Unwanted results: the ethics of controversial research

July 31st 2003

I am responding to the recent editorial, "Unwanted results:the ethics of controversial research" which ran in the July 22nd issue.

Allow me, on behalf of our national board and members to congratulate you on the decision to run the results of the research study "Psychiatric admissions of low income women following abortion and childbirth" by David C. Reardon and colleagues. We are especially appreciative of your efforts to subject this paper to "cautious review and revision" before publication. It is gratifying that you have not allowed the politics of abortion to stifle this most essential debate.

I believe it is important to make two points - one a challenge and the other a question of concern. If, as it seems, abortion advocates do not trust the results of the Reardon research and if, like us, they are truly concerned with women's health - then let them commission research which is "independent and unbiased" on the effects of induced abortion and submit it to the CMAJ for the same "cautious review and revision." It is interesting to note that there is a website www.afterabortion.com which is definitely not pro-life yet acknowledges the pain of abortion and includes heart rending stories by women of their own abortion experience.

Secondly, just over a year ago in a new Canadian publication entitled "Women's Health After Abortion-The Medical and Psychological Evidence," by Elizabeth Ring Cassidy and Ian Gentles, a 2001 Ontario study was mentioned in the introduction. This study, commissioned by the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Ontario, made a comparison between 41,039 women who had had an abortion and a similar number who had not.<_1/> The study only concerned itself with the three month period after the abortion. The hospital patients had a more than four times higher rate of hospitalizations for infections (6.3 vs 1.4 per 1000), a five times higher rate of "surgical events" (8.3 vs 1.6 per 1000), and a nearly five times higher rate of hospitalizations for psychiatric problems (5.2 vs 1.1 per 1000), than the matching group who had not had abortions.

The overwhelming majority of these women were healthy, but unhappily pregnant women. Surely a duty of care exists toward these and indeed all women that must be defined within the confines of proper peer reviewed research but outside the idealogical bias of the particular researchers? If there is a right to choose, there is also a right to know. Again, our thanks for allowing this debate to continue.

Respectfully submitted,

Mrs Jakki Jeffs President LifeCanada/VieCanada 519 824-7797 aflo@mgl.ca

1. Ostbye T, Wenghofer EF, Woodward CA, Gold G, Craighead J. Health services utilization after induced abortions in Ontario: a comparison bewteen community clinics and hospitals. American Journal of Medical Quality 2001;6(3):99-106