Stress-Free Abortions! Don’t Worry.

A number of articles in newspapers including one yesterday from the Seattle Post-Intelligencer are all asking the same question: “Is Post-Abortion Syndrome Real?” And their main tactic-because they actually have no facts- is simply to put the old scare quotes around anything a christian or conservative says.

You can tell the press doesn’t like something when they put quotes around it for no reason. Remember “so-called partial birth abortion” which, according to the media was intermittently described as never ever performed and then a necessary surgery required to save lives. Republican tax “relief, “War on terror” and “Media Bias” also come to mind. I wonder what those “objective reporters” will start questioning next.

But now the scare quote battle is to ensure the public believes in the stress-free abortion. In the face of a study conducted by Finland’s National Research and Development Center for Welfare and Health which found the suicide rate among women who had an abortion was six times higher than for women who had given birth in the prior year, the press is deep in their “nothing to see here” strategem.

In this day and age we have Carpal Tunnel Syndrome? Restless Leg Syndrome? Post election stress syndrome? Silicone breast syndrome? 21st Century Stress Syndrome? And these syndromes go completely unquestioned by the major media.

Ms. Magazine took time away from interviewing Laurie David and Sheryle Crow to criticize anyone who thought abortion might be at all traumatic to women.

-“Post-abortion stress syndrome” — PASS or PAS — sounds scientific, but don’t be fooled — it’s a made-up term. Not recognized as an official syndrome or diagnosis by the American Psychiatric Association , the American Psychological Association, or any other mainstream authority, it is a bogus affliction invented by the religious right.

Like children who when they’re scared they close their eyes, when liberals don’t like something they simply pretend it doesn’t exist. This from the Seattle Post-Intelligencer:

If people have moral or religious objections to abortion, that’s fine, but I have objections to making up a syndrome to put backdoor barriers to people getting medical care,” said Nada Stotland, vice president of the American Psychiatric Association. “It’s a misuse of science co-opting a serious medical problem by using a similar name.”

The New York Times did a piece earlier this year where they felt compelled to throw in the old scare quotes to signify their displeasure:

“Early on a windy Saturday morning in November, Rhonda Arias drove her Dodge Caravan past a Wal-Mart at the end of her block and onto the Interstate. She was beginning the 50-mile drive from her house in southwest Houston to Plane State Jail, where she is, as she puts it, an “abortion-recovery counselor.”

What will these “wonderful” “progressives” think of next?