Objective: This study examines potential risk factors for long-term abortion-related distress in women.Method: One hundred and two women receiving outpatient psychiatric services were assigned to one of three groups on the basis of their reported abortion history. Women with a positive history of abortion were assigned to a distressed or non-distressed group depending on whether abortion-related distress was a primary presenting problem. Women with no history of abortion who sought outpatient services served as controls.Results: Comparisons across groups revealed that the abortion-distressed group had symptoms consistent with Posttraumatic Stress Disorder, including intrusive thoughts of the abortion experience and active avoidance of events associated with their abortions. Two women who underwent an abortion following rape were both in the abortion-distressed group.Conclusions: Implications for identifying women at risk for long-term distress are discussed and suggestions for clinical interventions are made.

Abstract: Linear porphyrin oligomers have found various applications as synthetic molecular wires in the context of light harvesting, solar energy conversion and molecular electronics. In many of these applications a partial ordering of the molecules helps to improve the reaction efficiency or device performance. In this work we study the orientational properties of the building blocks of such porphyrin-based molecular wires, namely a porphyrin monomer and the corresponding butadiyne-bridged dimer. The porphyrins have been embedded in the nematic liquid crystal solvent 4-cyano-4'-pentylbiphenyl (5CB) and the anisotropic properties of their photogenerated triplet states were characterised by transient electron paramagnetic resonance (EPR) spectroscopy. When aligned in strong magnetic fields, the liquid crystal molecules impose their orientational anisotropy onto the solute guest molecules whose orientation-dependent magnetic properties can then be explored. The line shape analysis of the porphyrin triplet state EPR spectra - highly sensitive to small conformational changes - confirms the orientation of the zero-field-splitting (ZFS) tensors previously determined for these molecules by magnetophotoselection experiments. A biaxial distribution function is shown to be necessary to simulate the experimental EPR data. The biaxial behaviour, in conjunction with symmetry considerations, allows an unambiguous assignment of the three ZFS tensor axes to the molecular axes. From the determined orientational distributions of the porphyrins in 5CB, the biaxial order parameters for both molecules were calculated