. “So the point is, we know that the reality is there.”
According to O’Bannon, ignoring the voluminous research that proves the psychological damage from abortion does not make it untrue. He also notes that the source of the pro-abortion study – U.C. San Francisco – makes the pro-abortion research suspect.
“We sometimes refer to [UCSF] as America’s abortion training academy,” the pro-life leader pointed out. “They have been training people to do abortions, they’ve been doing research on abortion for decades, and, over and over, their conclusion is supposedly that despite what other studies have shown, — despite what everybody knows – they’re trying to say abortion is not really problematic … it’s not really difficult.”
Because authoritative research proves psychological harm to women who have abortions, it is argued that the school is doing a tremendous disservice to women by suggesting otherwise.
Critics of the UCSF study recommend the Elliot Institute as a more reliable source for accurate information on abortion.