Meet Saddam Hussein. If you are unfamiliar with this individual, he was a writer, military man, president and abortion candidate. And I'm not just saying that because he was a ruthless son of a bitch, either. He was a difficult pregnancy for his mother, and her doctors advised her to end it.
We all know that Hussein killed hundreds of thousands of his own people in the decades he was dictator of Iraq and fought two aggressive wars with his neighbors. I've always wondered what kind of mentality a person like Hussein has. What the hell is going through their heads? This research doesnt prove anything but it makes some interesting suggestions.
A study of children that were unwanted pregnancies in Czechoslovakia in the late 1970's made some observations about the lives of those children. One hundred and ten "unwanted" children were compared with one hundred children whose mothers did not request an abortion. (The mothers of the unwanted children had sought and been denied abortions twice by the Communist state for the same pregnancy.) These kids were tracked over the course of their lives.
The unwanted children had worse grades, behavioral problems requiring therapy and worse relationships with other children. They did, however, have more cases of illness. The hypothesis was that the parents subtly or not so subtly let it be known that the children were unwanted and were treated worse than the children who were wanted. This was especially true of males and only children.
Thirty five years later, in 2002, the Prague Psychiatric Center in the Czech Republic followed up on those now adult unwanted children. Self reports and objective reports of their lives and emotional states were compared to identical reports from wanted siblings or wanted children from other families. The unwanted adults had a higher rate of becoming psychiatric patients (especially psychiatric inpatients)than thier wanted siblings or people from other families.
Source:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/6989474
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12409858
Mahoney, E.R. Human Sexuality. New York: Western Washington University, 1983.
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