A recent study from the University of California, San Francisco found that the vast majority of women that had an abortion felt that they had made the right decision. Researchers examined data from 843 women that sought abortion care between 2008 and 2010; of those that were able to obtain the procedure, 90 percent percent felt relief one week after the abortion, and 80 percent of those that reported having primarily negative emotions about their abortion still felt that they had made the right choice.

As I read about these findings, I thought about that popular boogeyman of the anti-choice movement, the so-called post-abortion syndrome. Anti-choice advocate Vincent Rue is credited with coining the term, which refers to an adverse emotional or physical response to abortion, in 1981, during testimony before Congress. Despite neither the American Psychological Association nor the American Psychiatric Association recognizing it as an official diagnosis or syndrome, the term gained traction in the anti-choice community, to the extent that in 1987 Ronald Reagan asked then-Surgeon General C. Everett Koop to write a report about the effect of abortion on women.

Koop — who made no secret of his personal opposition to abortion — and his staff were unable […]