Emotional support for abortion care can be a fraught topic. Anti-choice organizations claim, with no evidence, that abortion causes mental health conditions like depression, anxiety, or post-traumatic stress disorder (they’ve coined the phrase “post-abortion stress syndrome”), and that many people regret their choice to have an abortion. Research from the Turnaway Study debunks this myth, showing that the vast majority of women believe after-the-fact that abortion was the right choice for them, and that women denied abortions face worse health, financial, and social outcomes (e.g., staying in contact with violent partners) than those who received them.
The efforts to discredit the myths around “post-abortion stress syndrome” and the like, however, have sometimes neglected the very real (usually time-limited) emotional experiences that some abortion patients do have before, during, and after abortions. These emotional experiences are driven by a combination of factors – societally-imposed stigma that can lead to guilt, contextual factors around the circumstances of the pregnancy, personal values, and the huge fluctuations in hormones that happen during an abortion. While some patients feel nothing but relief, for others the experience can be more fraught. Many reproductive health and rights efforts have (rightly) focused on access to the medication – but meeting the emotional needs of patients is also important to ensuring patients feel safe and supported, and community-building efforts can help to fight the stigma that contributes to both access challenges and negative emotions like guilt and shame.