Does Looking at the Ultrasound Before an Abortion Change Women's Minds?

[ismnotwasm]

They needed a study for this? Fucking fucked up Republican reproductive slavery POS bullshit assholes. Or anyone else who is anti-choice

Seven states now mandate that women seeking abortion get an ultrasound first, and require doctors to offer the women a chance to see the images; three states require the doctors to show and describe the ultrasound. But despite the conservative push for these laws, smaller studies out of Texas, Canada and South Africa imply that sonogram viewings do not impact women’s decisions to end or continue their pregnancies.

This latest study is much larger. Researchers analyzed 15,575 medical records from an urban abortion care provider in Los Angeles. Each patient seeking an abortion was asked how she felt about her choice: Those who made “clear and confident” replies were rated as having “high decision certainty,” while those who seemed sad, angry or ambivalent were said to show “medium” or “low” decision certainty. (Only 7.4 percent of the women fell into the latter categories.) Patients underwent ultrasounds as part of the standard procedure, and 42.5 percent of them opted to see the images. Of those, 98.4 percent terminated their pregnancies; 99 percent of the women who did not look at the photographs ended their pregnancies. But here’s the thing: The women who viewed the sonograms and then backed out were all part of that 7.4 percent of women with low or medium decision certainty. Women who knew abortion was the right decision for them continued with the procedure whether they were shown the images or not.

The main takeaway here is definitely that 98.4 percent of the women who saw their ultrasounds went on to get an abortion anyway. And for the 1.6 percent who decided not to go through with it, other factors, such as gestational age, were more salient in swaying them. (“It is the information the ultrasound scan renders…rather than the image that influences women’s decision-making,” the researchers write.) Also, it is clear that once you’ve resolved to terminate, gazing at the bean won’t change that: Exactly none of the women with high decision certainty were dissuaded by their sonograms.

Yet viewing the ultrasound images did influence some of the wavering women to stick with their pregnancies. Even though the number is very small, this is important to acknowledge. It means not only that forcing or pressuring women to look at their fetus will probably prevent a sliver of abortions—which is relevant for those who oppose and want to reduce abortions—but also that some women do respond to these pictures. I don’t buy the patronizing notion that patients seeking abortion “know not what they do”—that they have some false idea about the contents of their uteruses to be toppled by an “adorable,” “precious” or “lifelike” sonogram. I also doubt all women even have the maternal instinct right-wingers hope these images will fan to life. But I do trust that unsure women who voluntarily look at ultrasounds and then decide against abortion are acting as rationally as the ones who decide to go through with it. We all make choices along a variety of axes: the financial axis, the relationship status axis, the personal goals and dreams axis, the ethical axis and, yes, the emotional axis. Expecting women to ignore any one scrap of data (as if they are not capable of weighing it, carefully, alongside the others) is underestimating women.

http://www.slate.com/blogs/xx_factor/2014/01/09/ultrasound_viewing_before_an_abortion_a_new_study_finds_that_for_a_small.html