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Do American Women Regret Having Abortions?

by — Last updated: 2015-08-28 in Women's Health

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Anti-abortion rights groups in the US often showcase the stories of women who were tormented by their decicions to terminate their pregnancies. A recent study of 667 women who had abortions, however, finds that 95 percent believe they decided correctly.

There was a time when abortion was a horror that followed American women for the rest of their lives. That time has almost completely passed, but where abortions are difficult to obtain, desperate women sometimes take desperate measures.

Botched, Back Alley Abortions Ruined Women's Lives

Two women I knew, both born about the end of World War I, had abortions in the 1930's. Both had conceived a child out of wedlock. Both would have been alienated from their families and shunned by the small towns in which they lived had they brought the baby to term. Neither had the support of a home of unwed mothers or an adoption agency to provide them with shelter, clothing, food, and medical care while they might have brought their unborns to term.

Both found doctors willing to perform illegal abortions in secret. 

One paid the doctor the then-considerable sum of $40 for the procedure. In 1932, this was approximately a month's pay. The pregnancy was terminated, but she developed sepsis and nearly died. (This was about a decade before antibiotics were available.) She managed to have a happy marriage, but never achieved a stable relationship again after her husband died suddenly of a heart attack at an early age.

The second had her abortion in 1933 at the age of 16, with no complications other than the doctor also tied her fallopian tubes. As a result, she never conceived a child. When I last saw her in 2008, when she was 91, she had every surface in every room of her large home filled with a doll, except her kitchen table, where we had coffee. 

She mourned her inability to have another child for the rest of her life.

Abortion Safety Today

Abortion is a safer procedure in the US today. In many states it is difficult to find an abortion clinic, but very few women endure backroom or botched procedures. (They are not unknown, especially in deep South Texas.) Fewer women suffer injury or death from abortion than endure complications of pregnancy at every stage of gestation.
 
When abortion is induced by medication, or medication is used to induce labor before a surgical procedure, complications are essentially zero. Under one percent of women undergoing surgical abortions will develop infections. Death of the mother as a result of abortion is not unknown, but it is:
  • Approximately 1 woman in 250,000 when the procedure is performed during the first 8 weeks of pregnancy,
  • Approximately 1 woman in 33,000 when the procedure is performed in the ninth through fifteenth weeks,
  • Approximately 1 woman in 8,000 after the fourth month of pregnancy.
Death, when it occurs, is typically due to pulmonary embolism, leakage of amniotic fluid into the bloodstream, or complications of anesthesia. In the United States, fewer than  percent of all abortions involve induced labor (giving pills to force a miscarriage is much more common in other countries), and essentially all abortions after the first trimester involve surgery.
About one in three pregnancies is ended by abortion in the United States. The procedure is most often performed on women who are 20 to 24 years old. Unintended pregnancies are most common among African-American women, about twice as often as other groups in the USA.
 
Clearly, elective abortion in the twenty-first century leaves few lasting physical effects on women, but what about its emotional effects?
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