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PAGE 13 — The Georgia Bulletin, February 8, 1990
USCC Pro-Life Aide
Raps Abortion Study Findings
WASHINGTON (CNS) — The executive director of the
U.S. bishops’ Secretariat for Pro-Life Activities said the
conclusion of a univ'ersity study that said young women who
had abortions were no more likely to have emotional prob
lems than those who bar# their children was "under
whelming. "
Researchers at The Johns Hopkins University did a two-
year study of 360 black, unmarried women 17 years old or
younger who visited one of two Baltimore family planning
agencies that provided pregnancy tests.
“The conclusion of this study regarding psychological
aftereffects of abortion," Vincentian Father John W.
-Gouldrick said in a Jan. 25 statement, "is underwhelming."
He noted the study’s conclusion that membership in the
group having abortions as opposed to the group bearing a
child was “not significant in relation to negative
-psychological change."
Both Father Gouldrick and the study, published in the
November-December 1989 issue of Family Planning
Perspectives, referred to former U.S. Surgeon General C.
Everett Koop, who decided in January 1989 against issuing
a report on the secondary results of abortion on women
because available scientific evidence was "flawed
methodologically.”
Father Gouldrick said the Johns Hopkins study
“underlines what Dr. Koop has been saying: The long-term
study has yet to be done that will prove whether abortion or
childbirth carries negative psychological effects more fre
quently."
"Certainly one cannot predict in any individual case that
abortion will be a psychological benefit,” the priest said.
The researchers said the “ideal” study Koop had called
for would have to involve young women who would be
enrolled in school before they had their first sexual en
counter. who would be followed by researchers through
their pregnancy and their decision to obtain an abortion or
carry the pregnancy to term, and then who would be “inter
viewed several times following the outcome."
South African Bishops
(Continued from page D
an open agenda with "overall aims” including a “new con
stitution” and "universal franchise."
He also said the government would soon decide the
release date for long-imprisoned African National Congress
leader Nelson Mandela.
Along with the lifting of the ban, exiled members of the
newly legalized organizations will be allowed to return to
South Africa, political prisoners are to be released, and
restrictions on 38 anti-apartheid organizations and on those
recently released from politically motivated detention are
to be lifted. The longstanding state of emergency, which
gives police vast powers of arrest and detention, is to be ter
minated as soon as possible, the president said.
In addition, de Klerk announced a moratorium on the
death penally.
Three days before the announcement the bishops publicly
demanded, for the first time, an end to capital punishment.
At the close of the bishops’ Jan. 31 meeting. Bishop
Reginald Orsmond of Johannesburg, vice president of the
conference, said that a "growing awareness that capital
punishment was unjust” had been heightened in South
Africa by “the realization that the death penalty was
fraught with racial discrimination and used as an instru
ment to eliminate those fighting the evil of apartheid."
He said the death sentence is "more the symbol of an un
just and uncaring social order than a remedy restoring
justice and peace to society. In this it clearly contradicts all
that Jesus lived and died for.”
Amnesty International reported that 117 people were ex
ecuted in South Africa in 1988. Further executions are
believed to have been carried out in the "nominally in
dependent African 'homelands.’ ” created by South Africa,
the rights organization said.
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The bishops’ conference urgt'd that a commission be ap
pointed to look into all aspects of the death penalty and ex
amine its relation to widespread violence in South African
society.
Bishop Orsmond said the conference urged Catholics to
pray for condemned prisoners and added that the church
has been asked to cooperate in a nationwide educational
campaign on violence and capital punishment.
On another field of the South African political landscape,
police firing tear gas dispersed 1,500 youths who met in a
church hall in Bloemfontein to plan protests against a tour
ing English cricket team.
The Jan. 29 incident was one of many as activists pro
tested the seven-week tour, made by the team despite an
anti-apartheid sports embargo against South Africa.
Father Leo D’Aes. a priest at St. Rose of Lima Church in
the black township of Mangaung, outside Bloemfontein,
said windows in the church hall were smashed as police
broke up the meeting. Chairs were broken and benches
were knocked over as people fled, the priest said.
"People were cut by broken glass, and hundreds of shoes
were left behind in the hall.” Father D’Aes said.
Press reports said some of the crowd began stoning police
vans that sped by, while children in the hall burned
newspapers to try to rid it of tear gas.
On Jan. 31, about 1.000 black demonstrators sang and
chanted outside the cricket grounds, where the English
team played a university team. The protesters dispersed
peacefully after the demonstration.
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"However, such a study would clearly need to have an
immense sample population and to go on for an extremely
long time,” the researchers said, adding that their study
represented "a compromise.”
The research wair^Jpe by associate professor Laurie
Schwab Zabin, her associate Marilyn B. Hirsch and pro
grammer Mark R. Emerson, all of the Department of
Population Dynamics at The John Hopkins School of
Hygiene and Public Health.
It was funded by the National Institute of Child Health
and Human Development, and the article was prepared
with a Ford Foundation grant.
The Alan Guttmacher Institute of New York, which is af
filiated with Planned Parenthood, publishes Family Plan
ning Perspectives. Planned Parenthood is a supporter of
abortion rights.
Another finding summarized in the article was that those
"who terminated their pregnancies were far more likely to
have graduated from high school” or continued their
schooling than those who had their babies or those who had
tested as not being pregnant.
Also, the study said those "who had obtained an abortion
were also better off economically than those in the other
two groups.”
Father Gouldrick said those results “prove the obvious:
The black urban teen-ager who gives birth out of wedlock is
likely to drop out of school and have trouble finding a decent
job.”
He said the study "cannot begin to address the policy
question."
That question, he said, was. “Should we help this teen
ager by giving her more help with educational and job op
portunities, or by talking her into an abortion?”
Father Gouldrick said it was obvious that “an objective
study” would account for all affected by deciding to have
abortions.
“The difference between a live baby and a dead one is
more fundamental than the slight statistical differences in
economic status and career advancement among disadvan
taged teen-age girls,” he said.
A "civilized society,” he said, would find solutions that
help both mothers and their children.
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