Category: Women’s Health

Psychotherapist Mira Dana,on postabortion grief:

 “Why would you feel sadness or loss about something you wanted to get rid of? On the surface it looks like a contradiction… The fact that it was your decision which caused the loss does not allow space for mourning.”

Mira Dana Abortion and the Emotions Involved (London: Women’s Therapy Center, 1984) 12

A World Health Organization technical report acknowledged that women with a previous history of mental illness were more likely to suffer negative emotional aftereffects of abortion :

“There is no doubt that the termination of pregnancy may precipitate a serious psycho neurotic or even psychotic reaction in a susceptible individual.

Studies concerned with women who have had legal abortions in hospitals, mainly for psychiatric reasons, show that serious mental disorders arise more often in women with previous emotional problems. These, the very women for whom legal abortion is considered to be justified on psychiatric grounds, are the ones that have the highest risk postabortion psychiatric disorders.”

World Health Organization, Technical Report Series, “Scientific Group on Spontaneous and Induced Abortion” Geneva, 1970, 41 – 42

Pro-Choice author Miriam Claire lists the following as psychological effects of abortion:

“Depression: some women get into a state of depression which could be described as a general sense of hopelessness and diffused (unfocused) feeling of blackness… Feeling bad about yourself and your life and your environment, but without actually knowing what it is – a state of no specific emotion but this “darkness”… Feelings of worthlessness… and that nothing is of much importance… [Other reactions may be] Fear of Sexuality… Many women need time after an abortion before they feel relaxed and able to have sexual relationships again because they fear another abortion… Envy: Often women feel envious of other women who have babies after the termination… Some women will refrain from visiting their friends who have newborn babies as they feel it is too painful to be with them.”

Mira Dana Abortion and the Emotions Involved (London: Women’s Therapy Center, 1984) 14 – 17

Quoted in Miriam Claire The Abortion Dilemma: Personal Views on a Public Issue (New York: Insight Books, 1995) 18

Social worker Ava Torre–Bueno, on women’s depression and mental health problems after abortion:

“What you hear in the [pro-choice] movement is “Let’s not make noise about this” and “Most women are fine, I’m sure you will be too.” And that is unfair.”

Emily Bazelon “Is There a Postabortion Syndrome? Inside the Next Fight over Roe V Wade” The New York Times Magazine January 21, 2007

Dr. Eloise Jones, a Toronto psychiatrist, on why she stopped referring women for abortions:

“An abortion has not helped the self-image of any woman I have talked with. I was listening to one recently. She was very frightened lest her teenage daughter discover what she had done, and since the abortion she has become increasingly fearful, hostile, and unresponsive to her husband. In her and in others I have been presented with psychosomatic illness… All kinds of neurotic disturbances and some deep depressive reactions.”

John Powell, SJ Abortion: the Silent Holocaust (Allen, Texas: Argus Communications, 1981) 124 – 125

Abortion has been hurting and damaging women for decades