Dr Paul Allen

"Women are hard-wired for relationships—and a woman’s relationship to her baby is one of the most powerful of all, whether she realizes it or not. The hard-wiring of the brain may explain many women’s disturbing post-abortion feelings," write Evelyn Birge Vitz and Paul C. Vitz in  an article  published in the September 20 issue of Public Discourse. Evelyn Vitz is Professor of French and Affiliated Professor of Comparative Literature at New York University . Paul C. Vitz is Professor Emeritus of Psychology at New York University and Senior Scholar at the Institute for the Psychological Sciences. In the article the authors relate spending a semester with students studying the stories of women who shared their experiences after an abortion. The authors found that "many of these women are in acute pain ; some are almost totally incapacitated" by their post-abortion feelings. "What is particularly striking is that most of the women who have these powerful emotional...

According to the most recent figures released in the annual report of the Australian Consultative Council on Obstetric and Paediatric Mortality and Morbidity , 345 late-term abortions were committed in Victoria State in 2007. Of these, the report states that 164 were performed at a Melbourne clinic on women with perfectly healthy unborn children who said they were suffering psychological or “social” problems. Though most of the abortions were carried out on women about six months pregnant, two of the aborted children were older than 28 weeks. A further 181 late-term abortions were committed on babies diagnosed with genetic abnormalities. Fifty-four of these babies survived the procedure to die post-natally, according to the figures released in the state government report. In Victoria, late-term abortions can be carried out for "psycho-social" reasons even if there is no declaration of a threat to the mother's health. The report says that many of the women given lat...