Abortion syndrome?

Following is a brief outline of one of the stories RELIGION & ETHICS NEWSWEEKLY will be covering this week. The show airs Sunday mornings on WMHT at 6:30 a.m. Every Friday evening, new stories are uploaded to the Web site here.

According to Theresa Karminski Burke with Rachel’s Vineyard, a post-abortion support group, the trauma of abortion, which she calls “post-abortion syndrome,” can cause addictions, disorders or depression: “Some people can ignore it. Some people can run from it. Some people can numb it through drugs and alcohol. But, on some level, just as a human being, we pay a price when we engage in destruction of life.” But Reverend Rebecca Turner with the Missouri Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice denies that such a syndrome exists: “It's a name applied by those who are completely against abortion and want others to believe that all women suffer this extreme emotional trauma after an abortion . . . Certainly, there are women who experience stress related to an unplanned pregnancy and an abortion. It's normal to experience stress. But to say that there's a particular syndrome that women are always going to go through after they have an abortion is completely fictitious.”