Category: Women and Abortion Regret

From the article “Counseling Single Abortion Patients: A Research Overview and Practice Implications” by Paul Sachdev:

“Young single women are particularly vulnerable to intense emotional trauma upon unwanted pregnancy as they generally lack the needed emotional support and participation from the male partner involved in the pregnancy. Frequently, the pair-relationship terminates following pregnancy and abortion.”

Gail Grenier-Sweet, ed “Pro-Life Feminism: Different Voices” (Lewiston, NY: Life Cycle Books, 1985) 236

Read studies about abortion’s emotional effects here.

Read stories and testimonies from post-abortion women here. 

Meta Uchtman, regional director of Suiciders Anonymous, spoke at the Cincinnati City Council Sept 1, 1981 in support of the Parental Notification ordinance for abortion :

“The Cincinnati group has seen 5,620 members in 35 months. Over 4,000 were women of whom 1,800 or more had had abortions. The highest suicide rate is in the 15 to 24 age group. There is a direct link….it is an act of cruelty to remove parental duties and rights during an abortion crisis….Any experience that forces an individual to feel that sense of lonely isolation and complete abandonment is a crisis and when you exclude someone (parents) who can reach a hand out to you, someone who cares- the crisis is worsened. Without the strength and health from a family, you are actually giving birth to a suicide.”

From Right to Life Committee of Greater Cincinnati Inc. Newsletter (September 1981) p 102-103 of Gail Grenier-Sweet, ed “Pro-Life Feminism: Different Voices” (Lewiston, NY: Life Cycle Books 1985)

Dr. Fred E Mecklenburg, professor of obstetrics and gynecology at the University of Minnesota Medical School and member of the American Association of Planned Parenthood physicians:

“There are no known psychiatric disorders which can be cured by abortion. In addition, there are none which can be productively improved by abortion… [Instead], it may leave unresolved conflicts, coupled with guilt and added depression, which may be more harmful than the continuation of the pregnancy.

Furthermore, there is good evidence to suggest that serious mental disorders arise following abortions more often in women with real psychiatric problems. Paradoxically, the very women for whom legal abortion may seem most justifiable are also the ones for whom the risk is highest for postabortion psychic insufficiency…

When abortion is substituted for adequate psychiatric care – and there is ample evidence to suggest that this is already happening – then there is a distinct danger of minimizing establish psychotherapeutic principles. Unfortunately, it is the distressed woman who ultimately faces the dulling impact of this minimization. She is the one who cries for help, and she is also the one who was turned away.”

Quoted in Thomas Hilger’s “the Medical Hazards of Legal Induced Abortion” in Abortion and Social Justice Editor’s Thomas W Hilger’s and Dennis J Horan (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1972) 40

Dr. E Joanne Angelo, an assistant clinical professor of psychiatry at the Tufts University School of Medicine and a psychiatrist in private practice in Boston:

“Women who have had abortions… may turn to alcohol or drugs to get to sleep at night or to deaden the pain of their waking hours, or throw themselves into feverish activity in an attempt to forget their sorrow, guilt and shame. Deep feelings of loneliness and emptiness may lead to binge eating, alternating with purging and anorexia, or intense efforts to repair intimate relationships or develop new ones inappropriately, or to an insatiable need to replace lost child at any cost.”

In a Special Word to Women Who Have Had an Abortion (National Conference of Catholic Bishops, Washington DC, 1999)

Read about the studies about psychological dangers of abortion here.

Read women’s stories of abortion regret here.

From a counselor in an abortion clinic:

“Abortion is very emotional for everyone. The women think, let’s get it over with fast. They don’t open up in counseling as they should… So the trouble doesn’t come out till afterwards and they just keep it all in. Postabortion counseling doesn’t do any good either, because if the woman has any regrets, admitting it will feed her guilt feelings even more…”

Linda bird Francke The Ambivalence of Abortion (New York: Random House, 1978) 253