“Every now and again you read a book that shatters assumptions you have held for a long time. This is one of them. Academic Ellie Lee looks at discussions around post-abortion syndrome (PAS) and post-natal depression (PND). Her conclusions are like a stone dropped in the pool of complacency of most pro-choice feminist thinking. Abortion, Motherhood and Mental Health has the potential to make waves – if those outside the academic community can be persuaded to shrug off philistinism and grapple with a book that refuses to simplify complex ideas.” —Ann Furedi, sp!ked. The reviewer and perhaps the author, however, are reacting to a straw man. They interpret the controversial syndromes to represent an assumption that “once a pregnancy has begun a woman can’t end it without suffering a degree of mental illness – even if the mental illness is so suppressed that she doesn’t recognise it.” This rendition of big, bad medical science is easy to refute because it is simply not what researchers and clinicians into postpartum depression and psychosis, which is how these syndromes are known in the US, are saying.