is there such a thing as "Post-Abortion Syndrome?".

It’s the cover story for the NYTimes Magazine tomorrow – not up on the main magazine site yet, but I found it posted already here.

The author, Emily Bazelon, is a contributing editor of Legal Affairs and a senior editor of Slate magazine, and has written for Mother Jones.

The article, as you would expect from a NYTimes Mag cover piece, is lengthy. The central character of the story is not a psychologist who has dealt with the fallout from abortion with his or her patients but a freelance activist who is post-abortive herself, runs a ministry, but has no professional training and whose techniques lend themselves to vivid description.

Bazelon looks over the science and mostly dismisses it (I make no comment on that in itself because I’ve not looked over the science and can’t knowledgably evaluate what she says. I’m sure someone out there will in the next few days, and I’ll link to it.). What she does is give voice to a couple of researchers who dismiss any notion of "Post-abortion syndrome" and only talks about those who suggest there might be such a thing, including David Reardon. 

The gist of her conclusions is this: Women whose lives go awry want to find a reason why things have gone wrong. They seize on abortion for one reason or another, sometimes because they are convinced to by others with an agenda. Sometimes women really do regret abortions, but those are mostly women who were ambivalent at the time of their abortions.

Her ardor and influence is better explained, perhaps, by the theory of social contagion, which psychologists use to explain phenomena like the Salem witch trials or the wave of unfounded reports of repressed memories of sexual abuse. Reva Siegel of Yale compares South Dakota’s use of criminal law to enforce a vision of pregnant women as weak and confused to the 19th-century diagnosis of female hysteria. These ideas can make and change laws. The claim that women lacked reliable judgment was used to deny women the vote and the right to own property. Repressed-memory stories led states to extend their statutes of limitations. Women who devote themselves to abortion recovery make up for the wrong they feel they’ve done by trying to stop other women from doing it too — by preventing them from having the same choices.

And then there is the relief in seizing on a single clear explanation for a host of unwanted and overwhelming feelings, a cause for everything gone wrong. When Arias surveyed 104 of the prisoners she had counseled in 2004, two-thirds reported depression related to abortion, 32 percent reported suicide attempts related to abortion and 84 percent linked substance abuse to their abortions. They had a new key for unlocking themselves. And a way to make things right. “You have well-meaning therapists or political crusaders, paired with women who are troubled and experiencing a variety of vague symptoms,” Brenda Major, the U.C. Santa Barbara psychology professor, explained to me. “The therapists and crusaders offer a diagnosis that gives meaning to the symptoms, and that gives the women a way to repent. You can’t repent depressive symptoms. But you can repent an action.” You can repent an abortion. You can reach for a narrative of sin and atonement, of perfect imagined babies waiting in heaven

It seems to me – and perhaps I read the article too quickly – apart from the clear indications of bias and ill-informed reporting, as evidenced here:

Abortion-recovery counselors like Arias could focus on why women don’t have the material or social support they need to continue pregnancies they might not want to end. They could call for improving the circumstances of women’s lives in order to reduce the number of abortions. Instead they are working to change laws to restrict and ban abortion.

…yeah, aside from boilerplate groaners like that, a flaw in the article is that what she seems to be asking is, "Does every woman who has an abortion suffer from this "post-abortion syndrome?" And since the answer is "no," she then aims to claim that no such set of symptoms related to a past abortion exists, and that is all illusion, propped up by the rabid anti-abortionists. But that’s not what those in the post-abortion community are saying. They are saying, "We experienced this post-abortion, and our experience is real, and this is what we call it."

There is also a crucial difference (among many) between 19th century "hysteria" diagnoses and post-abortion syndrome. The hysteria diagnosis was developed and promoted by physicians and others, not by women themselves. Bazelon is suggesting that this is the root of the post-abortion "movement" as well – that the amorophous pain of women is exploited by the anti-abortionists to get their way in the legislatures and the courts. This is simply not the case with the post-abortion community. They are who they are, they have come out, at great cost, themselves, and not always and invariably  finding a welcoming place in the pro-life movement, either.

I must be getting old. I remember a time when it was all about "listening to women’s stories."

I guess that day is over.

At least when the stories don’t have the ending you want.