User:Sbowers3/sandbox/Reardon

David Reardon

http://www.justfacts.com/abortion.koopsletter.asp http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0098-7921(198903)15:1%3C172:TUSGOT%3E2.0.CO;2-T Koop "the data do not support the premise that abortion does or does not cause or contribute to psychological problems." "the scientific studies do not provide conclusive data about the health effects of abortion on women. I recommend that consideration be given to going forward with an appropriate prospective study."

- Reardon has published several peer-reviewed studies on the physical and psychological effects of abortion. Reardon's studies have consistently found a significant statistical associations between a history of abortion and elevated risks of death, psychiatric hospitalization, suicide, depression, anxiety, sleep disorders, and other sequelae.

Reardon's research and methodology have been criticized by, among others, Brenda Major of the Department of Psychology at the University of California, Santa Barbara and Nancy Russo, a psychology professor at Arizona State University.

In his earliest peer-reviewed paper, Reardon reported a statistical association between abortion and subsequent substance abuse. "Women who aborted a first pregnancy were five times more likely to report subsequent substance abuse than women who carried to term, and they were four times more likely to report substance abuse compared to those who suffered a natural loss of their first pregnancy (i.e., due to miscarriage, ectopic pregnancy, or stillbirth)."
 * Abortion and Subsequent Substance Abuse

Reardon coauthored a brief report published in 2002 in the British Medical Journal (BMJ) describing his analysis of the National Longitudinal Study of Youth (NLSY) database. Reardon found that among married women, abortion was associated with a higher risk of depression than childbirth. The BMJ published seven "Rapid Responses" to his report, and six replies thereto by Reardon.
 * Depression and unintended pregnancy in the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth - a cohort study

Analyzing the same dataset as Reardon but using what they described as more appropriate methodology, Schmiege and Russo reported in 2005 that evidence for Reardon's finding was inconclusive. Among the many responses were two lengthy letters by Reardon.

In a 2002 report published in the Southern Medical Journal, Reardon and his co-authors examined the California Medicaid records for 173,279 women and found higher death rates associated with abortion than with childbirth.
 * Deaths associated with pregnancy outcome - a record linkage study of low income women

In 2003, Reardon published a study of California Medicaid records for 56,741 low income women. Reardon and his colleagues found that women who had an abortion had a higher risk of psychiatric admission than women who gave birth.
 * Psychiatric Admissions of Low-income Women Following Abortion and Childbirth

Along with Reardon's paper, the Canadian Medical Association Journal published an article by Brenda Major, who argued that Reardon's methodology was flawed. The two articles "elicited a barrage of letters" including short letters by Reardon and Major.

Peer-reviewed studies
I have expanded and trimmed this section. Because Reardon has 25 cites in PubMed I thought there should be more than two of his papers in his section. To decide which ones were more notable, I counted how many times each paper was cited elsewhere in PubMed. It turned out that the two most cited papers were already in our article. I added the next most cited article and I added his earliest paper, notable only for being his first paper.

I trimmed the summaries to just a few sentences, for the most part taken from the abstracts. I didn't want to get into a lot of details or a long back and forth. Abstracts should be a fair summary of what the author thinks most important, helps to avoid cherry-picking, and retains verifiability for readers who might not have access to the full papers.