This Article  • References  • Full text PDF  • Send to a friend  • Save in My Folder  • Save to citation manager  • Permissions  Citing Articles  • Contact me when this article is cited  Related Content  • Similar articles in JAMA  Social Bookmarking   What's this?

Katherine Dowling, MD
University of Southern California School of Medicine Los Angeles

JAMA. 1993;269(17):2209.

	Since this article does not have an abstract, we have provided the first 150 words of the full text PDF and any section headings.

To the Editor.

—Dr Stotland contends that the abortion trauma syndrome is a myth¹ and states as her reason for this conclusion that she could find no references to this syndrome "in the scientific literature."

Having seen this entity in my own inner-city practice on several occasions, I was motivated to examine the literature. My brief research indicated that postabortion dysphoria is a documented entity in the medical and sociological literature, and is not confined, as Stotland would have it, to religious tracts and antiabortion publications.

Tamburrino et al² published an article that explored psychosocial factors, especially religion, in women identified as dysphoric 1 to 15 years after abortion. Another article³ cites close to 100 references, including "Psychiatric Sequelae of Therapeutic Abortion"⁴ and "Postpartum and Postabortion Psychotic Reactions"⁵ among others.

Abortion is usually a significant life event. Regardless of where one stands on the ethics . . . [Full Text PDF of this Article]

CiteULike    Connotea    Del.icio.us    Digg    Reddit    Technorati    Twitter     What's this?