Thursday, March 28, 2024

It’s Time to Consider the Harm Abortion Does to Mothers

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Washington, D.C. – When the decision was handed down earlier this year, it was widely condemned on the nation's editorial pages. Most of them trumpeted the line that taking the responsibility for policy out of the hands of judges and returning it to the legislative branch was undemocratic.

Ironically, it was the systems Dobbs abolished that had been undemocratic. Roe took the issue away from the people. A majority of the judges on the high court at the time decided to substitute their judgment on what is essentially a political matter for the people.

That was a mistake that increased the divisions among us. Polling data collected since 1973 shows consistently that only a fifth of all Americans favors one of the two positions considered most extreme. Slightly more favor a total ban on the procedure (save for when the life of the mother is endangered) than support with no restrictions up through the end of a pregnancy.

Most of us fall somewhere in between. Roe boxed us in, restricting what could be done through the democratic process to what the court pronounced in its Roe, Webster and Casey decisions. The template for looking at the issue the court created tended to highlight the extremism on one side while masking what existed on the other.

Without it, because of Dobbs, the extremism on both sides has quickly become evident. Georgia Democrat Stacey Abrams' recent suggestion that legal abortion was key to fighting inflation during an interview on is part of that.

“Right now, we are walking away so often from the real issues that people care about. Abortion is an economic issue. It's been reduced to this idea of a culture war. But for women,” Abrams, who wants to be the next governor of Georgia said, “this is very much a question of whether they're going to end up in poverty in the next five years because women who are forced to carry unwanted pregnancies end up within poverty.”

Her opinion is endorsed, even embraced by those who've argued for years that abortion rights empower women and are critical to their achieving economic and social success. A new study just released by Support After Abortions that looks at the effect abortion has had on women who've undergone them suggests that's not quite true.

Researchers found that mental resources are far more helpful to women after abortion than political rhetoric. Activists on both sides need to start treating them like people rather than pawns in a political contest.

Some find it necessary to shout their approval of abortion to others, even their own. Perhaps they're seeking justification or trying to ease their psychological pain. Most women, however, told researchers who asked open-ended questions they wanted to remain anonymous about their emotional struggles. Even the 75% of them who identified as “pro-choice” said this.

The study's authors found a “negative self-image” among 34% of the women who underwent an abortion using pharmaceutical methods. Nearly two-thirds either sought help or said they could have used someone to talk to following the procedure.

Hardcore abortion rights supporters have made it difficult for women who experience regret, shame or other negative psychological and emotional outcomes to make their feelings known. It might, one suspects, diminish the public's acceptance of the practice, especially among those who tout women's empowerment as the primary justification for legal abortion.

Dobbs frees policymakers to consider the full impact of legal abortion on children and their parents. It gives us all a chance, especially those people in between the two extremes a chance to revisit what abortion means and how to address it.

This is an opportunity of which we should take advantage to prove the American democratic system gets it right more often than judicial diktats do. Babies deserve far more protection than they get. Abortion advocates need to stop dismissing the real harm done to mothers who have experienced abortion. And we all need to face up to some uncomfortable facts. The hard cases are not all on one side and never have been.

The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the positions of American Liberty News.

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Peter Roff
Peter Roff
Peter Roff is a longtime political columnist currently affiliated with several Washington, D.C.-based public policy organizations. You can reach him by email at [email protected]. Follow him on Twitter @TheRoffDraft.

13 COMMENTS

  1. Sorry guys! I am one person with two abortions in my basket. I have never felt any regret, or pain or psychological trauma or anything. These abortions were done with the other person’s agreement and full knowledge. I paid for them myself and have no self recrimination processes going on in my head. I am now 78 years of age and don’t appreciate being “lumped in” with any other group of people. I never wanted children or saw myself as a brood hen. If you don’t like truisms don’t read this or comment. I am my own woman and need no one’s approval for living my life my way!

    • We understand that women who select abortion for birth control often do not feel any guilt or regret over that decision. But we also understand that not every woman who decides to use abortion for birth control can keep up the pretense that she did not destroy human lives, or, alternatively, is perfectly aware that abortion cruelly ends a human life but does not care.

      Many women, however, are not like you. Many women actually do care about human life and the guilt of their abortions manifests itself in many ways. They may become hyper-caring of everything except unborn babies. For example, becoming rabidly pro-animal rights. They may have weight issues or other psychological issues that they will not acknowledge dates back to their decision to use abortion for birth control.

      And what I mean by “using abortion for birth control” is that the majority of women having abortions chose not to use any kind of contraception because they figured it was more convenient not to break the intimate mood and to “take care of it” at a later date.

      Pro-lifers believe that women have a responsibility to not get pregnant in the first place if they do not want to have a baby. And, for women who never want a baby, there is a permanent alternative that does not entail the wonton destruction of human life.

    • “These abortions were done with the other person’s agreement and full knowledge.” I notice you didn’t use persons’ rather than person’s. The other person being whom? The father? The baby?

  2. This argument is bogus. Understanding rape and incest are outliers to the typical abortion and rules should not be based on outliers. Exceptions are made for outliers. So for the typical pregnancy, men and women CHOOSE to have sex. Once this results in pregnancy, women all of the sudden think they hold all of the deciding power. If they want the baby, they decide. The man has zero say, but holds responsibility to support the child. If the women do not want the baby, again the man has zero say. The response is the men chose to have sex so they have no choice in the responsibility. Ok, well why do the women not have the responsibility unless they choose. Abrams’ argument is women should keep their choice due to the “economic impact,” it would make to their life. By the way, the worse possible excuse ever to abort a baby. But either way, how can you make that argument and decide men have no say about having the baby and ignore the “economic impact” to them. The fact is, your decisions have consequences. These women seem to ignore the choice they made that got them in this position but use the same argument that the men’s choice ended when they had sex. Sorry Abrams, you can’t have your cake and eat it too. You can’t use the same argument to support abortion and requires child support that goes against abortion and child support.

  3. Wanting to abort the result of sexual activity, shows they did not exercise responsible choice for their own body.

  4. more feeble attempts to insert govt into the dialogue. abortion is a personal choice not govt or crowd sanctioned.

  5. There is no excuse for getting pregnant in the first place. There are plenty of birth control methods available including abstinence.

  6. I spent 16 years working with women who regretted their abortions and lived with guilt & emotional consequences. It is interesting that we found the same symptoms with women in others countries with a different cultural & political perspective. I think the heart of women is to nurture and protect their children and has nothing to do with politics. The consequences of abortion regarding women has been largely ignored & the shame has not be recognized. It also seems likely that many of the strongest supporters of abortion are defending their own personal decisions. Let’s hear from women who have had abortions and not just politicians.

    • The abortion industry makes a big effort to spread the narrative that women who feel guilt over their abortions are mentally defective.

      My intuition tells me that those who proclaim the loudest that they feel no guilt are, in fact, suppressing their guilt and find it impossible to face up to what they did. I think that those who rabidly promote abortion, such as the leader of NARAL, are actually trying to suppress their guilt, as in “what I did was horrific, but it can’t be so bad because so many other women are doing it, too.” Of course, one cannot make an evil act benign through encouraging others to commit the same evil.

      Abortion causes more than psychological harm to women. It causes physical harm that can impact a woman’s ability to carry a pregnancy to term or even to conceive if she decides that she wants to have a living baby at some point. The effect of a past abortion on another pregnancy is equivalent to smoking during pregnancy in terms of fetal loss and premature birth. Women can negate the effects of smoking on pregnancy by quitting, but they can never undo the damage caused by abortion.

      I hear a lot about the high incidence of bad pregnancy outcomes (premature births and neonatal deaths) among black women which is always blamed on some sort of systemic racism in the health care system. The elephant in the room is that black women are targeted by the abortion industry more than women of any other race. Of course, this is going to have an effect on their ability to have healthy full-term babies.

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