The deVeber Institute
for Bioethics and Social Research

In the largest study of its kind researchers have concluded that women having abortions experience an 81% increased risk of mental health problems.

Published in the prestigious British Journal of Psychiatry, it also found almost 10% of all mental health problems are shown to be directly linked to abortion.

Separate effects were calculated based on the type of mental health outcome with the results revealing the following: the increased risk for anxiety disorders was 34%; for depression it was 37%; for alcohol use/abuse it was 110%, for marijuana use/abuse it was 220%, and for suicide behaviours it was 155%.


This new meta-analysis, conducted by Priscilla K. Coleman
from Bowling Green State University, Ohio, USA, is based on 22 published studies. Only the strongest studies were included, with a combined number of participants totalling over 850,000.

An original report, submitted to the Parliamentary Committee on Palliative and Compassionate Care.  

Prepared by Aaron Mix-Ross, BA,  L.L.. Barrie deVeber, MD, FRCP(C) and Jean Echlin, RN, MScN.

Executive Summary

The deVeber Institute's nationwide study of resources available to pregnant and parenting students on university campuses in Canada.  Report attached.

In 2001 an article was published in the Quarterly Journal of Economics in which the authors argued that legalized abortion reduces crime rates. The authors, economists John Dubner and Steven Levitt, examined the decrease in crime in the United States since the early 1990s and attribute it in large part to the legalization of abortion in 1973. The article immediately invoked heated debate, particularly because of its moral, social and political implications. Levitt later published the findings on the abortion-crime theory to a much broader audience in a chapter of his New York Times Bestseller, Freakonomics, which he coauthored with New York journalist Stephen J. Dubner. Freakonomics made the abortion-crime theory well-known and widely accepted among non-academics because of the simple commonsense way in which Levitt and Dubner presented their arguments and evidence.

Ovarian cancer is one of the most fatal malignancies effecting women around the world. In 2009 it is estimated that 21,550 women will be diagnosed with ovarian cancer in the USA and 14,600 will die of the disease. The National Institute of Cancer estimates that each woman has a 1 in 71 chance of developing the disease in her lifetime.

A recent paper by Gierach et al. (2005) found that women who have previously been pregnant and then had an induced abortion had a 31 percent increased chance of developing ovarian cancer. Since over 1,000,000 abortions are performed annually in the US and 100,000 in Canada, a possible role between abortions and induced abortions cannot be ignored and should be further investigated to determine its role.