Written by Eric Kambach, Marketing Associate at Divine Mercy Universtiy.
Sitting in a hospital room during an emergency, waiting to speak with a doctor builds a great anxiety that makes the heart race while simultaneously petrifying the body. Words of comfort fall over and around you like acorns in autumn, and thoughts bounce around inside your head of all things that have gone wrong and could go wrong, all followed by a great fear of not knowing what lies ahead.
My wife had been admitted into the hospital’s high risk pregnancy unit just a week and a half before Christmas. The day before, we had met with the sonogram specialist at the pregnancy center we were visiting to try and discover the gender of our baby. All indications showed that our child was as healthy as can be, with all limbs accounted for and all organs developing well, but we were unsuccessful in learning if we were expecting a boy or a girl.
Instead, we learned that my wife’s amniotic fluid levels were dangerously low and, later, that the reason for the low fluid levels was due to a rupture in the amniotic sac. My wife was immediately put on bedrest and began to drink gallons of water every day to supplement for the loss of fluids for the baby inside. In meeting with one of the doctors at the hospital, we discussed what our situation was and what our different options of care were with this fresh, frightening setback, which ranged from remaining in the hospital under constant monitoring–doing everything possible to keep from delivering too early–to immediate induced delivery via c-section if an infection was detected.
As we went over everything, the doctor reminded us: another option is termination.
Abortion is one of the most hotly contested and controversial issues in the United States. An electoral candidate can rise up or fall from the political landscape depending on views and affiliation of abortion, as it’s become one of the top three topics of discussion at political election debates, and your own opinion on the matter is almost considered a battle-cry declaration of your political and social affiliation. Movements and annual marches organized by proponents of both sides of the issue are attended by hundreds of thousands of participants.
On one side, it’s a highly complex and difficult choice that’s accepted as a right and a means of protecting a woman’s physical, emotional, financial and social health based on the circumstances of the pregnancy. It can even be a means of saving the mother’s life in the case complicated pregnancies as a result of rape. It’s also considered as protection of the unborn child from a potentially difficult life, especially if any complications like disability and disorders are detected early on. In our case, our child’s death would mean us avoiding the financial burdens of a potentially extensive hospital stay, as well as any hardships that our child’s premature birth could bring about, including physical, intellectual or developmental disabilities or conditions.
On the other side, the right to terminate the pregnancy is a cold infringement on the child’s right to live, a dangerous shortcut escape from responsibility as a parent or certain anticipated hardships, a naziesque means of extermination and a multibillion dollar, government-funded industry of legalized murder. For us, it meant losing an otherwise perfectly healthy child.
There are hundreds of surgical and medical procedures that are standard or common, but none are without their own risk of complications. No matter what side of the issue you’re on–whether you believe in the legitimacy of the practice and are trying to stand up for women’s rights or you believe the practice is murder that was wrongfully legalized–abortion itself is not a risk free operation. According to the abortion recovery nonprofit Ramah International, the procedure carries many different health risks that could cause serious complications, including scarring and injury on the uterine wall, blood clots in the uterus, pelvic infection and cuts or tears of the cervix. The procedure can even make it more difficult for the mother to get pregnant again.
But in considering risks and complications of abortion, what’s very rarely touched on are the potential psychological and emotional repercussions that can hit those who have had the procedure.
According to Dr. Priscilla K. Coleman, professor of human development and family studies at Bowling Green State University, researching any connections between abortion and mental health is incredibly difficult due to how sensitive the topic is.
“Perhaps even more serious than this,” she said in her 2017 article, Post-Abortion Mental Health Research: Distilling Quality Evidence from a Politicized Professional Literature, “are the well-entrenched, seldom-discussed professional gatekeepers, who encourage agenda-driven research and ignore fundamental scientific principles in order to fill journal articles with ‘evidence’ that abortion poses no risk to women’s health.”
But studies do show that mothers who have an abortion put themselves at risk of experiencing psychological and emotional repercussions of the procedure, a condition that’s been unofficially tagged Post Abortion Stress Disorder (PASS).
One report released in 2017 from the European Institute of Bioethics–The Psychological Consequences of Abortion–found that mothers may experience different states of mourning or grief as a result as a result of having an abortion. Like mothers whose pregnancies end in miscarriage, mothers who abort can experience a similar denial and anger. They’ll then experience doubt over their decision and guilt over the loss. It can then lead to anxiety and depression in many different forms, such as eating disorders, loss of self-esteem, sleep and relationship trouble, and thoughts of suicide. Both the abortion and the emotional experiences that follow can lead the mother to mistreat those closest to her, creating psychological strain on family members.
“When I became pregnant at 18, I had an abortion,” said Michaelene Fredenburg on her website. She is the founder of AbortionChangesYou.com, an online refuge for those trying to recover from their abortion experience. “I was completely unprepared for the emotional fallout. I thought the abortion would erase the pregnancy. I thought I could move on with my life. I was wrong. I experienced periods of intense anger followed by periods of profound sadness. When my feelings became too difficult to deal with, I reached out for help from a trained counselor. With counseling and the help of supportive friends, I was able to enter into a healthy grieving process. In addition to grieving the loss of my child, I slowly became aware of how my choice to abort had impacted my family. I was surprised and saddened that my parents, my sister, and even my living children struggled to deal with the loss of a family member through abortion.”
For us, in weighing the risks and complications between alleviating possible short-term and long-term hardships of delivering prematurely and the risks of termination, we respectfully declined the doctor’s proposition and were admitted for the long run. Termination just wasn’t an option.
A week and a half into our hospital stay–exactly 24 weeks into our pregnancy–our son Jude was born (pictured above at two weeks old in the incubator).
It’s a fact of life today: not all pregnancies go according to plan, and not all pregnancies are planned. This can create a great fear of the decisions we’ll have to make and of not truly knowing what challenges wait for us along the way. We look at abortion as a decision to eliminate those decisions; a resolution to a dire moment of fear; a restoration to a pre-pregnant identity; an easy fix to complicated health or circumstances; the safer alternative to a harder road ahead. But just as a pregnancy changes a mom and dad forever, so too does abortion.
I look at my son, recovering from his early entry into the world–hooked to ventilators to help develop his lungs, lying in the incubator for the long haul to his original due date in April–and my mind drifts to an alternative scenario, if we had chosen to let him go. The very thought drives wounds into my heart to depths I, otherwise, would have never known existed.
If you’d like to help counsel women and families that have considered or gone through an abortion, sign up to learn more about our online Master’s in Counseling degree.