Psychological Aspects of Elective Abortion

Unfortunately, even today many women turn to their gynecologist to «resolve an unexpected situation», even though they should be well informed and aware that even a single act of unprotected intercourse (sometimes not even a complete one) can cause a pregnancy!

The situation cuts across age and educational level, affecting both very young women and mature women, who often already have children and do not feel able to start over from scratch.

On a psychological level, for every woman, the choice to have an abortion, however carefully considered, is not free of a distress that many do not recognize or do not want to admit, which can show itself before the abortion, right after it, or even a long time later, and which can affect any future pregnancies and the relationship with future children.

However certain, however settled in a choice they consider inevitable, many women arrive at the operating room in tears, their convictions, which had seemed like certainties just a short time before, now wavering. Others, on the other hand, seem not to feel the impact at all, maintaining their composure and certainty even at the moment of the procedure, but then, often even months later, if some situation brings back the trauma they thought they had overcome, they can fall into a depressive state that they may not even connect to the earlier abortion.

It is not only feelings of guilt that cause this distress, but also the resurfacing of the anguish of abandonment that many people may have experienced during childhood, even if they were never actually abandoned. A lack or an inconsistency of emotional investment can have made the little girl feel defenseless and fragile, in a situation of danger, of emotional deprivation, even if this does not correspond to the actual facts. The abortion feeds back into the mother these past feelings, which amplify her guilt through her identification with the aborted embryo. It is as if all the aggression felt in childhood toward the figures who made her feel abandoned were now turned against herself, the adult who rejects a child who will not be born, a child she identifies with.

To this is added the fear of having caused damage to her body through the abortion, damage that could seriously threaten her ability to have children again. Indeed, infertility often appears following one or more induced abortions. Without the guilt being defused, for some women it becomes difficult to get pregnant again and carry a pregnancy to term. For others, who do manage it, it is the relationship with the child that can be affected by what happened before. The «bad mother» who had an abortion turns into a mother who is excessively protective of her newborn, as if she had to make up to this child for what she did to the other one. It should be remembered, though, that a mother's possessiveness conceals a strong dose of aggression, which the child still has to defend against!