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So in debate today someone brought up that a group of "Scientists" have found a link to abortion and the raise of child abuse in the country. Now I have never heard of this before and I seriously doubt that it's true but I can't find ANYTHING on google, yahoo, ask jeeves or anything else on this subject that gives me more information on the subject. (Well, except a bunch of pro-life sites claiming it proves abortions evil... but they do that with everything.)
Admittedly I am not the most web savy person and it could just be that I'm looking in the wrong spots...

So if any of our members has stumbled across this before I would appreciate it if you could enlighten me.

Here's the information that was given.

Priscilla Coleman, Vincent Rue, Catherine Coyle, Charles Maxey: Induced Abortion and Child-Directed Aggression Among Mothers of Maltreated Children. The Internet Journal of Pediatrics and Neonatology. 2007. AND Acta Pædiatrica, 2005Abortion & Increased Risk of Child Abuse: Child Maltreatment and Perinatal Loss

If you wanted to counter that: point out the freakanomics article that links a reduction in crime to poverty-stricken women getting abortions instead of raising poverty stricken little thugs who grow up to become criminals.

Really, what's their point? If a fetus has a right to life then abortion should be banned because the fetus has a right to life; who the hell cares what good or bad things come from the act of abortion itself. Crime being reduced does not mean fetuses lose their right to life and reduction in crime is as good a reason to support abortion as population concerns (which is to say: not at all good). The same is true of this research; if women have a right to bodily integrity this right exists whether abortion leads to child abuse or not.

No one would say that "because people who undergo chemo are statistically more likely to beat their kids* chemo should be banned," or that "because treatment for heart disease is linked to obesity** treatment for heart disease should be banned." These side issues in no way impact the real cruxes of the issue: personhood, fetal rights, women's rights.



*I'm completely making this up
**This is the sort of spurrious links studies like this make; yes heart disease treatment can be linked to obesity, but not because treatment causes obesity, but more likely some original cause (bad lifestyle) causes both the obesity and the heart disease (which leads to treatment). So perhaps abortions really can be linked with abusive parents, but perhaps there's some originating cause such as: women in abusive relationships are more likely to abort because of the abuse, women who are being abused are less likely to stop their husbands from abusing their children and possibly women who are abused are more likely to become abusers themselves.

That would bias the results. Don't about one third of women have an abortion at some point in their life? Of course a lot of women who have abused their children have also had an abortion. I wanna see what happens when you compare women who have and have not had abortions and women who have and have not abused their children.

Besides, don't abusive parents typically have bad pasts? Maybe they've had hard lives which caused them to be pregnant when they didn't want to be.

What this really adds up to, to me (not to say that you guys haven't refuted that "study" very well!), is correlation without causation.