Actually, from 1987 through 1994, the APA did take a position, a medical one, though not on abortion’s mental health benefits. They included induced abortion as one of the psychosocial stressors that can cause Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) in the APA’s DSM-III-R, a book that was the diagnostic tool for psychologists and psychiatrists nationwide for seven years.

You can get a used copy on Amazon, as I did.

Then when the DSM-IV came out, they simply had removed abortion from the book altogether, without a single research study or review of such studies to warrant doing so.

That just isn’t how anything is entered or removed from that manual.

If you’d like to read extensive excerpts without having to buy your own copy, I wrote an article on this here:
http://afterabortion.blogspot.com/2004/05/you-might-recall-my-recent-comment.html

Actually, from 1987 through 1994, the APA did take a position, a medical one, though not on abortion’s mental health benefits. They included induced abortion as one of the psychosocial stressors that can cause Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) in the APA’s DSM-III-R, a book that was the diagnostic tool for psychologists and psychiatrists nationwide for seven years.

You can get a used copy on Amazon, as I did.

Then when the DSM-IV came out, they simply had removed abortion from the book altogether, without a single research study or review of such studies to warrant doing so.

That just isn’t how anything is entered or removed from that manual.

If you’d like to read extensive excerpts without having to buy your own copy, I wrote an article on this here:
http://afterabortion.blogspot.com/2004/05/you-might-recall-my-recent-comment.html

Ok — roll back a few years when gay to straight therapy was heavily promoted and forced on people.

Do you imagine anyone doing it even cared that it caused harm?

None of the therapists cared. They never bothered to properly assess their current clients, let alone ones that had fled or cracked up. No, they blamed the client and moved onto another victim.

R.I.P. Rado, Hatterer, Socarides.

I’ll make another suggestion: after you’ve got to know some gay couples — and not just by email, or in passing — ask them to direct you to a few of an older generation that took the brunt of that callous indifference by previous therapists. Ask those older men and women about harm, and publish what you find.

Actually just ask Jack Drescher.

They have taken a position on the mental health benefits that comes with people being able to determine their own intimate lives based on their needs and values. It’s not specific to it, but that self-determination extends to abortion.

Regarding the back-alley outcome of making abortion illegal or difficult — what study would you suggest the APA should have conducted before deciding abortions would best occur in proper medical facilities rather than some tin shed with a deregistered doctor (or worse)?

Do you need to study such things?

And perhaps you don’t particularly care that someone would be so deceitful about academic qualifications, but I do. They say nothing about the quality of a research paper, but they say an awful lot about the quality of the individual.

Reardon has piggybacked on people with real qualifications. He’s been promoted by people aligned with his views, but who should know better. And he’s hence been actively sought to provide any anti-abortion viewpoint, you know — for “balance”.

But science isn’t a democracy, and there’s no jury to be out. Reardon is not accepted by the academic community, regardless of how appealing his campaign is to others.