The Elliot Institute News
From the Leader in Post-Abortion Research
Vol. 7, No. 3 -- March 3, 2008
 

The UnChoice Campaign: TheUnChoice.com

IN THIS ISSUE:

• British Woman's Death Part of Dangerous Trend of Unwanted Abortions and Post-Abortion Trauma

• A Conspiracy of Silence

• New Resources for Men Who Have Been Involved In Abortion

In one survey of U.S. and Russian women who underwent abortions, 60 percent of the American women said they "felt like part of me died" after having an abortion and 36 percent had thoughts of suicide. 64 percent said they felt pressured by others to abort and more than 50 percent said they felt rushed or uncertain about having an abortion. However, 84 percent said they did not receive adequate counseling and 79 percent said they were not given any information about alternatives to abortion.1

Record-based studies of women in Finland and the U.S. found that women who had abortions were more likely to commit suicide than women who carried the pregnancy to term. In Finland, aborting women were six times more likely to commit suicide in the following year than delivering women,2 while a U.S. study that looked at outcomes for up to eight years after the pregnancy found that women who had abortions had a 154 percent higher risk of suicide than women who had giving birth.3

A Conspiracy of Silence
Dismissal of Post-Abortion Injustice, Trauma and Pain
Leaves Many With No Place to Turn

Melinda Tankard Reist, Giving Sorrow Words

Conventional wisdom has it that abortion is mostly trouble-free. Because of this, those who are troubled are made-indeed, often forced to be-invisible.

Attitudes towards women overwhelmed by grief following abortion demonstrate a cruel indifference to women's pain. Their suffering is considered a figment of their imagination, a by-product of social/religious conditioning. In short, they are an embarrassment.

There is another constraint on their expression of grief. The politics surrounding abortion have drowned out the voices of women harmed by it.

How free are women to share their anguish when advocates extol abortion as "an act of individual self-determination," and a "rite of passage into womanhood," a "positive moral good" for women and "a source of fulfillment, transcendence, and growth"? Women whose lives are shattered by the abortion experience and for whom abortion was not a "maturational milestone," women coerced or pressured into unwanted abortions, women who did not feel abortion made them a "mistress of their own destiny," are cast aside as oversensitive, psychologically unstable, victims of socially constructed guilt. Their experience is trivialized.

When an article I wrote about women's negative experiences of abortion appeared in The Canberra Times in 1997, a Family Planning figure hastily wrote in to dismiss post-abortion trauma. Similar reactions surfaced in a feminist e-mail discussion about my book that lasted several days. The project was treated with contempt by all but two participants. Someone suggested a quick on-line collection of "stories of women not hurt by abortion" be compiled. This reaction unnecessarily pits women's differing stories against each other and, once again, suggests there is only one authentic experiential reality when it comes to abortion.

A woman's abortion pain is discounted and minimized due to the prevailing view that a termination is really no big deal-an easy fix. Abortion is promoted by many who dominate the discourse on the subject as a procedure without repercussions. Because of this, attempts to discuss women's abortion suffering have been constrained.

Suffering post-aborted women feel a resentment towards a society which ignores or neglects their suffering. They are not allowed to acknowledge or mourn their loss openly. The disdain for women suffering after-abortion trauma sends the message: you're only upset because you've chosen to get upset. Herald Sun writer Evelyn Tsitas epitomizes this attitude: "Abortion can be an emotional subject-particularly for people who choose to get upset about it. There is a movement taking hold called: 'I'll always regret what I did and want to burn in hell for it.'"

This mocking response to women's abortion-related suffering makes them feel they're being melodramatic, oversensitive, attention-seeking. But many women are suffering emotionally from a procedure which was portrayed as emotionally benign. They are filled with feelings of self-loss, daily haunted by their abortion experience. "We live with that regret till the day we die and for some we were wishing we too were dead," wrote a woman who signed her name "Tortured."

These women might have been told "there is nothing there," or that their fetuses look like "scraps of paper" (the description given to one woman by an abortion counselor). But to them, these were flesh and blood babies; for them, a baby died in an abortion. "I do not think I terminated a 'bunch of cells' but a real human being," wrote Marguerite.

Their arms feel empty, they don't like looking at babies, they cry often. They ask: "What would my baby have looked like? Was it a boy or a girl?" Would-have-been birthdays are quietly marked year after year.

As Margaret Nicol points out in her important work on maternal grief, it is a myth that a mother only bonds with her child after birth. A woman never forgets a pregnancy and the baby that might have been. When the baby is lost and there are no memories or visible reminders of the baby, "the feeling of emptiness and nothingness becomes pervasive and it is this uneasy and anxious void that makes women wonder if they're going crazy."

The Silence

Beatrice, who underwent a second trimester abortion, describes what this feels like: "My grief will be unresolved because you cannot grieve the normal way, you can't repeat and repeat yourself. My husband and I never talk about the inner feelings ... although I'm sure he must think of it too. It's just taboo and you put it to the back of your mind ... the regret will always be there."

Katarina, a psychologist, wrote: "My sister has since had two stillbirths-as a family we have grieved and empathized with her and her husband's dreadful pain. Inside of me I felt cheated as no one had grieved with me for my two lost children-not even me. My sister's children died at the same time as both my losses-I felt responsible, guilty and so alone. When my mum says no one in the family has experienced pain like my sister my heart cries out silently-but I have."

E. Joanne Angelo, Assistant Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at Tufts University School of Medicine in the U.S., has written about the importance of the mourning process:

"Grief following a death in the family is a universally accepted experience. A period of mourning following the loss of a loved one is a normal expectation in every culture. It is also generally understood that if this mourning process is blocked or impacted, there will be negative consequences."

But there is no period of mourning for a woman suffering grief after an abortion. There are no grief teams, no body for her to cuddle and dress, no footprints or photographs to keep in an album, no ceremony, no grave on which to lay flowers; in short, nothing to acknowledge that this baby ever existed. A grieving post-aborted woman faces a conspiracy of silence.

~~~

Excerpted from the book Giving Sorrow Words: Women's Stories of Grief After Abortion by Melinda Tankard Reist. Copyright 2007 Melinda Tankard Reist. For ordering information, visit http://www.theunchoice.com or call 1-888-412-2676.

Ramah International has a men's page with links to resources on their web site at www.ramahinternational.org/for-post-abortive-men.html. There is also a short page for men whose partners have experienced abortion at www.ramahinternational.org/post-abortive-spouse.html.

Each of these sites contains links to other sites and information on awareness, hope and healing for men.  Visit our men and abortion page at www.theunchoice.com\men.htm.