These days, we could do with all the mental strength we can muster.
Mental strength is the ability to productively regulate your emotions, thoughts, and behaviors, even in the face of adversity. And adversity is in no short supply. If you want to overcome more challenges, achieve more success, experience more happiness and less stress — it takes mental strength.
After spending decades studying mental strength and interviewing and surveying thousands of people for my recent book, “The Mentally Strong Leader,″ I have good news. The mentally strongest people tend to share certain habits we can learn from. There are patterns I’ve noticed when it comes to what they say (and don’t say) and what they do.
If you always do these eight things, you’re already mentally stronger than most. If you don’t — yet! — you can look to this list as a mini-playbook that will help you level up your mental strength.
1. Manage emotions without minimizing them
That adage about how you should “leave your emotions at the door” just doesn’t work. If you’ve tried it, you know it’s not that simple.
That said, while mentally strong people are aware of emotions triggered inside, they don’t let those emotions instantly flow through into words or actions.
They catch their emotions, consider if they’re helpful to express, then decide how to respond. In other words, regarding unhelpful emotions, they catch it, check it, and change it (using the 3 Cs of cognitive behavioral therapy).
2. Remember confidence isn’t the absence of doubt
We all contend with doubt. Even the most confident people I’ve interviewed experience doubt.
Confidence, then, is your ability to manage your relationship with the doubt you’ll inevitably experience.
The mentally strong have found the right middle ground between overconfident and paralyzed by fear of failure. They acknowledge doubt, but let it sit quietly in the background so they can focus on how they will accomplish something, not if they can accomplish it in the first place.
3. Talk to yourself like a friend in need
Imagine a friend, clearly upset and in need of empathy, was telling you about a relationship they just ended. After listening, would you say:
“How could you let this relationship fail? It’s all your fault, you jerk!”
I doubt it. Instead, you might say:
“I appreciate what you’re going through and how much it must hurt. Try not to be so hard on yourself.”
You should take this more compassionate tone with yourself, too.
NEW YORK CITY —The United Nations approved its first international cybercrime treaty yesterday. The effort succeeded despite opposition from tech companies and human rights groups, who warn that the agreement will permit countries to expand invasive electronic surveillance in the name of criminal investigations. Experts from these organizations say that the treaty undermines the global human rights of freedom of speech and expression because it contains clauses that countries could interpret to internationally prosecute any perceived crime that takes place on a computer system.
The U.N. committee room erupted in applause after the convention’s adoption, as many members and delegates celebrated the finale of three years of difficult discussions. In commending the adoption, delegates such as South Africa’s cited the treaty’s support for countries with relatively smaller cyber infrastructure.
But among the watchdog groups that monitored the meeting closely, the tone was funereal. “The U.N. cybercrime convention is a blank check for surveillance abuses,” says Katitza Rodriguez, the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s (EFF’s) policy director for global privacy. “It can and will be wielded as a tool for systemic rights violations.”
In the coming weeks, the treaty will head to a vote among the General Assembly’s 193 member states. If it’s accepted by a majority there, the treaty will move to the ratification process, in which individual country governments must sign on.
The treaty, called the Comprehensive International Convention on Countering the Use of Information and Communications Technologies for Criminal Purposes, was first devised in 2019, with debates to determine its substance beginning in 2021. It is intended to provide a global legal framework to prevent and respond to cybercrimes. In a July statement before the treaty’s adoption, the U.S. and fellow members of the Freedom Online Coalition described it as an opportunity “to enhance cooperation on combatting and preventing cybercrime and collecting and sharing electronic evidence for serious crimes” but noted that the agreement could be misused as a tool for human rights violations and called for its scope to be more precisely defined. (The U.S. Department of State did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Scientific American.)
The agreement is a reaction to major technological developments in the past few decades that allowed cyber threats to evolve at a rapid rate. In 2023 alone, more than 340 million people worldwide were affected by cybercrime, according to data from the Identity Theft Resource Center.
The years of deliberation over the long and complex treaty culminated in this week’s closing session of negotiations. Critics such as EFF and Human Rights Watch (HRW) argue the text’s scope is too broad, allowing countries to apply it to offenses beyond what were typically considered cybercrimes in the past. The Budapest Convention on Cybercrime, which went into effect in 2004, is the only other major international treaty to address cybercrime. It sought to criminalize a range of offenses, including cyber-enabled crimes (such as online bank scams or identity theft) and cyber-dependent ones (such as hacking and malware), while still aiming to accommodate human rights and liberties.
But experts have expressed that the newly adopted treaty lacks such safeguards for a free Internet. A major concern is that the treaty could be applied to all crimes as long as they involve information and communication technology (ICT) systems. HRW has documented the prosecution of LGBTQ+ people and others who expressed themselves online. This treaty could require countries’ governments to cooperate with other nations that have outlawed LGBTQ+ conduct or digital forms of political protest, for instance.
I’ve done the traditional barbell squat my whole life. It’s a great exercise for overall lower-body strength. I’ve also experimented with other squat variations: the front squat, the goblet squat, the belt squat.
This year, I’ve been doing a squat that’s become my favorite ever: the Hatfield squat.
I love this exercise. I originally switched to it because long-standing problems with cranky shoulders and knee pain were making the traditional barbell squat uncomfortable. The Hatfield squat has made squatting fun and productive again after years of frustration trying to make the barbell squat work for me. What’s also great about the Hatfield Squat is that it’s an excellent movement for quad hypertrophy, which lines up nicely with my new fitness goal of getting more ripped. It’s been a game-changer in my training.
If you’ve had trouble with barbell squatting or are looking for a different squat variation to mix into your programming, here’s everything you need to know about the Hatfield squat.
What Is the Hatfield Squat, and What Are Its Benefits?
The Hatfield squat, named after powerlifting legend Dr. Fred Hatfield, aka Dr. Squat, is a back squat variation that requires a safety squat bar, which is a type of barbell that looks sort of like an ox yoke.
When you do the Hatfield squat, you place the safety squat bar on your back. Then, instead of holding on to the safety squat bar with your hands, you rest your hands on an additional barbell or a set of handles that have been placed at navel level on the barbell rack. As you descend into the squat, you keep your hands on the support in front of you, using it to maintain your balance and an upright torso.
This increases the stability of the exercise, allowing the Hatfield squat to offer some unique benefits:
Great for quad hypertrophy. If you’re looking to grow legs as big as tree trunks, the Hatfield squat can be a helpful tool. Its increased stability allows you to overload your quads more than a traditional squat. Instead of focusing on keeping your balance during the squat, you can just focus on the movement, which means you can be a bit more aggressive in adding reps or weight.
Great for squatting around injuries. The most significant benefit that the Hatfield squat has given me is that it has allowed me to squat heavy again despite the niggling physical issues I’ve had on and off for years.
Because I have shoulder tendonitis due to bench pressing and struggle with shoulder flexibility (despite the amount of time I’ve worked on developing this capacity), the bar position on the traditional low-bar squat just exacerbated my shoulder pain. Because you use a safety bar with the Hatfield squat, you don’t have to use your hands to hold the bar on your back. It completely removes the stress on your shoulders.
The Hatfield squat has also allowed me to work around some pain I’ve had behind my knee since 2020. The pain only happens during the descent part of a traditional barbell squat. I still don’t know what the source of the pain is despite talking to an orthopedic surgeon and getting an MRI done. I reckon it’s some sort of overuse injury on a tendon back there. But at any rate, the increased stability of the Hatfield squat allows me to squat heavy and below parallel without any pain behind my knee.
The goal is simple: save the world. Rob Jackson, climate scientist and author of Into the Clear Blue Sky, is trying to save the world by removing things: removing greenhouse gases from the atmosphere, removing fossil fuels from our cars, removing everyday pollutants from our homes. Last summer in the Northern Hemisphere felt cataclysmic: the sky in the U.S. Northeast turned burnt orange from wildfires in Canada, temperatures rose higher and higher, and hurricanes caused more and more damage. How do you save the world, when the present and future feel so bleak? Jackson hasn’t lost hope for a green, sustainable future. He has trekked across the world, meeting CEOs, researchers, and field scientists who are working to save our world and our future by removing pollutants, building with greener and better materials, and inspiring the rest of us to never lose hope.
Scientific American spoke with Jackson about his new book and outlook on our environmental future.
You start this book with small but surprising ways the atmosphere affects our lives on Earth. A funny example that I wanted to ask you about was salt forming on Italian frescoes. Can you tell me about that?
It seems like an odd place to begin a climate book, but I was interested in how we think about preserving things for centuries, and the Vatican has a whole office of people thinking about maintaining and restoring items over decades to centuries. For centuries, people lit the chapel with candles, and the burned wax and soot were released into the air and gradually built up on the frescoes. On top of that, they started to see what looked almost like powdery mildew on the frescoes, and that was literally carbon dioxide from people’s breath, almost in the same way that the stalagmites form in a cave. There was too much carbon dioxide in the air. The most amazing thing about seeing the chapel were these little blocks, the Italian word for them translates to “testimony”; they leave these rectangles of dirt on the fresco to remind people of what things were like. I found that to be a very beautiful and moving example of how far they had come in restoring the frescoes.
In addition to carbon dioxide, you talk about the greenhouse gas methane. Can you tell me what concerns you about methane in particular?
I spent so much of my time working on methane because it’s 90 times more potent than carbon dioxide at warming Earth. It’s responsible for an additional third as much warming as CO2 in recent decades. But methane is also mysterious. We’re still trying to understand why it’s rising: [it] could be the tropical wetlands that I study in the Amazon are starting to release more methane as they warm; it could be that there’s more methane coming from cows or oil and gas wells or other things that we do. The biggest reason for emphasizing methane as much as I do is [that] it’s short-lived in the atmosphere—it lasts only a decade or so. That means that if we could eliminate all methane emissions from human activities, we could restore methane concentration to preindustrial levels in only a decade!
Three times a day, my phone pings with a notification telling me that I have a new happiness survey to take. The survey, from TrackYourHappiness.org, asks me a series of questions about what I was doing the moment right before I take it, whether I wanted to be doing it, how focused I was on my task, how productive I was being, and how happy I felt about it all. I measure my emotional levels with a little toggle that slides from “bad” to “good.” Though the trackers’ authors offer a disclaimer that “correlation does not prove causation,” results from thousands of its users published in 2010 suggest that people are happier when they are focused.
After I took 100 surveys over about a month, that’s not what my results told me. I reported the most happiness when I was eating and the least when I was working. I was happier at home than I was outside or anywhere else.
My biggest takeaway, though, is that much of my life consists of things that I don’t particularly want to do, like folding laundry and struggling with the wording of a paragraph. Being reminded that most of my life is obligatory does not exactly spark joy.
As the weeks of survey-taking went by, I had another, more paralyzing thought: that this focus on my feelings was instilling a new kind of anxiety. Rather than just walking one of my kids home from school and contentedly listening to her chatter about sedimentary rocks, I was thinking about the survey’s infernal happiness toggle and where this experience ranked relative to the other moments I had tracked.
The survey is just one example from an increasingly crowded field of tools offering consumers the chance not just to contemplate their happiness but also to measure it, track it, schedule it, and optimize it. Every app store is overflowing with offerings like the Happiness Planner, Happiness 360°, Daylio, and more. Apple’s Health app has a mood tracker (with one of those damn toggles) built into all of its devices, and even my Fitbit offers mood tracking, with some fancy bonus features if I pay to upgrade to premium status.
According to Stephen Schueller, a psychologist who runs the technology and mental health lab at the University of California, Irvine, there are now thousands of these apps — so many that he used to run an entire site that reviewed their credibility, user experience, and transparency. How-to books about boosting your happiness in measurable ways are mainstays on best-seller lists. And there is no end to online courses and expensive products that make similar promises.
The deep attraction to these ideas and products ties together the decline in Americans’ mental health, which leaves many people desperate to find relief, and the mania for the optimized self, which in its most extreme form drives tech barons to spend small fortunes measuring every second of output from all 78 of their organs to maximize every bio function until they die.
But feelings aren’t the same as other kinds of health metrics, like steps and heart rate, and liver function. There is a great deal of disagreement on how even to measure happiness and fairly weak evidence that doing so makes us significantly happier. Less considered is the question: Could tracking happiness make us feel worse?
According to one study published early in the tracking fad, frequent “texting about happiness seemed to be particularly distressing among those with more negative emotional tendencies (depression and neuroticism)” and “may have drawn attention to their typically unpleasant emotional state, thus bearing the potential of perpetuating a downward spiral of satisfaction.”
When you’re struggling through a case of the common cold, the snot pouring from your nose seems endless. You go through countless tissues to mop up all the chunky, bright yellow boogers and thin, runny mucus, heaping up mountain ranges of used tissues.
And while you try to comfort yourself with hot soup and over-the-counter medications (many of which don’t do anything at all), a question pops into your head—how much mucus does someone actually produce while they’ve got a cold?
It must be enough to fill at least a coffee cup, you’re sure. Or a sink maybe? Or even a car? Surely someone must have attempted to measure this for the sake of sinus science.
As it turns out, only a few intrepid scientists have collected Kleenex for the common good. And from what these brave researchers have found so far, the amount of mucus produced through our valiant viral suffering may not be as much as we think.
Mucus plays an astonishing number of useful roles in the human body, from lining our intestinal tracts and sliming up our poop to working as nature’s lube for sexual activities involving vaginas. The slick combination of water, salts, and gel-forming proteins called mucins that make up mucus also helps trap dust, allergens, and infectious particles in the nose, mouth, windpipe, and lungs. This congealed mass of sticky mucus and unwanted particles is then swept up with the help of tiny, hairlike structures known as cilia, and dumped at the back of the throat where it’s usually swallowed—hopefully without you noticing (until someone points out that’s what’s happening; you’re welcome). Overall, even without a cold, our bodies produce quite a lot of mucus, over 1.5 liters per day. You’re gulping down a solid large ice cream container of snot every day, even when you’re not sick.
But get a cold, and it can feel like bucketloads more. Since mucus is also poised to act as a major immune response when we get sick, mainly due to its sticky consistency, booger production gets pushed into overdrive. Blood flow gets rerouted to the nose, swelling up the nasal tissues and making it hard to breathe (the reason you still can’t get a good breath no matter how much you blow). Submucosal glands and cells called goblet cells pump out gobbets of mucin proteins. The mucin proteins fill up with water, and the resulting overflow comes out as a tsunami of snot—hopefully also flushing out harmful virus particles in the process.
But exactly how much goop a cold produces is a difficult question to investigate, not least because of all the variables involved. There are at least 160 strains of rhinovirus that produce the symptoms we call the common cold—each causing a slightly different immune response—and other viruses, such as coronaviruses and RSV, can also trigger varying coldlike symptoms. People are also known to respond differently to the same infection—one may be very slimy while another remains relatively dry. Individuals who live in dry climates may have drier mucous membranes than those in humid ones. So, when scientists attempt to research colds, they must try to minimize these variables; this means infecting study participants with a single type of rhinovirus or coronavirus at a time, and monitoring them through the course of their symptoms.
With most previous studies examining the common cold—mainly testing out different drugs to ease symptoms—researchers have measured things like subjective nasal congestion scores, or even how much air you can sniff up your nose, instead of anything to do with discarded tissues or snot volume. This is because effectively collecting snot samples can be quite difficult: as mucus is mostly water, asking people to collect their used tissues over time means that the water will evaporate, leading to unreliable results. Collecting tissues would also mean more than one visit to a lab, costing money and time for participants and scientists alike.
But a few courageous scientists have taken up the task of snot collection. A 1993 study by D.A.J. Tyrrell and colleagues at the Center for Applied Microbiology and Research in England infected 116 volunteers with either a coronavirus (one of the cold-causing kinds, not a pandemic-causing kind) or one of three types of rhinovirus and quarantined them for up to five days after infection. To study their mucus ejection volume, the scientists collected used tissues in sealed plastic bags and then weighed them against non-mucus-filled bags of tissues. After all that, however, they never reported the actual volume or weight of the snot rockets. Instead, the scientists simply noted that 60 percent of people experience an increase in mucus weight, and up to 70 percent had a “nonzero tissue score” (meaning they used at least one tissue) two days after inoculation.
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When sick, our noses often feel like a snot machine. Semen Tiunov/Alamy Stock Vector
Is a slower, more mindful pace of life the answer to stress – or is it just another unachievable, privileged lifestyle brag? Meet the author who battled burnout with “a year of nothing”.
How does the idea of doing nothing for a year sound? No work, no emails, no career progression, no striving or achieving or being productive. For many of us, such a thought might once have brought its own anxiety attack – surely, work is status, earning money is achievement, and being busy is a brag? But these days, a year of nothing is more likely to sound dreamy, even aspirational – there has been, as they say, a vibe shift.
Millennials are embracing the concept of #SlowLiving – the hashtag has been used more than six million times on Instagram (despite posting on Insta being fairly antithetical to its principles of a mindful, sustainable lifestyle, with much reduced screen-time). Gen Z, meanwhile, have pioneered quiet quitting and “lazy girl jobs”, where one does the minimum at work to preserve your energy for the more meaningful parts of your life, be that hobbies, relationships, or self-care. And people across the generations are united to wanting to work less: in the UK, the concept of the four-day week is gaining serious traction.
To be facetious about it: hustle is out, and rest is in. And this is something Emma Gannon knows all about: the prolific author, podcaster, and Substack entrepreneur published A Year of Nothing – her account of taking an entire 12 months off – earlier this year. It quickly sold out when published earlier this summer, and has proved so popular it will now be reprinted and available to buy in November.
Not that it was, initially, a lifestyle choice: Gannon suffered such extremely bad burnout, she had no choice but to stop working. Her account of her year of rest and recuperation is now published in two small, sweetly readable volumes by The Pound Project, charting her journey back to health via gentle activities such as journaling, watching children’s TV, birdwatching, and the inevitable cold-water swimming (which Gannon knowingly acknowledges is a cliché for “Millennial writers with their bobs and tote bags”, but comes to love anyway).
Having been fully on-board with the girl-boss culture of the 2010s, Gannon had already stepped away from that with her last book, The Success Myth: Letting Go of Having It All, which explored how relentlessly striving for success rarely brings true happiness. But it was experiencing complete burnout that forced her to really confront the importance of rest.
“Looking back, there were lots of red flags – feeling very confused, pulsating headaches, not being able to focus on things in the room, quite scary stuff. But I over-rode it, [thinking]: ‘I’m busy, I’ve got to crack on’,” she recalls. Suddenly, in 2022, her body went into a forced shut-down mode. “Couldn’t look at a phone, couldn’t look at a screen, couldn’t walk down a street without feeling fragile. It was the feeling that, ‘oh you can’t muddle your way through this – you have to stop’. Many people with chronic burnout have to get to that point before they’ll take time off [work], because we’re so conditioned in this society to push through at all costs.
CLIMATEWIRE | Climate change is thinning Arctic sea ice, but contrary to conventional wisdom that’s making shipping through the North American Arctic more difficult.
A study published in Nature looked at Canada’s Northwest Passage over 15 years. It found that the melting of local ice due to global warming enables thicker ice from Greenland to flow into the corridor’s choke points, reducing the length of time when ships can move through the passage.
“First-year ice, that’s retreating. But it means the thick ice — multiyear ice — is then more able to flow down into those areas,” lead author Alison Cook, a researcher at the Scottish Association for Marine Science and the University of Ottawa, said in an interview.
That thicker ice poses hazards for ships, such as damage or sinking if there’s a collision.
The results contradict the common view that the Northwest Passage, the Arctic Ocean waterway linking the Atlantic and Pacific, is an increasingly practical option for commercial shipping. It even surprised Cook.
“I certainly was assuming the season length was becoming longer everywhere, and it just wasn’t,” she said.
Cook and her colleagues looked at historical ice charts of the Northwest Passage and converted those into season lengths. The seasons indicate the number of weeks where medium ice-strength ships can traverse the passage without taking extra safety precautions.
Four regions saw significant changes. In three, the shipping season was shortened by 50 to 70 percent between 2007 and 2021. In one — the eastern Lancaster Sound — the season length grew by 15 percent.
Shipping seasons typically run between 15 and 25 weeks, though it fluctuates heavily between years and regions.
Changing ice has discouraged at least one passenger cruise line from sailing the passage.
Scenic Luxury Cruises and Tours crossed the Northwest Passage in 2022, but “because of the sensitive environment and ever-changing ice conditions and weather conditions of the Arctic, they redeployed their sailings after that season,” said Michelle Abril, vice president of Coyne PR and a spokesperson for Scenic. “They are not currently sailing there or have itineraries set through Q1 2027 to visit that region.”
Despite the shrinking seasons, crossings have — on average — increased over the past decade, according to data provided to POLITICO’s E&E News by the Canadian Coast Guard.
“Over the coming years, the Canadian Coast Guard anticipates an increase in arctic traffic, due to increased tourism, commercial shipping, and adventuring opportunities,” the Coast Guard said in a statement.
While the trends show voyages rising and season lengths decreasing, there are a couple of explanations for that apparent contradiction.
The first is demand. Shipping companies are eyeing alternatives to the narrow and congested Panama Canal. And adventure tourists are eager to trek into the Arctic.
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Large cargo ship filled with containers navigating through ice. Jean Landry/Getty Images
Someone told me recently, “If you’re like me, you’re watching the Olympic games thinking, ‘Why can’t I get motivated to get in shape?’” I responded, “I feel your pain. I have a book deadline October 1st, but I catch myself rearranging the spice rack, surfing online, or cleaning out a cabinet that doesn’t really need it.
Unfortunately, motivation doesn’t simply show up when you’re waiting for the mood to strike. If you are waiting for the urge to finish that report, reach a deadline, or send an important email, you might be waiting a long time. And according to experts, it’s not motivation that’s needed to reach conclusion. It’s something else.
What’s holding us back? It’s the myths that are inconsistent with science that me believe in, according to Dr. Wendy Grolnick, professor of psychology at Clark University and an expert on motivation. I spoke with her by email, and she told me, “A common motivation myth is that we should wait for motivation to strike.” Grolnick, coauthor of the new book, Motivation Myth Busters: Science-Based Strategies to Boost Motivation in Yourself and Others, added that there are several things you can do instead of waiting for that magic moment.
“We all struggle with motivating ourselves and others at times,” Grolnick explained to me. “My coauthors and I argue that some of the problem is that we may hold beliefs about motivation that are not consistent with science. Our book busts 10 myths and provides scientifically supported strategies to boost motivation.” She shares examples of four common myths along with information to bust them.
Myth 1: Some People Are Motivated—Others Aren’t
The Science: You are motivated and so is everyone else. The idea that motivation is a characteristic of a person is not supported by science, Grolnick informs us. “Motivation varies by the domain (e.g., sports versus academics), context (some situations or people in them prime your motivation and others don’t), task (some tasks are more motivating than others), and the person’s interests.
Grolnick’s suggestions for action:
Assume everyone is motivated. When you see someone who seems to lack motivation, try to understand why and tap into their motivation.
Try to understand why the person feels unmotivated. For example, do they feel pushed to do something, unable to succeed? Disconnected from others?
Tie the task to the person’s interests or goals.
Make the task more interesting.
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Many of us spend an inordinate amount of time waiting to get motivated, but experts inform us that … [+] Getty
The percentage of people who say they’ve tried to end a pregnancy without medical assistance increased after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade. That’s according to a study published Tuesday in the online journal JAMA Network Open.
Tia Freeman, a reproductive health organizer, leads workshops for Tennesseans on how to safely take medication abortion pills outside of medical settings.
Abortion is almost entirely illegal in Tennessee. Freeman, who lives near Nashville, said people planning to stop pregnancies have all sorts of reasons for wanting to do so without help from the formal health care system — including the cost of traveling to another state, challenge of finding child care, and fear of lost wages.
“Some people, it’s that they don’t have the support networks in their families where they would need to have someone drive them to a clinic and then sit with them,” said Freeman, who works for Self-Managed Abortion; Safe and Supported, a U.S.-based project of Women Help Women, an international nonprofit that advocates for abortion access.
“Maybe their family is superconservative, and they would rather get the pills in their home and do it by themselves,” she said.
The new study is from Advancing New Standards in Reproductive Health, a research group based at the University of California-San Francisco. The researchers surveyed more than 7,000 people ages 15 to 49 from December 2021 to January 2022 and another 7,000-plus from June 2023 to July 2023.
Of the respondents who had attempted self-managed abortions, they found the percentage who used the abortion pill mifepristone was 11 in 2023 — up from 6.6 before the Supreme Court ended federal abortion rights in 2022.
One of the most common reasons for seeking a self-administered abortion was privacy concerns, said a study co-author, epidemiologist Lauren Ralph.
“So not wanting others to know that they were seeking or in need of an abortion or wanted to maintain autonomy in the decision,” Ralph said. “They liked it was something under their control that they could do on their own.”
Kristi Hamrick, vice president of media and policy at Students for Life Action, a national anti-abortion group, said she doesn’t believe the study findings, which she said benefit people who provide abortion pills.
“It should surprise no one that the abortion lobby reports their business is doing well, without problems,” Hamrick said in an emailed statement.
Ralph said in addition to privacy concerns, state laws criminalizing abortion also weighed heavily on women’s minds.
“We found 6% of people said the reason they self-managed was because abortion was illegal where they lived,” Ralph said.
In the JAMA study, women who self-managed abortion attempts reported using a range of methods, including using drugs or alcohol, lifting heavy objects, and taking a hot bath. In addition, about 22% reported hitting themselves in the stomach. Nearly 4% reported inserting an object in their body.
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The percentage of people seeking to end their own pregnancies who used the abortion pill mifepristone has increased since the Supreme Court overturned the federal right to an abortion. Soumyabrata Roy/NurPhoto via Getty Images
Film and Writing Festival for Comedy. Showcasing best of comedy short films at the FEEDBACK Film Festival. Plus, showcasing best of comedy novels, short stories, poems, screenplays (TV, short, feature) at the festival performed by professional actors.
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James' World 2 