Lawmaking by anecdote.

I think we've hit a nerve in the local anti-abortion blogosphere with the news about the APA's determination that abortion is not a significant mental health risk to women.

Bob Ellis has been working overtime at Dakota Voice, with several posts on the topic.

There seem to be two major arguments the antis are trying to make with their recent posts. 1. Women regret their abortions sometimes, therefore abortion should be illegal for all women. 2. Any professional organization suggesting that 1. is not as big a problem as the antis think it is, is biased and anything such an organization has to say about the topic should be disregarded out-of-hand.

I think both of these arguments are pretty easily refuted.

1. I don't think any pro-choice person doubts that some women who have had an abortion, or several abortions, may regret their decision(s) later in life. That's the chance we take as human beings every time we make a decision of any sort - we might decide later on that we made the wrong decision and feel bad about it.

Almost every day, I make a decision that I later regret. I regret some big things and some small things. For example, I regret ordering a pizza the other night instead of making supper at home. I also regret not starting college until I was 21 years old; I feel my life would be very different right now if I'd made a different decision a few years previous. On the other hand, I've made some huge decisions in my life that everyone warned me I'd regret later...and I haven't regretted them for a second. (Quitting my job to go to grad school comes to mind immediately.) I don't assume that decision I later come to regret are always bad decisions for every person facing them - I bet a lot of people ordered pizza the other night and really enjoyed it. I bet a lot of people regret leaving full-time employment for grad school.

Some women might regret having abortions - tens of thousands of women, in fact, might regret having abortions. All of this is entirely possible. That still leaves millions of others who don't regret their decision to terminate. The fact that some women later feel they made the wrong decision does not mean the ability to make the decision to have an abortion should be taken away from every woman. Unless, of course, you believe women aren't smart enough to make these kinds of decisions on our own. Unless you believe we're so stupid that we have to be protected from ourselves.

2. I had to laugh at the title of one of Bob's posts - "The APA - When Bias Eclipses Science." You see, the APA doesn't hate gay people like Bob does, so we shouldn't trust anything they say. To refute the APA's study, Bob posts this statement (Warning: it's a .pdf) signed by various counselors, doctors, and nurses - and some other random people (you mean to tell me someone holding a B.A. in psychology thinks abortion hurts women? My stars, that changes everything!). A quick review of the footnotes of this report suggests what I assumed was the case from the beginning - Bob's attempting to refute what he considers biased science with other "science" that matches his worldview and is therefore completely unbiased. Every study footnoted in the statement Bob referenced is authored or co-authored by David Reardon, Vincent Rue, Jesse Cougle, or Priscilla Coleman - all people who put their personal biases against abortion ahead of their role as researchers and academics.

Bob has failed to prove the APA's bias on this issue (as I suggested above, his evidence is that they removed homosexuality from the DSM in 1973), and instead relies on the "research" of people like David Reardon, who doesn't really even pretend to be anything but an agenda-driven junk scientist.

So what this ultimately boils down to, in my mind, is that people like Bob Ellis and Steve Hickey think we should outlaw abortion because they know some people who really wish they hadn't had abortions. Anecdotal evidence like this isn't science, for one thing, and it certainly shouldn't dictate how we pass laws in this country.