Monday, we told you how that decision changed the dynamic of the abortion debate. It legitimized a faction of the anti-abortion movement that believes women are often the victims of abortion.
Today, the other side speaks out. According to abortion rights groups, relief, not regret, is the overwhelming emotion for most women following an abortion.
Rhiannon Good: About 15 to about the age of 18, I struggled with some really difficult issues, which is part of what lead me to getting pregnant in the first place. It was sort of that desperate need for approval -- and suddenly, going from not being a very sexual person to being seen as very sexual almost overnight with really no mental or emotional capability to deal with that.
Rhiannon Good was 17 when she got pregnant. She had a steady boyfriend, but when she gave him the news, he left.
Half of all pregnancies in America are unintended and almost half of those will end in abortion. That’s according to the Guttmacher Institute , founded by the president of Planned Parenthood 40 years ago, now an independent research agency. [Editor's note: The original broadcast script indicated that the Guttmacher Institute was "a research organization affiliated with Planned Parenthood."] When Rhiannon Good learned she was pregnant she had an abortion.
Good: I felt relieved. I was very relieved.
Research shows most women feel relief following an abortion. One UC Santa Barbara study followed post abortive women for two years. Seventy-two percent of women reported more benefit than harm from the abortion. Only 1 percent had signs of post traumatic stress disorder. But despite the science, the idea of post abortion syndrome is gaining credibility these days and it's coming from the highest court in the land. [Click here to read the PDF of the UC Santa Barbara abortion study]
In April, the Supreme Court upheld a 2003 ban of a specific late term abortion procedure, dubbed “partial birth abortion.” It’s a procedure rarely used, accounting for less than 1 percent of all abortions. But in the court’s decision, Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote, some women feel regret following abortion, and can suffer from depression and a loss of self esteem. Some studies say that may be true for some women, but they are in the small minority.
Amy Everitt, NARAL ProChoice California , State Director: It was really shocking to see that anti-choice rhetoric could find its way into a Supreme Court decision when he also recognized there was no scientific medical evidence to support it.
Amy Everitt is the state director of NARAL Pro-Choice California. An advocacy group for women’s reproductive rights. She says the Supreme Court 34ed a brief submitted by a fringe group, called Operation Outcry. [ Click here to read a PDF of the brief from the Operation Outcry Web site . A group that claims women turn to drugs, alcohol and are often depressed after having abortions.
Everitt: They’re out there and they’re like this incredibly vocal minority and do things to grab headlines and they do things to put the most horrible framework around womens’ private decision making out there, and the really important thing, especially for the pro-choice movement, is not to have our agenda set by these fringe people who actually don’t represent the majority of Americans in any state in the country, but to focus on what we do best -- and what we wish these groups would work with us on -- which is to reduce unintended pregnancy so we can all work together to reduce the need for abortion.
In Beverly Hills, at Ms. Magazine headquarters, the magazine founded by feminist Gloria Steinham, there is a c38aign on to take abortion out of the closet -- a c38aign that has thousands of women declaring they had abortions without regret, shame, or guilt.
Katherine Spillar, Executive Editor: We felt we had to wake up the country and put the woman back into the picture. It's women's lives and their health that is at stake in this debate.
And so last year the magazine asked women who had abortions to come forward and publish their names in the magazine. Thousands did. So many names, there wasn’t enough room in this issue to publish them all.
Spillar: Yes some women will, some women regret continuing a pregnancy, some women regret getting married or entering into a relationship, but to take away a safe medical procedure that saves more women’s' lives and their mental health and their ability to continue living on these so-called studies, which have been disproved time and time again, is so irresponsible. That's why this Supreme Court decisions in many ways was irresponsible. It took as dogma anti-abortion literature and conclusions and incorporated that into a Supreme Court decisions that governs all of us.
The harshest criticism of the Court’s decision comes from the court itself -- Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg . In her dissenting opinion, she wrote the court’s own words revealed its bias. “Revealing this regard, the Court reveals an antiabortion shibboleth for which it has no reliable evidence.”
Spillar: This decision, I believe, puts this question of abortion and the right to legal abortion right into the center for the 2008 Presidential and congressional races. And a lot of politicians don't want to have to answer these questions.
Abortion has not been at the center of such debate since 1973 when Roe v. Wade ruled state laws banning abortion were unconstitutional. Now, with a Supreme Court revealing a majority willing to make changes to abortion laws in this country, abortion rights and anti-abortion groups are paying close attention to where the next president and future Congress stand on the issue. The “partial birth abortion ban” may just be the call to arms for both sides.
Good: The fact that these people are gaining credibility saying women are morally wrong and women regret it and its going to ruin your life I think the fact that's gaining credibility makes me feel almost obligated to share my story and say no, there are people out there doing just fine."
Rhiannon Good is 29 now. She’s married. A college graduate, a writer, and a c38aign manager for Planned Parenthood. A group she says gave her support when she needed it most.
Good: I went through a lot of therapy to deal with my other issues. And the interesting thing was now that I hear a lot about women and their regrets about abortion, and how it made them depressed and ruined their life, and I'm thinking I was very depressed and very anxiety-ridden before my unintended pregnancy, and before my abortion, and I did go to therapy and I was depressed afterwards. But the one thing I never had to deal with in therapy was the fact that I had an abortion.
Good and her husband are expecting their first baby. Good says she is moving forward in her life with no regrets. She feels sorry for the women who can’t move on.
Good: I empathize with the fact that they have this regret and they feel like they made a bad decision but I guess if I had to talk to one of them and probe into that and do they regret having the decision, do they regret being able to have that decision or do they regret the decision they made -- because that's a totally different thing and I think if some of them thought about it they would say, I regret the decision but maybe it was a good thing I was able to have that decision.
