Post-Abortion Syndrome

            On January 22, 1973, the United States Supreme Court heard a court case that transformed America and one could even say the world.  The case being heard was Roe v. Wade.  The challenge being waged was whether the statutes of the State of Texas were constitutional concerning the highly emotional and sensitive nature of abortion.  At the time it was a crime to procure an abortion except for the purpose of saving the life of the mother.  “Jane Roe, a single woman, instituted this federal action…. and sought a declaratory judgment that the Texas criminal abortion statutes were unconstitutional on their face, and an injunction restraining the defendant from enforcing the statutes” (Camp 1).   There is not enough space nor time to address this whole issue, only to state that with this judgment came the rendering of a decision that abortion could now be legal and that the right of privacy entailed giving a woman the right to terminate her pregnancy.

Many people were totally appalled by this decision. The lines were drawn: Pro-choice, Pro-Life.  Who was right, who was wrong?   This paper will show that many fallacies have been promoted over the last 30 years to show that what some people perceive as “choice” and not “life” is now a problem to women across the globe.  One of the major problems with the Roe v. Wade decision is that the courts ruled that the Constitution does not define “person” in so many words.  That means that according to the Fourteenth Amendment the use of the word “person” does not include the unborn.  Oh how sad a moment when we cannot define the unborn as a person.  With those words confusion began to reign in our country and thus the beginnings of another holocaust.

            If there is such a thing as Post Abortion Syndrome, why does our nation’s largest provider of abortions, Planned Parenthood, deny that there are complications that may arise in the form of trauma after a “planned” abortion?  Why do clinics pass out information telling fragile women that “emotional problems after abortion are uncommon, and when they happen, they usually go away quickly?  Most women report a sense of relief, although some experience depression or guilt.  Serious psychiatric disturbances (such as psychosis or serious depression) after abortion appear to be less frequent than after childbirth” (Fact sheet). The reason is due to faulty reasoning and inept research.  Book after book, finding after finding all point to another aspect of post abortion problems that make the above statement nothing more than a fallacy.

            Theresa Burke, Ph.D. has written a book entitled Forbidden Grief, The Unspoken Pain of Abortion, which details case after case of women seeking help with emotional, psychological, and physical problems after incurring an abortion.  If we are to believe that problems after abortions are “uncommon,” where did these women come from and why are mountains of information being suppressed by Planned Parenthood, all telling the horrors women endure after an abortion?  A motto we have heard over and over since 1973 has been that “because abortion is legal, it is presumed to be safe” (32).  How do we define safe in these terms?  Does safe mean from the law, from our families, or even from one's self?  Does safe mean an environment monitored so closely that the facility is considered clean and safe from hazards?  Well, we do know that abortion facilities are less restricted than a veterinarian’s facility.  What does that tell us?  And if being safe means from oneself, well the testimonies of thousands upon thousands of women seem to prove otherwise. Dr. Burke writes that it is time to compile and study testimonies of women who have undergone an abortion:

Defenders of abortion have often tried to sidestep the question of abortion’s psychological risks by arguing that having an “unwanted” baby is even more “traumatic” than having an abortion.  This argument, however, is always raised in the context of dismissing evidence regarding post-abortion trauma.  It is never accompanied by research citations showing that women who give birth suffer more psychological injury than women who have abortions, because no such studies exist. (Burke 28)

Women have expressed great anger at those who have spearheaded the abortion movement because they claim that they were never told of the pains that would arise after an abortion.  They are told it is just a “blob of tissue” or the “product of conception.”  If all women believed this, we would not have the issue at hand.  Unfortunately or fortunately, depending on how you view life, with the advent of modern medicine we are now able to see into the womb of a pregnant mother and discover that what is inside her has two arms, two legs, a beating heart and measurable brain waves.  All by the eighth to tenth week after fertilization.  This is fortunate for those who are thrilled to be pregnant, but not by those who are trying to convince others that it is not a life inside of them.  “By definition, a trauma is an overwhelming experience that is simply “too much” for a person to handle or understand.  The ordinary response to a trauma is to banish the experience from one’s mind–to run away from it, hide it, repress it” (Burke 82).  This seems to be what has happened to many post abortion women, and now years later they are looking for help as to why they are now feeling or acting like they do.  The symptoms of post-abortion syndrome are numerous but worth noting.  First there are the physical ”sequelae associated with the initial abortion such as breast cancer, cervical, ovarian and liver cancer, uterine perforation, cervical lacerations, placenta previa, pelvic inflammatory disease” and more (A list of Major Sequelae).  Second are the issues that women experience after the abortion is all said and done. They vary from woman to woman, but are notable to all women.  They include “guilt, depression, anger, sorrow, grief, bitterness, rage, anguish, remorse, despair, shame, loneliness, withdrawal, constant stress, confusion, and so on” (Burke 291).

Dr. Burke chronicles in her book some rather disturbing stories of how women have dealt and felt with this pain in their lives: hatred of self, men, babies, doctors, hospitals, and anything to do with the abortion decision.  Anorexia, bulimia, repeat abortions resulting from coercion, as a form of masochism, drug, alcohol and sex abuse, risk-taking and self-destructive tendencies.  Add to this the threat of suicide and we now have women all across the country behaving in ways that should be a concern to us all.  In the handout given to women at Planned Parenthood, the claim is made that full-term pregnancy and childbirth is 7 times more deadly than an abortion (Fact sheet). This is in total opposition to a recent government study done in Finland which “shows that women who abort are approximately four times more likely to die in the following year than women who carry their pregnancies to term.  Researchers from the statistical analysis unit of Finland’s National Research and Development Center examined death certificates records from all women of reproductive age (15-49) who died between 1987-1994—a total of 9,129 women.  The researchers found that compared to women who carried to term, women who aborted in the year prior to their deaths were 60 percent more likely to die of natural causes, seven times more likely to die of suicide, four times more likely to die of injuries related to accidents and 14 times more likely to die from homicide.  Researchers believe the higher rates of deaths related to accidents and homicide may be linked to higher rates of suicidal or risk-taking behaviors” (Abortion Four Times Deadlier).  This is quite an alarming report, as it seems the media in the United States does not pick up on these studies.  Why one might ask, and what harm would it do to bring the truth to light?  My thoughts on this are varied, but mostly if word got out that women were killing themselves, or becoming victims of accidents and homicides, due to an abortion, the legalities would flood the courts and we would have a mass revolt against Roe v. Wade.

If study after study shows that there are complications that arise from abortions and we are told that between “40% and 60% of American women of childbearing age have had at least one abortion” (Martinez), with half of them having two or more, we find ourselves in a situation of having many, many women in need of help and therapy in order to give them back a life of some sort of normalcy.  The issue of “unresolved emotions will demand one’s attention sooner or later, often through the development of subsequent emotional or behavioral disturbances.  This view is supported by the observations of Dr. Julius Fogel who is both a psychiatrist and an obstetrician and who has personally performed over 20,000 abortions.  Though a long-time advocate of abortion Dr. Fogel insists:

Every woman—whatever her age, background or sexuality—has a trauma at destroying a pregnancy.  A level of humanness is touched. This is a part of her own life. When she destroys a pregnancy, she is destroying herself.  There is no way it can be innocuous.  One is dealing with the life force. It is totally beside the point whether or not you think a life is there.  You cannot deny that something is being created and that this creation is physically happening…Often the trauma may sink into the unconscious and never surface in the woman’s lifetime.  But it is not as harmless and casual an event as many in the pro-abortion crowd insist. A psychological price is paid.  It may be alienation; it may be a pushing away from human warmth, perhaps a hardening of the maternal instinct.  Something happens on the deeper levels of a woman’s consciousness when she destroys a pregnancy. I know that as a psychiatrist. (Burke 33)

This statement is from a prominent abortion doctor as well as a psychiatrist.  Fogel, who kills the unborn, states the fact that trauma “will” occur; more or less it is just a matter of time.  People don’t allow women who have had abortions the benefit of grieving over their loss.  They assume that all is well and life goes on.  But again, groups of women are standing up and proclaiming that something terrible did happen to them and they want to be heard.  Various groups have surfaced to help women deal with post-abortion stress such as “Rachel’s Vineyard Ministries, Hope Alive, Post Abortion Counseling and Education (P.A.C.E.), and Ramah International.”  Help is also offered for men as well such as “Fathers and Brothers Ministries,” and for former abortion providers called “The Centurions” (Burke 301,302). If Planned Parenthood has told us that there are no great issues to be dealt with after an abortion, why the aforementioned ministries?  It brings us back to the beginning of this whole story.  Fallacies!   Nothing else makes sense.  These are human lives we are dealing with and who wouldn’t want to see a wife, daughter, mother, friend or others find the help that they are crying out for?

            If we deny that there is such a thing as Post-Abortion Syndrome, then we can always classify what these women are enduring as symptoms of “Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder” or PTSD.  As defined, PTSD is considered a psychological disorder that results from some traumatic experience that overwhelms a person’s normal defense mechanism.  The more “formal definition of PTSD involves two major elements and three types of symptoms.  The first element, a traumatic event, can be any event in which one either witnesses or experiences “actual or threatened death or serious injury, or a threat to the physical integrity of oneself or others” (Burke 109).  If women feel that what they endured was traumatic enough they would stand a good chance of falling under the PTSD’s guidelines.  Once an initial review is done, then a “clinical diagnosis of PTSD requires identification of symptoms in all three of the following broad categories: hyperarousal, intrusion, and constriction.  Rather than go into great detail about these areas, we recognize that once diagnosed with PTSD a patient is now given the okay to have these symptoms and help is usually available to overcome some of these feelings.  Post-abortion women are not given much due from the medical community for numerous reasons ranging from political to social justice.  The fear, horror and helplessness that women encounter is so very real to them, and if only the medical community would acknowledge these symptoms then the abortionist would be put out of business and healing can happen.  Funerals are a natural way for humans to deal with death and grief.  Yet, women who have suffered over the death of their child through abortion are not given that closure that comes with death.  As a mother who has lost a child before the age of one, I can personally attest that without family and friends to help my husband and I through the loss of our child, I too would probably be treated for PTSD.  Society would consider it normal as losing a child is considered traumatic, but if we have defined the unborn as not being a “person” then it makes sense that there would be no need to grieve after an abortion.  Tell that to the thousands of women, and men, who to this day are dealing with the loss of their unborn child.

If the grief of abortion is not healed, says Dr. Burke, then the world becomes a Freddy Krueger-like nightmare.  She maintains that the horror icons of the United States such as Freddy Krueger and the “evil child movies” are symbols of a culture running away from its guilt. I think that evil child movies are all around us.  The child is the victimizer, the one who torments, while other movies illustrate the horror of being tracked down by an ‘abortionist’ figure who is out to kill her baby. I’ve watched MTV where baby dolls are thrown off cliffs, discarded, abused, and unwanted – revealing the unconscious conflict shared by all who have rejected children or been abused themselves after having been used for sexual pleasure. (Martinez)

This brings us back to healing, and the need to inform women of what they are facing when they decide to abort.  There are efforts under way to sue doctors who perform abortions in order to end this horrible nightmare.  Another way is to reverse Roe v. Wade, which also is in the works.  Something needs to done, actually something has to be done, if we as a nation are to stand true to what our Founding Fathers had in mind when they declared that we were to be given the opportunity for “Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness.”   If we deny life to the defenseless unborn, when will our number be up?  The slippery slope is here, only not in the form of a fallacy.  If we declare that the unborn does not deserve to live, then we can also make that declaration to the handicapped, the aged, the blind, the deaf and so on.  Healing is only a step away as far as making things right with our maker.  Yet, we have denied the basis of our existence and the truth of being created with dignity and worth.  The fallacies continue.   Women are hurting yet we deny them the help needed all in the name of “choice!” When will it end?  It will depend on us, no one else.

 Works Cited

“A list of Major Physical Sequelae Related to Abortion.” Elliot Institute.

            15 April 2003 http://www.afterabortion.org/physica.html.

 “Abortion Nearly Four Times Deadlier than Childbirth.” Elliot Institute.

            15 April 2003 http://www.afterabortion.org/news/abortiondeaths.html.

Burke, Theresa. Ph.D. Forbidden Grief: The Unspoken Pain of Abortion

            Springfield, Illinois: Acorn Books, 2001.

“Fact Sheet for Early Surgical Abortion.” Planned Parenthood of CT., Inc.

            New Haven, Connecticut 01 Jan2000.

Martinez, Fred. “Ending the Abortion Nightmare…Would Make Bush The

            Next Lincoln.” The Wanderer 23 Jan 2003: 11.

Van Camp, Julie. Ethical Issues in the Courts: A companion to Philosophical

            Ethics. Stamford, Connecticut: Wadsworth/Thomson Learning 2001.  

Web Resource: http://www.rachelsvineyard.org/

  END OF STUDENT PAPER

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.Notes for future lecture:

Percent of women who have had abortions: 50% (with an accuracy of + or - 5 - 10 %

BLESSED GIANNA BERETTA MOLLA,

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Whoever destroys a single life is as guilty as though he
had destroyed the entire world; and whoever rescues a single
life earns as much merit as though he had rescued the
entire world. --The Talmud, Mishna