Women Overwhelmingly Don’t Regret Abortions, Research Finds, But Denying Them Takes A Toll

In some ways, reproductive health and medicine are facing greater threats today than ever before, including a fast-approaching Supreme Court fight that could ultimately deny care to millions of US families. Meanwhile, experts in this field are also making major strides, including landmark research on abortion outcomes over time, which debunks numerous common anti-abortion claims.

In January, researchers at the University of California, San Francisco’s Advancing New Standards in Reproductive Health (ANSIRH) center published the third and final paper based on their groundbreaking Turnaway Study, which tracked the experiences of 1000 women who either received an abortion or were denied one, recorded at one week after the event and then semiannually for five years.

Overall, researchers found that women and their families saw long-term harms when they were denied wanted abortions, including dips in extant children’s developmental progress and women’s income and credit scores. They also concluded that some of the most popular arguments to restrict abortion — suggesting that women will regret their abortions, or that the procedure may be bad for women’s mental health — just don’t line up with the data.

The team’s latest article tackles this point head-on: despite frequent popular rhetoric arguing otherwise, their longitudinal study found that women who received abortions overwhelmingly said that they primarily felt relieved, and continued to feel their decision had been right in the five years that followed.

“We found no evidence of emerging negative emotions or abortion decision regret; both positive and negative emotions declined over the first two years and plateaued thereafter, and decision rightness remained high and steady,” they explained last month in an article for Social Science & Medicine. “At five years postabortion, relief remained the most commonly felt emotion among all women.”

See also: The Endless Cost Of Maligning Abortion

The negative emotions that women did experience seemed to correspond most to perceived levels of decision-difficulty and stigma in their communities, but also petered out over time. “These results add to the scientific evidence that emotions about an abortion are associated with personal and social context, and are not a product of the abortion procedure itself,” researchers wrote.

Dr. Corinne Rocca, the study’s first author and one of the Turnaway Study’s lead researchers, noted in a phone interview that women who were denied abortions reported raised levels of anxiety, but women who received them reported feeling the kind of positive-and-negative emotional mix you’d expect “during any big life event” (such as changing jobs, moving, or ending a relationship).

“Feelings were most mixed during week after, with some sadness, but also happiness and relief; relief was the most common,” Rocca said. “Experiencing negative emotions during a big life event is completely normal; I don’t find that concerning. What I would find concerning would be if that persisted, or if women looked back [months or years later] and felt tremendous guilt,” but that just wasn’t the case. “And a very-high-to-overwhelming proportion said they felt they made the right decision, which held out over five years.”

The data also showed that women’s consistent feeling of ‘decision rightness’ continued “even under difficult circumstances,” Rocca said — for example, if they had chosen to have a late-term abortion, or had self-reported that they live around abortion stigma. “Even they still felt this was the right decision.” 

This kind of evidence about women’s emotions and perspectives after abortions hadn’t previously existed, Rocca said — for one thing, because it wouldn’t make sense to compare data on women who had abortions with that of women who experienced miscarriages, or who carried a wanted pregnancy to term.

Now that it is available, Rocca and her colleagues hope lawmakers will start taking this and other scientific evidence into account more often when legislating our reproductive health. In numerous states already, she said, “There have been multiple of these targeted regulation of abortion providers (TRAP) laws — a family of them, really — all centered around the regret claim.”

Sometimes such laws will require patients to wait 72 hours before getting the procedure, or require two separate visits (one for ‘counseling,’ one for the abortion), or have ultrasound-viewing requirements. “They’re all really targeting the idea that women will regret abortion,” Rocca said.

“But data suggest those policies are wrong, and that those policies won’t work,” she continued. “My desire for this research is really that we just base our policies on evidence. These are needless policies, and probably create the outcome that they are claiming to protect people from.” In terms of providing meaningful support to pregnant persons in the moment of their decision-making, Rocca added, “A better idea would be to offer solutions for dealing with stigma.”

Regarding the oft-used argument that abortion is or may be bad for women’s mental health (or that they’ll come to regret it), Rocca commented, “I think in part it’s because people who are against abortion don’t want to be anti-women, and the claim that they want to protect women from this decision has seemed appealing.” It’s far from the only misconception (or misrepresentation) out there, however. And usually the problem isn’t that research hasn’t been done.

“Some of the biggest gaps in people’s knowledge about abortion, and in the public’s knowledge, aren’t things we haven’t answered yet. They’re things that are out there, and firmly established,” Rocca said.

According to Rocca, the biggest knowledge gap has to do with “just how safe abortion is,” she said. “Far safer than a colonoscopy, or many other common procedures that people routinely get.” That includes surgical as well as medication abortions, “despite [the latter] being heavily regulated by the FDA.”

“The second [gap] is how common it is: people think abortions are rare, but one in three or four women have them in their lifetime,” Rocca said. “People may think they don’t know somebody that’s had one, but they’re wrong.”

See also: Dear AT&T, Boeing, Pfizer, Comcast, Walmart, Etc: Stop Funding Abortion Attackers