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Comment by pacala | Hacker News Reader

The A-word springs to mind. And yet the taboos are strong, not even a reference, either in the article or the HN comments.

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The long term emotional impact of abortion seems like it depends a lot more on the person and context than miscarriage, which is universally awful.

In fact there is at least some evidence: (e.g. https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...) that for the majority of women having an abortion does not even lead to regret, let alone anything as strong as PTSD.

However, you always have to be careful with statistical measures like this, it's certain to have been a traumatic experience for some fraction of women experiencing it, no matter how small. For people in that position hearing 'oh, it's no big deal' must be pretty hard.

Plus, its not a taboo at all; its been intensely studied, and there's no evidence that having an abortion increases post-traumatic stress compared to being pregnant and not having one, while miscarriage does increase it.

Now, there are people who very much want that not to be true for political reasons, but wanting something to be true for political reasons doesn't make it true.

I believe this, simply because the vast majority of abortions are elective. Explicitly deciding to do something invokes all sorts of defense mechanisms that don't come into play with something like a miscarriage. It doesn't mean that an abortion is any less of a tragedy than a miscarriage (and I say that as a pro choice individual), just that the ability to steel ourselves against the inevitable has some benefits.

>I believe this, simply because the vast majority of abortions are elective.

That can't be right, you're dearly underestimating the number of miscarriages or we live in a very crazy world.

You are correct, but I wasn’t counting miscarriages (“spontaneous abortions”) in with medical or surgical abortions.

That's a good point. I forgot how highly politicized this topic is, which means there is a high likelihood for a flamewar, which means people would rather avoid touching it, which creates a conversation vacuum easily mistaken for a taboo.

Well, there's also a lot of other parallels to draw, right? For instance, rape can cause PTSD but consensual sex usually does not so prima facie I wouldn't jump to the spontaneous abortion carrying the same results as one induced at the request of the carrier.

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