Question:

Is there truly such thing as a post abortion syndrome? If so, what does it consist of and how does it affect the woman who had an abortion?

Answer:

Among physicians, psychologists, psychiatrists and even priests, the so-called ‘Post-Abortion-Syndrome’ (‘P.A.S.’: ‘Post-Abortion-Syndrome’) is well known. It designates the pathological picture comprising a complex of physiological, psychological and spiritual symptoms, triggered after the performance of a procured (voluntary) abortion. It mainly affects the women who have had the abortion, but it also affects (to varying degrees) everyone else involved in the abortion: the father of the child, the doctors and the abortion staff.

The symptoms that manifest themselves are directly related to the reasons for the abortion, the time of the pregnancy, the relationship between the parents of the child, the steps taken in the decision and the influences that were experienced during the traumatic period of the decision for the abortion.

1. The Psychological Process of the Decision for the Abortion 

In a woman with normal convictions (with or without faith) the decision to have an abortion is a complicated and painful process. Some of the regular steps she usually goes through from the moment of her pregnancy are the following:

1st: From the moment she becomes pregnant, the organism arouses in the mother woman an instinctive maternal feeling. This is observable even in animals and is due on the one hand to the physiological processes that accompany the changes proper to maternity (nature prepares the woman for the relationship between motherhood and affiliation) and on the other hand to other sociological, psychological and spiritual factors, such as the customs of the society in which she lives, her personal maturity, her faith, etc.

2nd: The natural tendency to continue the maternity begun with the conception of the new being can enter in crisis for diverse external or internal factors that bombard the psychology of the woman, as for example (to indicate some of the most frequent):

• The adverse opinion of the pregnant woman’s parents (especially if she is an adolescent) either because of fear of defamation if she is single or because of many other diversely classifiable factors.

• The weight that the woman sees in the upbringing of the child (especially if she already has other children).

• Unresolved psychological conflicts: in the case of women who have had a bad experience of filiation with their own mothers, the fear of facing their own experience of motherhood arises.

• Conditions set by the father of the child: usually threats of abandonment in the event of continuing the gestation.

• The pressure of social rhetoric against the birth rate: the propaganda of overpopulation, the choice of abortion as a woman’s right, the affirmation that the fetus is only a collection of cells, etc.

• The ideology of materialism: when the new child is seen as an obstacle to economic progress and comfort.

• Selfishness: when the child is seen as a chain to freedom (‘first finish your degree, then get a job and only then think about your children’).

• Legal pressure: there are societies that exert pressure to impose birth control; a certain type of pressure is already present in the very ‘legalization’ and ‘state subsidy’ of certain abortions.

3rd: These pressures can lead to a real inner conflict confronting the woman with the need to make a decision. If she needs advice, the advice given will, in most cases, push her towards abortion, especially if in her case the civil law protects her, medicine guarantees it, and society is indifferent to it.

4th: Once the decision has been made, they usually feel a certain relief (natural when the conflictive state is temporarily over), which is sometimes taken as a sign that the decision has been correct. When they decide to abort, they usually close themselves to any other type of contrary advice, since rethinking the issue means reopening the traumatic situation of the deliberative process.

5th: Submission follows, i.e. a kind of resignation whereby they place themselves in the hands of a doctor with a certain feeling of fatality.

6th: The shock of the last moments; in order to commit an abortion, a woman has to eliminate her own maternal instincts which are of a natural order; for this she has to become self-conscious that the being she is going to abort is not a human being; with this attempt at self-convincing she begins the process of rationalization against her own moral conscience and against the same natural instinct. The woman is faced with a chaos of conscience; often, behind her apparent resignation, there is an anguished request for someone to stop the whole process, which appears to be beyond her strength.

7th: Inner hardening. After the abortion there is a time when the woman wants to be left alone, she becomes apathetic, disinterested in things; there is an inner refusal to assume what has been done. She must also fight against the feelings of aggression, despair and fear that emerge with the abortion. On the one hand they would like to unburden themselves to someone, but on the other hand they are afraid of reliving the process they have gone through.

  8th: The work of pathological reconstruction begins. They want to return to normality as soon as possible, so they try to fill themselves with activities so as not to think about anything.

  9th: But usually at some point the defense system that the person involved in the abortion builds around him/herself breaks down. Such a reconstruction of life usually fails when one of the following situations occurs:

• The person who has had an abortion is left too much alone.

• When she remembers the abortion or remembers the date of the abortion or the date that would correspond to the birth of the aborted child or one of its anniversaries (birthdays).

• In states of fatigue or illness.

• When they see other children (especially babies) at the age that they should have their aborted child or children.

• When they become pregnant again.

  In this case the so-called ‘post-abortion syndrome’ takes place.

2. Symptoms of Post Abortion Syndrome

  Although many doctors and psychologists (pro-abortionists) point out that the disorders presented by women after abortion are merely ’emotional and psychological’, a healthy psychiatry shows that it is something much more serious, of pathological order and that can be grouped into three types of problems: first of all, depression and guilt; secondly, aggression against the father of the child and against society in general; finally, alterations in the personality in a chronic form, similar to brain diseases.

  Specifying further we can list the following symptoms:

  1) Symptoms of Grief and Sorrow. Every loss generates a state of grief; and it is much more difficult to overcome the pain of an induced abortion than that of a spontaneous abortion produced by nature itself, and this for several reasons: the person knows she is guilty of the loss, has no possibility of visiting the body of the child, there has been a work of self-convincing that it was not a human being (curiously this work of self-convincing leaves the person with a greater sense of guilt because she knows that she has had to seek arguments to justify an act to which she was not spontaneously inclined by her conscience). When the pain is not overcome, it leads to depression. Depression can alter the immune system, and this increases the risk of contracting infections and even in extreme cases, the onset of cancerous processes has been observed. It has also happened that people who have fallen into acute depressive states, have been transformed into psychotic personalities.

  2) Feeling of Guilt. In many studies it has been observed that when there is no feeling of guilt, there is usually a tendency to alcohol or drug addiction; on the other hand, when there is a feeling of guilt, one tends to fall into depressive states, which manifest themselves in great sadness, crying, negative and pessimistic vision of the surrounding world. When the feeling of guilt is very great it leads to feelings of panic and self-destruction.

  3) Aggressiveness. One effect of the conflict unleashed by the abortion is the aggressiveness of the woman towards those who have intervened in the abortion: the doctor, the boyfriend or husband, the relatives or friends who pushed her into the act and even against herself. In this way, she somehow discharges the feeling of guilt against herself and the feeling of victimization with respect to others.

4) Affective Uncertainty. Part of the hesitation in the abortion decision revolves around the natural love or desire for the child with whom the woman is pregnant. She knows intuitively, although she does not want to reflect it, that her abortive act contradicts her natural love: her child demands to be loved primarily by its mother and nature predisposes her to love and protect it even at the risk of her own life, but in order to abort it she must reject it. The same feeling of lovelessness and helplessness that the woman assumes her child has suffered from her, begins to torment herself: she feels unloved, rejected and affectively abandoned by others. This is one of the ‘boomerang’ effects of abortion.

  5) The abrupt interruption of the hormonal cycle. In women there are natural cycles and rhythms related to pregnancy and characterized by changes in hormonal processes that end naturally at the culmination of the whole process of motherhood, that is, from the moment of ovulation until the end of the time of breastfeeding the baby. Hormonal changes dictate physical, psychological and emotional alterations. When the process is abruptly interrupted, as in the case of abortion, the woman suffers a notable disorder with effects in all these areas: physical, emotional, psychological and relational; these disturbances can range from depression in the emotional order, to the medical confirmation of greater tendencies to acquire breast cancer, to problems of social and family integration.

  6) The ‘Biological Conscience’. This is a finding of many psychiatrists. I quote the testimony of psychiatrist Karl Stern: ‘Not infrequently we see that in cases where a woman commits an artificial abortion, say in the third month of gestation, this act seems to have no psychological consequences. However, six months later, precisely when the baby should have come into the world, the subject falls victim to serious depression or even psychosis. However, two curious circumstances are observed in this regard. The depression occurs even without the woman consciously realizing that ‘now is the time when my baby should have been born’. Moreover, the patient’s philosophy is not necessarily such that she disapproves of the act of terminating the pregnancy. However, her profound reaction of loss (which is not necessarily coupled with a conscious preoccupation with the failed delivery) coincides with the time when it would have taken place… The woman, in her innermost being, is deeply linked to the bios, to nature itself’.

7) The Feeling of Failure as a Mother and Related Problems. Sometimes, in order to fill the void, there is a vehement desire to replace the lost child; but this desire is mixed with suspicion and fear of not knowing how to perform as a mother, or of not being able to relate to the baby in the right way or not knowing how to raise it. It also causes fear with respect to future children, for example: fear of mistreating them; sometimes this causes the decision not to have more children. Some studies also show that some women who have had abortions have real problems in carrying out subsequent maternity: they have problems breastfeeding their children, they react with fear or aggressiveness to their babies’ cries and even a kind of rejection (caused by fear), and as this is instinctively perceived by the baby, it generates feelings of abandonment. Sometimes, as they do not want to harm the child and are aware of not knowing how to treat him/her, they end up sending him/her to day-care centers from a very young age, and without any need to do so.

  8) Other Problems. The studies to which we refer also indicate other symptoms typical of this ‘syndrome’, such as: sleep disturbances of various kinds (persistent nightmares), identity crisis, mistrust, feeling of cynicism (awareness of lost innocence), and even psychosomatic diseases such as anorexia and bulimia.

For all these reasons, it must be said that the problems caused by abortion are by no means purely emotional and passing; however, they have a real basis in the voluntary and culpable loss of a defenseless human being on whom the responsibility of maternity/paternity was placed.

3. Three Testimonies of Women who had an Abortion

  The following three testimonies, from women who have had abortions (without a clear religious or moral culture, nor properly Catholic convictions), show us an aspect of this reality intentionally silenced by abortion campaigns.

• First Testimony: Judith. The pressure from my environment to have an abortion was increasing, and I let myself be convinced. My friend accompanied me to the doctor and after a few days, I decided to have the abortion in a private clinic. The day it took place is like a burn: the scar was not lost. The doctors were nice, but I felt so awful, helpless and alone. When I woke up from the anesthesia, my friend was sitting next to me, but I was no longer the same; I was someone else and I felt alone. And that loneliness I have up to this day. I let them take my child away from me. And just as that child died, something died in me that day. I would never do it again, no matter how my environment will react, because I live in constant fear, which never seems to end. In my nightmares I see how a little girl with outstretched arms comes towards me and asks me: Why, Mommy, why? I wake up in a sweat. And that dream has been haunting me ever since I let myself have that abortion. In the meantime, I am doing very well at work, but my private life is destroyed. My baby should be one year old. I am in mourning for my child, because it was also my mistake, and that mistake cannot be reversed. That is why I alone am the one who must be punished and not my friend, although he was also responsible. The only thing I hope is that my baby will forgive me for this mistake, and that he will understand why I did it. Today I am all alone, as the baby’s father left me alone to regain his “freedom”. I am writing this to all the young girls and women who find themselves in the same situation I was in. Think carefully about what you are going to do. You will be tortured by the traumas. You will be alone in front of yourselves, and the pain will increase when you see a mother with her baby. You will have to bear the consequences of such an intervention, not your partner. He will not be able to help, he will only be there, but it is you who will have to suffer. Your life will be destroyed!

• Second Testimony: Rebeca. I was 21 years old when I had an abortion. I was very afraid. Crying and full of doubts, I went to the place on Wednesday. I saw a lady with a child. The doctor’s assistant was walking back and forth with a plastic bucket. I wondered: would they throw the aborted child in it? I received an injection, when the doctor arrived I was crying uncontrollably. The doctor told me not to make such a big deal out of it, that if I wanted to, we could do it another day. I told him that I didn’t know what I wanted; that he should give me the injection at once, and that was it. In the middle I thought that I did not want to wake up again, I wanted to die. When I woke up, about an hour later, my boyfriend was near me. An unfriendly woman came in and told me to get up, wash my face and leave. Once at my boyfriend’s house, he confessed to me that when I woke up he hated me. I began to have pains and a terrible depression came over me. The next day I went to work, even though I had a day off by prescription, because I was afraid to stay home alone for more than a day. I could not admit that I had aborted my own child. At noon I went to my mother’s house for lunch; she was angry with me, and told me that I should be happy for what I had done because many women do it nowadays. In the afternoon I saw a pregnant woman, came home and threw myself on my bed full of guilt and regret. It was hell. Every time I went to sleep I saw my baby just as I had seen him on the monitor screen. The little one would haunt me. Eventually I started drinking alcoholic beverages at night until I could fall asleep. I broke up with my boyfriend because every time I saw him I was reminded of the aborted child. I met other men, but it was always the same. Half a year after the abortion I was psychologically destroyed. My friends were also tired of me, as were my siblings and parents. My life was destroyed, I also lost my job. I started taking tranquilizers, continued with alcohol and the continuous change of boyfriends. But I could not shake off the feeling of guilt. I want to warn all women who are facing an abortion: an abortion is easy to carry out; but afterwards there is something that breaks you inside, and nobody thinks about that. Sometimes I think about what my life would have been like if I had received my child: surely not as catastrophic as it is now’.

• Third Testimony: Nancy. I was five and a half months pregnant, I already had three children and my husband had abandoned me. I decided to have an abortion because I couldn’t bear another child. The solution, according to the doctor, was to ‘take out some of the fluid and put in some more. She will have some spasms and then we take out the fetus’. It didn’t sound bad, but it wasn’t the whole truth. That day when he introduced the saline solution, I wanted to scream at the top of my lungs: ‘stop everything’. Nothing could be done anymore, there was no going back on the decision. In the next hour and a half I experienced how my daughter was writhing as she was dying of poisoning and burning. I remember how, in the meantime, I talked to her and told her that I didn’t really want that, that I wished she had lived. But she was already dead and I remember the last jolt that hit my left side. Then I received an injection to bring on labor… For twelve hours I was in labor, and on October 31 at 5:30 in the morning I brought my daughter into the world; she had hair and her eyes were open. I was able to lift her as the nurses had not come on time. When the nurse arrived, she grabbed her and threw her in a bucket. After everything was done, I was taken to a room where a mother had just given birth to a beautiful baby boy; that was very hard. After the abortion, shame, regret and guilt settled in me’.

For all these reasons, one can understand the words that John Paul II addresses to women who have had abortions in his encyclical Evangelium Vitae: ‘ I would now like to say a special word to women who have had an abortion. The Church is aware of the many factors which may have influenced your decision, and she does not doubt that in many cases it was a painful and even shattering decision. The wound in your heart may not yet have healed. Certainly what happened was and remains terribly wrong. But do not give in to discouragement and do not lose hope. Try rather to understand what happened and face it honestly. If you have not already done so, give yourselves over with humility and trust to repentance. The Father of mercies is ready to give you his forgiveness and his peace in the Sacrament of Reconciliation. To the same Father and his mercy, you can with sure hope entrust your child. With the friendly and expert help and advice of other people, and as a result of your own painful experience, you can be among the most eloquent defenders of everyone’s right to life. Through your commitment to life, whether by accepting the birth of other children or by welcoming and caring for those most in need of someone to be close to them, you will become promoters of a new way of looking at human life.

Fr. Miguel A. Fuentes

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