I would rather err on the side of wrong and let the woman have the abortion whether her "mental illness" is faked or not... It's dangerous to go down that path though to decide if a pregnant woman is imagining things, faking or really sick to as whether or not she can get an abortion. Oboomer is totally living in the 12th century if he thinks that we need to go down that road.
Another thing is that borderline personality disorder can be misdiagnosed as bipolar and the other way around as well because many of the symptoms are the same, although there are major differences too.
When I saw my friend in his manic episode before he went to the hospital he was clearly out of touch with reality and did not think he was sick at all. You know, I've seen crazy homeless people in the street mumbling to themselves, but the first time I saw someone close to me actually have one of these episodes, it was like, wow... there was no mistaking this for some kind of brain chemistry gone awry! It was like nothing I had seen before. As if the person I knew was missing and someone else was in their body.
Anyhow... I'm just blabbing about this stuff because it really made me think, is oboomer that fucking stupid and 12th century or is he pandering to the fundies.. maybe it's a bit of both.
And as for the medications involved in this.. my friend had to fight the doctors tooth and nail to give him lithium (a mineral salt, not a drug) because he did not want to be on pharms, it's working out well for him. The pharms were what screwed him up almost worse than the bipolar... yes the medications are sometimes worse than the disease. And so many of these doctors do not want to give lithium anymore, even though it is the safest (but not for everyone, but for the majority) and most tested and effective, gold standard for 50 years in bipolar treatment, for someone with real bipolar disorder, they want to push the pharms.
hehe, and i've got another old friend that we don't see too much of anymore because his brain is so fried from the drugs they have him on he actually puts people in dangerous situations, either in his car or allowing his psychopathic brother around. I'm no doctor, but i totally think that the 10 drugs they have him on are not for bipolar at all, they are trying to medicate narcissistic personality disorder out of him, which of course, is not curable with psychiatric medications.
But I'll tell ya, a lot of these shrinks I have known of from the years of being around these two friends seem to all be 1. whoring for the pharm companies and 2. more like drug dealers than physicians. 3. willing to write up any diagnosis that makes the patient happy instead of facing the truth, a bratty child, a narcissistic idiot, etc. I've heard 2 or 3 good shrink reports out of the hundreds of times I have heard people bitching about them.