by Susan Brinkmann, OCDS
Staff Writer
(Feb. 25, 2008) The link between abortion and suicide once again made news when a coroner’s investigation into the 2007 hanging death of a 31 year-old British artist found that the woman killed herself due to remorse after having an abortion.
“I should never have had an abortion,” the deceased, Emma Beck, wrote in a suicide note.
“I told everyone I didn’t want to do it, even at the hospital. I was frightened, now it is too late. I died when my babies died. I want to be with my babies: they need me, no one else does.”
Miss Beck had just split up with her boyfriend who had reacted badly to the news that she was pregnant with twins. She had an abortion at eight weeks and was found hanging in her home shortly afterward. Tragically, her body was found on Feb. 1, 2007, her 31st birthday.
At the inquest, the victim’s mother, Sylvia Beck, said she wrote to the hospital demanding to know why her daughter was not given an opportunity to see a counselor.
“She was only going ahead with the abortion because her boyfriend did not want the twins,” she said at the inquest, according to The Telegraph. “I believe this is what led Emma to take her own life – she could not live with what she had done.”
A representative of the clinic where she had the abortion responded by saying that “The time that can be given to a woman by a counselor is limited in a busy hospital. I am satisfied everything was done to make sure Emma was consenting to surgery. . .”
Although it receives little publicity, the link between abortion and suicide in women is well established. A recent study conducted by the Elliott Institute, a post-abortion research and advocacy organization, examined the death records linked to Medi-Cal payments for births and abortions for approximately 173,000 low income Californian women. Researchers found that over an eight year period of time, women who aborted their children had a 154 percent higher risk of death from suicide.
These findings concurred with a large record-based study of 600,000 women conducted in Finland in 1997 which found that women who chose abortion over birth were six times more likely to die by suicide in the year following the pregnancy.
Both studies were largely ignored by abortion advocates. “If the results had been the opposite, they would have been shouted from the rooftops,” said David C. Reardon, Ph.D., director of the Elliott Institute.
Unfortunately, abortion advocates continue to trumpet the notion that abortion is six, twelve, or even twenty times safer than childbirth, a falsehood that is “constructed by combining a ‘hodgepodge of studies’ that rely on incomplete data,” Reardon says.
Because the U.S. considers abortion to be a privacy issue, there are no federal or state requirements for the recording of abortion complications. Therefore, statements such as these are “At best, educated guesses,” says David C. Reardon. “At worst, they are examples of propaganda dressed up as science.”
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