If you visit any anti-choice website or facility, within moments of your arrival, you'll be hit with the assertion that abortion causes mental health problems for women who get them. The problem with this, besides the whiff of bullying, is there isn't any evidence for the claim.

Repeated studies, which have been blessed by the American Psychological Association, have shown there is no causal link between abortion and mental illness. Despite the disinterested assessment of the experts, though, anti-choicers have continued to push this claim.

Now, however, the last bit of supposedly scientific evidence establishing the link between abortion and mental illness has been debunked – mostly because the original researchers distorted their data in order to establish a causal link where none existed.

Priscilla Coleman, a professor at Bowling Green State University, published a paper in the Journal of Psychiatric Research in 2009 claiming to demonstrate a causal link between abortion and mental illness. This month, researchers from the University of California, San Francisco and the Guttmacher Institute debunked Coleman's heavily criticised study, showing decisively that the data collected by Coleman did not support her conclusion that abortion causes mental illness. The Journal ran a letter from the debunking team (pdf), and devastatingly for the anti-choice cause, Ronald Kessler, the principal investigator of the National Comorbidity Survey, and Alan Schatzberg, editor-in-chief of the Journal, agreed with the debunkers (pdf).

Turns out that Coleman juiced up her results by counting mental health disorders that occurred prior to women's abortions. It's a little like arguing that the stomach-ache I had a week ago is caused by the meal I ate tonight. While fully acknowledging that errors are a common problem in research attempting to establish causal links between any two events, it does seem that, at a bare minimum, researchers should realize that an event such as an abortion cannot actually cause events that happened before it. Coleman's response acknowledged that they used lifetime mental health diagnoses (rather than 12-month or 30-day diagnoses, as previously stated) because she and her colleagues had wanted to "capture as many cases of mental health problems as possible".

Why is it so important to anti-abortion activists to claim, despite all evidence to the contrary, that abortion causes mental illness?

The answer goes back to the fundamental disagreement between pro- and anti-choicers on what men back in the day called "the Woman Question": that is, "What are women for?" Sadly, as recently as 2012, conservative commentator James Poulos insisted on framing the question of women's rights in just this way, saying if we could just get to the mystery of what women are "for", then we'll know how many rights they should be allowed to have.

For pro-choicers, the answer to this question is obvious: women aren't "for" anything, and the question itself dehumanizes women, positioning them as objects to be used instead of people in their own right. Like men, we're not the means to the end, but the end. Thus, we conclude, women have a right to self-determination.

For anti-choicers, the answer to the question of what women are "for" is rooted in the same old restrictive gender roles: women are for making babies, with some add-on features such as stove operation, male sexual release, and toilet cleaning. If a woman rejects baby-making, she's ceased working as she was meant to, and is therefore broken. It's like a car whose windows roll up and down and the stereo works, but the engine just won't start. They need a way to describe their sense that a woman rejecting childbirth is broken, and the language of mental illness gives them an easy way to do this.

There's a long and dishonorable history of labeling women mentally ill for refusing to perform restrictive gender roles to sexist standards. Sigmund Freud dismissed rebellious women as fantasists. Charlotte Perkins Gilman's famous essay "The Yellow Wallpaper" was rooted a culture where women with yearnings for work outside of the home were labeled sick and confined to bed rest. Even as late as the 1960s, the urge to self-determination in women was often treated with sedatives, in hopes they could be content with a life of being "for" someone else, instead of for themselves. The psychological community's rejection of anti-choice claims that self-possession is a sign of mental illness in women is a testament to the ability of science to adjust to evidence and criticism, and to right itself after even decades of doing wrong.

Unfortunately, the anti-choice community does not have the same regard as the majority psychological community for facts and evidence. Despite this latest debunking of claims that abortion causes mental illness, I fully expect anti-choice activists to continue to insist the link is there. They never really had concerns about real-world diagnoses of mental illness, anyway; it was just a metaphor to describe their conviction women who have abortions are broken women. As long as they continue to believe that any woman who says she doesn't want a baby at any point in time is malfunctioning, we can expect them to continue to push the false link between mental illness and abortion.

But it's important not to let anti-choice malfeasance distract too much from the facts. Abortion doesn't make women sick, in the head or in the body. For many women, it feels like a relief, because control of your body and life is returned to you. While getting an abortion is never fun, it's a legitimate failsafe for women who find themselves pregnant when they don't want to be.

Most importantly, women aren't "for" anything, whether it's serving men or making babies. And women who live, like men, for themselves, cannot be considered broken.