The belief that women experience negative emotional well-being result of early termination has been the reason for enactment trying to order different approaches to limit admittance to early termination. Biggs et al. (2017) hypothesize that the restrictions on abortion and the denial of abortion lead to adverse mental outcomes for women. The research methodology is a longitudinal study that interviewed women who underwent and women who were denied an abortion for more than five years. The study sample included 956 women admitted from 2008 to 2010 to 30 abortion centers in the United States (Biggs et al., 2017).
231 of the participants were denied early terminations, and the rest had an abortion at different stages of gestation. Intrigued forthcoming members were reached by phone, and informed assent was acquired verbally (Biggs et al., 2017). Women were first contacted by phone eight days after having or being denied an early termination and had interviews at regular intervals for an extended time. The researchers implemented six types of well-being measures such as anxiety, depression, and self-esteem measurements.
The results infer women who were refused abortion experienced higher levels of anxiety, lower levels of self-content and contentment, and a similar level of depression as those who had an abortion. Unfortunately, the study has lost 42% of the sample by the end of the 5-year period; thus, it is difficult to assess the significance of the obtained data (Biggs et al., 2017). In this article, in comparison to having an early termination, being denied an abortion might be related to the more danger of encountering unfavorable mental results during the initial period. These discoveries imply that the policy that restricts abortion due to the potential mental health risk of abortion on women is not valid.
Reference
Biggs, M. A., Upadhyay, U. D., McCulloch, C. E., & Foster, D. G. (2017). Women’s mental health and wellbeing 5 years after receiving or being denied an abortion. The Journal of the American Medical Association Psychiatry, 74(2), 169–178. Web.