Silvianoshei said:
Generally if that baby isn't going to kill you, I say you're probably better off just having it.
Please don't flame me with your half-baked pseudo-scientific nonsense, I am not making any statements other than a scientific one.
I'll start off with saying that I consider anyone in pediatric oncology pretty much a saint. And despite the "we're all black belts in martial arts on the internet", I completely believe that you're a pre-doc student in epidemiology.
Given that, I wonder at the above statement. Just googling up the CDC statistics, in 2000 (latest year I found) there were 857,000 or so reported legal abortions, with 11 deaths from complications, or roughly 1.3/100000 My google-fu failed me on maternal mortality rates for that year, but in the 2007, it was 12.7 per 100,000 births.
http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/ss5309a1.htm
http://www.hrsa.gov/ourstories/mchb75th/mchb75maternalmortality.pdf
While statistics can lie, seriously, I do think a tenfold greater mortality rate for childbirth versus abortion makes it hard to defend the notion that abortion is more dangerous for a pregnant woman, at least physically.
If we're talking about psychological effects, again, I'm wondering what studies you're referring to. In late 2011 the National Collaborating Centre for Mental Health (UK data here) looked at 44 studies on the subject and found that while women who have unplanned pregnancies were more likely to experience mental health issues, whether or not they had an abortion didn't affect that rate.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-16094906
Again, statistics are statistics, and each number in a study is a person-- fwiw, an oncologist once told my wife and I that on one of the worst days of our lives. And there's a vast number of biased studies on both sides of the abortion debate, so perhaps it's best to look at all of them with suspicion. Objectivity is an ideal, not a reality, after all. That said, I think sytematic reviews of the literature by various government health agencies is about as good as it gets, and those don't support the notion of "in in doubt, carry to term"-- unless we bring religious/philisophical objections into play.