By Susan Brinkmann, OCDS Staff Journalist The new president of the Pontifical Academy for Life has announced that his dicastery is planning to publish a new document on the after-effects of abortion which is expected to be completed next year. The Catholic News Agency is reporting that Archbishop Ignacio Carrasco de Paula told L'Osservatore Romano that the document will focus on the depression that affects so many women who have undergone an abortion and will distinguish this condition from the better known post-abortion syndrome.  “We believe that in studying this issue, a distinction must be made," he said. "The existence of post-abortion syndrome is a well known fact that has already been developed in much literature.  I am referring to the state of depression that isolates many women who have undergone an abortion.” This depression often manifests itself through anxiety or other more serious conditions, he said. “It is true that abortion, in addition to killing an innocent person, profoundly affects the conscience of the woman who undergoes it.  It is a question, then, that cannot be ignored, especially from a pastoral point of view.”    Another aspect that will be studied in the document is what the Archbishop calls the "grave phenomenon of the habit of abortion.”   This problem “was made manifest in all of its gravity when 20 years ago, after the devastating earthquake in Armenia (1989), a team of doctors from the Sacred Heart Catholic University traveled to the region to provide medical assistance and discovered that many women had undergone as many as 20 abortions or more.  For them, having an abortion had become something like having a cup of coffee. Thus they talked about the dramatic phenomenon of completely erasing any moral sensitivity to the issue of abortion.” This tragedy “could spread to the European populations in the wake of the recent commercializing of the pill RU 486,”  the Archbishop warned.  “There is no question that facilitating its use could result in the banalization of abortion and the transformation of unwanted pregnancies into something akin to a bothersome cold that can be taken care of with a pill." © All Rights Reserved, Living His Life Abundantly®/Women of Grace®  http://www.womenofgrace.com