Manufacturing Hysteria: The Import of U.S. Abortion Rhetorics to Poland‪.‬

[1] When I first heard about the Post Abortion Syndrome (also known as Post Abortion Stress Syndrome) as a strategy used by American anti-choicers, I did not give it much thought. There were by far greater issues to worry about in my own backyard. Poland, the Central European state where I live and work, has one of the most restrictive abortion laws in Europe. The law was introduced shortly after the democratic transformation in 1993 and remains in force to this day. Officially, there are only several hundred legal abortions performed yearly, although women's NGOs estimate that the actual number of terminations performed in Poland could be much higher. Nonetheless, bearing in mind the legal situation and the official statistics, the last thing the pro-life movement should worry about in Poland is the mental health of women who have terminated their pregnancies. Yet, I was in for a surprise. The mid 2000s witnessed a true abortion syndrome boom, with both popular media and scientific authorities exhibiting intense and mysterious interest in the topic. On Polish turf, my first encounter with pro-life discourse on the post abortion syndrome took place rather unexpectedly during a conference which I hoped would try to provide a non-ideologized vocabulary for talking about abortion. I soon learned I was mistaken. [2] "Abortion--causes, effects, therapy." An international academic conference by this name took place in Warsaw on June 20, 2004. The goals as described by the conference committee in the information materials sent out to academic institutions sounded objective and reasonable: "The conference is organized by the Committee for Demographic Studies of the Polish Academy of Sciences, the Ombudsman for Children's Rights, and the Institute for Psychiatry and Neurology. The goal of the conference is to present the medical and psycho-social causes of abortion."