Jessica SALTER
Women should not be made to feel guilty for abortions and miscarriages,
Elizabeth* was 25 and in her last year of university when she found out she was pregnant. “I had been with my partner no more than three months,” she tells me. “It was evident he wouldn’t support me should I continue with the pregnancy. I was crippled by debt and just starting what I thought was a new life and, as much as I wanted this baby, I couldn’t do it alone.”
So, like the one in three women who will have an abortion in Britain, Elizabeth ended her pregnancy. Seven years later, and after the death of her son, Felix, who succumbed to a congenital heart defect, Elizabeth found herself struggling to mourn her miscarriage – which she had hoped would be her rainbow baby.
“Throughout my pregnancies, I felt sure something would go wrong,” Elizabeth, who lives in Dorset, says. “I remember telling my mother that I was going to have an abortion and that it would mean God would take one of my future babies as punishment. I was haunted by that for years, especially after the death of my son and subsequent pregnancy loss.”
As a clinical psychologist specialising in reproductive and maternal mental health, and the creator of the #Ihadamiscarriage campaign, I’ve heard from countless women who’ve struggled to grieve the untimely end of a wanted pregnancy while simultaneously feeling comfortable – even confident – about a pregnancy they chose to terminate.
Essentially, those who have experienced both a miscarriage and an abortion often face feelings of shame and guilt – two powerful forces that can lead to self-hate, depression, anxiety, and other negative feelings that may be deleterious to a person’s mental health.
“After I had my miscarriage, I blamed myself,” Teresa*, 30, who lives in Durham, tells me. Eight years before her pregnancy loss, Teresa had an abortion – a decision she did not doubt at all. She was unequivocal: it wasn’t yet time to raise a human being.
More than one in five pregnancies in Britain will end in miscarriage
“I had just started a new relationship, and we were still [really] young. When I told him I was pregnant he wasn’t happy, and I knew instantly what choice had to be made. I couldn’t bear the thought of bringing a child into the world, knowing his/her father would resent them, so for that reason I had to end the pregnancy.”
However, her miscarriage made her revisit her decision to terminate an earlier pregnancy.
“My miscarriage made me regret my abortion,” she said. “I thought about all the what-ifs. And my abortion made me feel guilty about my pregnancy loss. It made me feel like it was karma paying me a visit.” Studies have shown that abortion does not negatively impact a person’s fertility, or is the cause of a future pregnancy loss. And like abortion, miscarriage is incredibly common – more than one in five pregnancies in Britain will end in a miscarriage.
But lies about abortion – that it is unsafe (it’s safer than having your wisdom teeth removed), that it causes cancer (it does not), that most people regret their abortions (a recent study found that 95 per cent of people do not, even five years after the fact) – can leave women who have had abortions feeling as though they’re to blame for their miscarriages.
A 2019 survey of 3,440 adult women in Britain and the US found that 66 per cent of women believe they’re to blame for their pregnancy losses, even though the majority of miscarriages are the result of a chromosomal
abnormality. “I thought my body was punishing me for having an abortion,” Teresa says. “At the time, I believed my miscarriage happened due to my abortion. However, after receiving counselling, I now know and believe my body did everything to support my pregnancy and that one had nothing to do with the other.”
While the majority of people who choose to have an abortion are certain of their decision at the time – one study assessing the certainty of 500 women seeking abortion care in the US found that the majority agreed strongly with the statements “I know which options are available to me” and “I expect to stick to my decision” – and the vast majority of abortion patients do not go on to doubt or regret their decision, the shame manufactured by the anti-abortion movement can metastasize after a pregnancy loss and
Jessica Zucker is a psychologist specialising in reproductive health and the author of I Had a Miscarriage: A Memoir, A Movement
during the grieving period. What was a sure decision is now painted as a villainous decision that has somehow become the catalyst for punishment.
“Pregnancy loss is chock-full of what-ifs,” Teresa tells me. And in the “what-if ” period, she says, she couldn’t help but doubt a decision she knew was right for her when she made it. And it is this self-doubt, often manufactured and facilitated by outside forces, that can work to vilify abortion and those who have one.
It reinforces the idea that a person who has an abortion and a person who has a miscarriage are two different people. In reality, they are often one in the same, and just like they were able to make their own choices about their own bodies, they’re capable of feeling a wide range of emotions in response to the many reproductive outcomes.
Which is why it’s worth remembering that the way abortion is discussed and legislated in the US does not stay confined to those 50 states – the ramifications of both the rhetoric and the proposed anti-abortion legislation travel across the pond, harming people who have lived through the many possible outcomes of reproduction.
As miscarriage becomes criminialised in the US in an attempt to curtail abortion rights – women who get pregnant face up to 30 years in prison for having a miscarriage under Georgia’s recent House Bill, for example – it is impossible to ignore the fact that when one normal outcome of pregnancy is demonised, every other possible outcome is subject to judgment, as well as the people who experience them. And now that the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic has given anti-abortion politicians in the US another excuse to legislate away access to abortion care, countries around the world are, once again, in danger of regressing. According to the Guttmacher Institute, if even 10 per cent of safe abortions become unsafe, we could see an additional three million unsafe abortions and an additional 1,000 maternal deaths.
For Elizabeth, who was cradling her 10-week-old baby when speaking to me, it took finally processing and grieving her abortion to fully heal from her miscarriage.
“I now know that God would not punish a baby because of my decisions,” she says. “My pregnancy loss has enabled me to be more forgiving of myself about my choice to have an abortion. I have forgiven myself and my body for both losses.”
*Some names have been changed
‘I thought my body was punishing me for having an abortion’