The Charlotte Lozier Institute recently conducted a peer-reviewed study in which it analyzed the data of women receiving Medicaid. It looked at 4,800 women’s claims over a 17-year period (1999-2015). The choice to use Medicaid claims and not self-reporting was a pointed one. Self-reporting is fraught with low participation and unreliable narration issues that affect the quality of the data. The study also analyzed only the data from states that used taxpayer dollars to fund abortions. There were seven states in all from all regions of the country.

The findings were astonishing. Women whose first pregnancy was ended by an abortion had a higher instance of needing mental health services compared to women who chose birth. They were 3.4 times more likely to need further outpatient visits, 5.7 times more likely to need inpatient hospital visits, and 19.6 times more likely to have an increased number of days in the hospital.

The Charlotte Lozier Institute is a pro-life organization. However, its research findings align with other findings in Germany, Italy, Finland, China, and Korea.

Lead author James Studnicki, Sc.D. sums up the findings: “Some researchers insist that any limits on abortion to protect mothers and children create ‘mental health harms’. Our study using years of claims data adds to an extensive body of international, peer-reviewed science showing the opposite — abortion itself has a significant negative impact on several measures of mental health.”

With abortion being such a hot-button political issue in the U.S., pro-abortion institutions such as Planned Parenthood love to spread the lie that women need to abort their children because not doing so will give them a higher likelihood of mental health struggles. Pro-abortion institutions also like to further the lie that crisis pregnancy centers don’t care about mothers and children post-birth.

However, it is places like Planned Parenthood where two people enter and only one leaves alive. Abortion is a clinical, dehumanizing, painful, and raw experience. Many times these women feel immense pressure to abort their child. That pressure may come from their significant other, their family, or even the Planned Parenthood workers. After the abortion, these abortion mills provide little to no follow-up with the women they deprive of their children. There is no compassion. These women and their children are just quotas and paychecks to them.

It is crisis pregnancy centers that offer community and support for mothers in need. They are the ones providing free birth classes; setting up baby boutiques for mothers to get what they need for their children; sponsoring charity drives for diapers and other necessities; offering post-birth follow-ups and classes and community; providing healthcare services and counseling throughout; and even having compassionate post-abortion-care classes available. These pro-life volunteers care about both mother and child, their stories, and their future.

Abortion is fundamentally a dehumanizing act. It reduces the child in the womb to a clump of cells and a woman to dollars and cents. Regardless of the euphemisms used to hide the truth, women know that they have destroyed a life created within them. That is very difficult to reconcile and the data lines up with that.

If you know someone who is having a pregnancy crisis or is struggling with the aftershocks of abortion, please consider contacting your local crisis pregnancy center. Helping mothers is what they do.