By Antonia Tully

Pro-abortion propaganda the world over is widespread, powerful and packed full of lies. Women are told that abortion is safe, simple and convenient. And now women are being told that they don’t regret their abortions. 

Last week, headlines in the US and over here, announced that five years on, the majority of women don’t regret their abortion. The headlines were in response to a new study from a team of researchers at the University of California, San Francisco. But scratch the surface of this study and you’ll quickly see the glaring flaws in it.

This latest study is based on data collected in what has been termed the ‘Turnaway Study’. Between 2008 - 2010, researchers looked for women to participate in the study from 30 different abortion centres across 21 states in the US. The researchers then interviewed the women one week after the abortion and then at intervals over five years.

It is called the ‘Turnaway Study’ because it compares women who were close to the abortion time limit of the clinic and had abortions and those who those who were turned away from the clinic because their pregnancy was too advanced. A third group of women had early abortions. The significance here is that all women did not want to be pregnant and had chosen abortion. This meant that any adverse mental health problems would be related to the abortion and not to whether the pregnancy was unwanted.

So, what are the problems with the ‘Turnaway Study’?

The fundamental flaw with this study is the sample of women who took part. 3,000 women were approached to take part in the study between 2008-2010. But only 37.5% of women agreed to take part and of that 15% dropped out before the first interview. That left of 31.9% starting the study and only 22% of women were still participating at the five-year end of the study.

So the vast majority of women approached by researchers did not want to talk about their abortion. This makes it likely that those who did take part, and continued to the end, were more comfortable talking about their abortion and less likely to have any regrets.

Over the five- year period of the study, during which the women were contacted twice a year, the researcher lost touch with some. But some women will have dropped out because they did not want to continue answering questions about their abortion. These women may well have been suffering from psychological problems.

So now in 2020, women around the world are being told that there is no regret attached to abortion on the basis of what, at the end of a five-year study, a tiny sample of 667 of women told researchers.

Among the reasons women may have dropped out during the research period, is their sense that the researchers were looking for particular answers. This is likely because the ‘Turnaway Study’ was conducted by the Advancing New Standards in Reproductive Health at the University of California. This organisation is committed to free access to abortion.

Furthermore, the ‘Turnaway Study’ was funded by organisations such as the David and Lucille Packard Foundation, which is deeply committed to abortion. 

At least 27 academic studies have been based on the data collected by the ‘Turnaway Study’. This means that researchers are making claims about how women feel about abortion based on deeply flawed information.

Possibly the most damming verdict on the ‘Turnaway Study’ is that it contradicts the findings of the majority of other studies looking at the impact of abortion on women’s mental health. The abortion lobby studiously ignores the literature from around the world, now piling up, which shows that women do regret their abortions and can suffer hugely after an abortion. 

The abortion industry is built on lies. Women deserve the truth and SPUC will never stop proclaiming the truth.