The contention that abortion harms women constitutes a new strategy employed by the pro-life movement to supplement arguments about fetal rights. David C. Reardon is a prominent promoter of this strategy. Post-abortion syndrome purports to establish that abortion psychologically harms women and, indeed, can harm persons associated with women who have abortions. Thus, harms that abortion is alleged to produce are multiplied. Claims of repression are employed to complicate efforts to disprove the existence of psychological harm and causal antecedents of trauma are only selectively investigated. We argue that there is no such thing as post-abortion syndrome and that the psychological harms Reardon and others claim abortion inflicts on women can usually be ascribed to different causes. We question the evidence accumulated by Reardon and his analysis of data accumulated by others. Most importantly, we question whether the conclusions Reardon has drawn follow from the evidence he cites.

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The problem of fiction and emotion is the problem of how we can be moved by the contemplation of fictional events and the plight of fictional characters when we know that the former have not occurred and the latter do not exist. I will give a general sketch of the philosophical treatment of the issue in the present day, and then turn to the eighteenth century for a solution as effective as the best that are presently on offer. The solution is to be found in the account of ideal presence given by Henry Home, Lord Kames.The 1970s saw the emergence of a debate in aesthetics and the philosophy of mind that remains a subject of considerable significance in the philosophical literature to this day. The problem of fiction and emotion is the problem of how we can be moved by the contemplation of fictional events and the plight of fictional characters when we know that the former have not occurred and the latter do not exist. Affective responses in such contexts seem, at least to many philosophers, either to impugn our rationality or to cast doubt on the contention that genuine emotions are involved in our reactions to fiction. I will give a very general sketch of how the philosophical treatment of the issue has gone in the recent literature, and then turn to the eighteenth century and Kames for a solution that seems as effective as the best that are presently on offer.