Late-Term Abortion in Wanted Pregnancies

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.  Friends who you thought all your life supported reproductive rights, it turned out, were pro-lifers.  Even with those who supported abortion rights, talk about abortion was still taboo and made them squeamish and silent.  Well-meaning family members urged me to look at the bright side and carry on for my 2 year old son.  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, I can help others feel less alone and give them access to information that isn’t readily available on the internet.

• 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 inside me for several weeks after the abortion.  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 it can also be attributed to local nerve damage, ligament readjustment, abdominal/uterine muscle readjustment, or gas.  The strong kicks that just weeks earlier symbolized a healthy baby and that all was well, were now playing cruel tricks on my mind!  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 these moments, I thought more than once that I was losing my mind.
• 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 for 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 supporter of abortion and reproductive justice my whole adult life).