Coleman Report on Abortion and Depression Refuted In 2009, the Journal of Psychiatric Research published a study that claimed to find a link between abortion and long-term mental illness. Right-wing groups seized on it as justification for a series of nasty laws requiring women to be counseled that having an abortion could, using the technical terminology, drive them bonkers. Never mind that a year earlier, the American Psychological Association had reviewed all the studies up until then, and concluded "among adult women who have an unplanned pregnancy, the relative risk of mental health problems is no greater if they have a single elective first trimester abortion than if they deliver that pregnancy." Why, after all, pay attention to science that gets in the way of your political agenda? Think global warming. Now we know that the 2009 study by Priscilla Coleman, a professor of human development and family studies at Bowling Green State University in Ohio, was entirely erroneous. The March 2012 edition of the same journal contains a detailed letter refuting the Coleman report. Julia Steinberg of the University of California at San Francisco and Lawrence Finer of the Guttmacher Institute, re-analyzed the data and found serious errors, including a basic flaw in Ms. Coleman's methods. It seems that she counted all lifetime mental health disorders that women may have, including ones that happened before an abortion. I'm not a scientist, but that seems like a pretty major flaw to me. And it did, too, to Ms. Steinberg and Mr. Finer, who criticized the report's "untrue statements" and "false claims about the implications of the findings" that cannot be chalked up to merely "a scholarly difference of opinion." The journal also ran an unusual note by its editor-in-chief, Alan Schatzberg; and Ronald Kessler of Harvard, who helped compile data that was misused by the Coleman study. They said the original study was "flawed" and did not support the assertion that having an abortion can make you mentally ill. The Coleman study has been cited as intellectual support for "informed consent" laws in at least eight states (Kansas, Michigan, Nebraska, North Carolina, South Dakota, Texas, Utah and West Virginia). I'm not going to hold my breath waiting for those states to repeal those terrible policies. But Dorothy Samuels, who covers legal issues and women's reproductive rights in particular for the editorial page, said the debunking of the Coleman study will make these laws more susceptible to legal challenge. Under Supreme Court precedent, states may require that women be given information about the nature of the abortion procedure. But that permission extends only to "truthful, non-misleading information."