Does having an abortion lead to a greater likelihood of having future mental health problems?
That’s what a study by Priscilla Coleman and her colleagues published in 2009 in the Journal of Psychiatric Research claimed. She said the data showed a direct, temporal relationship. In other words, after a woman had an abortion, they were more likely to report a serious mental health concern later in their life.
However, when other researchers (Steinberg & Finer, 2012) tried to replicate Coleman et al.’s findings, they could not do so. After conferring with the original authors and digging through the data a little more, they discovered the problem.
Coleman et al. had misrepresented a very important component of their original research. They never looked at a person’s recent or current psychiatric diagnosis. Instead, they had asked only about any diagnosis in their entire lifetime — something that meant they had no data about whether such a diagnosis was made before or after the abortion.