After the abortion: by ceding the counseling role to pro-lifers, pro-choicers may be doing their cause more harm than good

Washington Monthly, March, 1998 by Jonathan Dube

A stone statue of Jesus Christ cradling a child stood before the mourners. Brenda Heyworth clutched the knit baby hat and little white booties she had bought for her son, whom she lost before she ever got to know. Tears rolled down her cheeks as she sank her high heels into Woodlawn Cemetery's moist soil, muddied from the morning's rain.

"Dear Jordan," the 42-year-old read slowly from a handwritten letter, taking deep breaths to maintain her composure. "I want you to know that I have always longed to hold you in my arms. That longing will only be fulfilled when we meet in heaven. Please forgive me, and if, you can, help me to forgive myself. The knowledge that I ended your life is almost more than I can bear. If I could make the decision today, I would do it differently. It was the worst mistake and worst sin in my life. If I hadn't allowed myself to be deceived, our lives or our deaths would have been different, in our Lord's hands. I love you." Her sobbing nearly overwhelmed her as she read her signature: "Your Mother."

For Brenda Heyworth, the memorial service was the beginning of the end of the grieving process. For 22 years she had lived with the guilt of having sacrificed her son's life for personal reasons when she chose to abort her pregnancy. "I hated myself," Heyworth says. "It hurt so bad emotionally I couldn't deal with it." So when she learned of a post-abortion counseling program near her home in Joliet, Ill., she sought help.

Heyworth is one of thousands of women each year who turn to such programs to deal with the lingering emotional effects of abortion. Dozens of groups dedicated to post-abortion counseling have sprung up around the country in the past decade, which is hardly surprising considering 1.4 million women terminate pregnancies each year. What is surprising, however, is that these counselors are not affiliated with abortion clinics or family planning agencies. In fact, they aren't even pro-choice. With names such as Women Exploited By Abortion and American Victims of Abortion, these groups firmly believe abortion is immoral, yet spend their time counseling women who have chosen to abort.

At the same time, the people one might expect to offer this type of counseling -- those dedicated to abortion rights and women's health issues -- rarely provide such services. Pro-choice groups maintain that such programs do more harm than good, and claim they're unnecessary because studies show that abortion causes women little psychological harm. But behind this ambivalence lies a deeper, political motive: Pro-choice advocates fear that, by counseling women who have had abortions, they would be acknowledging that abortions can, in fact, cause depression and emotional trauma -- and thus arm the pro-life camp. But by refusing to move beyond the political rhetoric, pro-choice advocates are in some ways abandoning the very women whose rights they claim to champion.

The Politics of Grief

At the heart of the post-abortion counseling issue is an intensely politicized debate over the psychological effects of abortion. Nowadays, one can find studies to back up any side of any cause, so it's not surprising that the right has a truckload of research demonstrating abortions negative psychological effects, while the left has just as many studies proving those effects are negligible. Pro-choicers maintain that the most common reaction to abortion is relief, because the procedure ends a stressful unwanted pregnancy. Pro-life advocates, on the other hand, cite evidence for what they call post-abortion stress or "Post-abortion Syndrome," whose symptoms are said to include abortion flashbacks, relationship problems, guilt, severe depression, low self-esteem, substance abuse, and even suicidal tendencies. They point to a 1985 doctoral dissertation by University of Minnesota psychologist Anne Speckhard, who compared post-abortion stress to the Post-traumatic Stress Disorder that afflicts many Vietnam veterans. Many women, wrote Speckhard, suffer flashbacks and hallucinations, while others report intense nightmares related to the experience, such as images of discarded fetuses in garbage heaps or babies trying to locate their mother.

The debate over abortion's psychological impact surfaced as a political issue in the late 1980s. As prolife groups realized they were losing the abortion battle on legal grounds, they began trying to scare women away from the procedure by painting it as a threat to women's health, both physically and psychologically. At the urging of such groups, in 1987 President Reagan asked then-Surgeon General C. Everett Koop to produce a report on the medical and psychological impact of abortion. Koop reviewed more than 200 studies on the subject. But upon completing the report in January l989 he refused to release it, saying that the research in the area was too flawed for him to draw any solid conclusions. "At this time, the available scientific evidence ... simply cannot support either the preconceived beliefs of those pro-life or those pro-choice," Koop wrote in a letter to Reagan.