Here are some ways in which I think my experience of having to terminate a wanted pregnancy posed unique mental health issues for me. The normal grief that I would experience from a pregnancy loss was exacerbated by not being able to be fully open about my feelings with people due to the abortion stigma factor. I wished that I could have prepared myself better by hearing more stories from others in similar situations or speaking with a specialized counselor before this difficult period in my life. Hopefully, by sharing some of the details of my experience, it can help others to better cope and heal.
- Imagining the details of the late-term abortion itself was scary for me, mainly because reliable and up to date information was not available to me. At first, I felt a lot of anxiety not knowing what the procedure entailed and how, in medical terms, my baby’s life was going to end. I was worried about the health risks associated with going under (with general anesthesia) on both Day 1 and Day 2, and about the risks of the actual surgical procedure. I worried about how much the stigma of abortion and the images I had seen in the media of “baby-killers” (especially surrounding the controversy of “late-term abortions”) would impact my psyche and ability to recover from this experience. I worried that I would encounter angry pro-life activists protesting outside the clinic where I would have the procedure.
- After the baby was euthanized on the first day of the procedure, I continued to feel the baby kick for several weeks after. This “phantom kicking” that many people describe (even after women birth healthy babies or aren’t even pregnant) was a very strange and unsettling experience for me. I figured that it was a psychosomatic response to the emotionally stressful termination process but I have read that others attribute it to local nerve damage, ligament readjustment or abdominal/uterine muscle readjustment, or gas. To make matters worse, I also experienced “phantom crying” a couple of times in the first week after the procedure, at night when the house was quiet. In both instances I actually got up out of my chair to look for the crying baby.
- In our case, the genetic test results of our baby’s chromosomal abnormality showed that we were in the rare 5% of people who have a genetic incompatibility called a Robertsonian Translocation, that usually shows up again in subsequent pregnancies with high odds. This added another layer of worry and grief to the situation, especially when I thought about how I may never be able to have more children (luckily, this wasn’t the case).
- After a month or so after the procedure, I was surprised by how sad and “off” I still felt. The mild feelings of depression that I had (feeling empty, not sleeping well, having low energy and not wanting to do anything) were overlapping with feelings of grief and loss (disbelief, anger, regret, and anxiety), which I took as a normal response to the loss I had faced. It still took at least 6 months to begin to feel “normal” again, even thought I knew the process of grief I experienced, was, in fact “normal.”
- It was stressful not knowing which one of your friends and family were morally/politically opposed to abortion, which made it difficult to openly talk about what I had experienced. Even with those friends and family who I knew supported our decision to have the abortion, I felt like I had to whisper and hide my real experience, knowing that the details could easily offend or cause uneasy feelings with people within earshot. It created a temporary shame and guilt within me that I had not ever previously felt (and which was especially unsettling to me, having been a vocal supporter of abortion and pro-choice policies my whole adult life).
Late-Term Abortion in Wanted Pregnancies 