But how do you <i>feel</i>

The Wall Street Journal reports:

Activists on both sides are awaiting a comprehensive report reviewing two decades of published research on mental health and abortion, to be presented this week at the American Psychological Association's annual conference in Boston.

The report comes at a pivotal time as some judges and lawmakers have begun to make decisions in part based on peer-reviewed studies suggesting women who have had abortions are at higher risk of anxiety, depression and substance abuse.

Abortion opponents cite these studies, as well as testimony from women who describe years of psychological turmoil after abortions, to make the case that the state must restrict abortion to protect women's mental health.

The U.S. Supreme Court cited this reasoning last year in upholding a ban on a late-term procedure known as partial-birth abortion. South Dakota incorporated the same rationale into a new mandate that abortion doctors must tell prospective patients they will be putting themselves at risk for psychological distress and suicide.

The abortion-hurts-women view is also being used to promote a broad abortion ban on South Dakota's fall ballot. The argument: A woman may think she wants to end a pregnancy, may even feel relief when she does, but she will suffer for it later. So the state has a duty to stop her.

To supporters of legal abortion, this is equivalent to saying the state has a duty to warn women away from giving birth because some might later suffer postpartum depression. They acknowledge some women may regret their decision or feel sad about it, but say there is no proof abortion leads to serious mental illness -- or that women would be better off if they were forced to carry unwanted pregnancies.

I'm considerably more ambivalent about abortion than most pro-choice pundits, but this time I'm firmly on the abortion rights side.  I can see this being relevant in boundary cases, like teenagers petitioning for judicial overrides of parental notification laws.  And I can certainly see requiring providers to inform patients of any mental health risks, provided that the best evidence shows that there are indeed such.  But it is not the state's job to prevent me from dating jerks, taking long car trips with my mother, reading Russian novels, or doing any of a number of other things that put my mental health at risk.  It's my job to decide whether the benefits outweigh the risks.

More generally, I'm kind of disgusted by the way both sides look to do an end run around the central issue:  the personhood of the fetus, and the mother's right to bodily integrity.  If you can't make your case on those grounds, you're setting yourself up for a bad situation when biological technology changes.  On current pro-choice rhetoric, if it ever becomes possible to harvest a fetus and gestate it outside the womb, the organization is going to have to change its name to "Unplanned Parenthood".  Meanwhile, basing your case on the mother's mental health just means that your arguments will collapse as better treatments emerge for mental illness.  Meanwhile, you've set up a pretty damn offensive nanny-state framework that will no doubt intrude into other matters you'd like to hold sacred.