Abortion and mental health: A response to Romans and Steinberg

Abstract

In their recent commentaries on our paper (Fergusson et al., 2013), Romans (2013) and Steinberg (2013) produce a series of arguments which they claim impugn the validity of our conclusions that: “at the present time there is no credible evidence to support the research hypothesis that abortion reduces any mental health risks associated with unwanted or unplanned pregnancies that come to term” (p7). Their critiques centre around two general issues: (1) the choice of research design used to test the research hypothesis; and (2) the selection and analysis of data. We address these issues.