Trauma from abortion - why the surprise?

Lucy Burns... "After the abortion, I had a mental breakdown." Publisher's photo

Uma Thurman became pregnant as an aspiring actress when an older teenager. She wanted to keep the baby, but her family persuaded her to have an abortion. In an article, she describes the “shame” she internalised as she went through with the procedure, adding:

There is so much pain in this story. It has been my darkest secret until now... The abortion I had as a teenager was the hardest decision of my life, one that caused me anguish then and that saddens me even now...

Though Thurman is pro-abortion now, she obviously wasn't when she was carrying the child. She has had three more children and counts her ability to be a mother to them as a benefit of her gruelling experience. But the abortion still saddens her.

Meanwhile, Lucy Burns, the young writer of a book on her experience of having an abortion, "found terminating an unwanted pregnancy to be both a physically and mentally traumatic experience", as a Sunday Times review puts it.

In a Harper's Bazaar piece, Burns talks about the abortion aftermath:

After the abortion, I had a mental breakdown. I became obsessed with anti-abortion memes. I thought that people could tell that I’d had an abortion just by looking at me. I was so terrified of being exposed that I kept a list of everyone who knew about the abortion. The anger, the paranoia, and the intrusive thoughts were exhausting. It wasn’t until I wrote about the experience of having sex for the first time after the abortion that I realised how disconnected from my body I felt. And it wasn’t until I tried to put everything in chronological order for the book (and saw that I couldn’t remember what happened when) that I realised I probably had post-traumatic stress disorder.

Burns's book, Larger Than an Orange, is a personal account but highlights what a Guardian columnist sees as useful for all, namely, that: "what has become difficult to acknowledge is that for some women, even a legal, safe abortion can be a traumatic experience." 

My point here is not to promote the concept of a post-abortion syndrome that would affect all women in that gruelling situation, but to draw attention to the feeling that women commonly have that there is more to their abortion than removing a few cells.

We can judge the factual state of affairs from reviews of medical literature, as with that by Reardon (2018)*. Referring to the abortion and mental health controversy, this journal article states:

[B]oth sides agree that (a) abortion is consistently associated with elevated rates of mental illness compared to women without a history of abortion; (b) the abortion experience directly contributes to mental health problems for at least some women; (c) there are risk factors, such as pre-existing mental illness, that identify women at greatest risk of mental health problems after an abortion; and (d) it is impossible to conduct research in this field in a manner that can definitively identify the extent to which any mental illnesses following abortion can be reliably attributed to abortion in and of itself.  

We learn from this that abortion is likely to have consequences for the would-be mother. 

Burns talks of some of her friends' reaction to her book: 

“So many of my women friends have said, ‘I knew this to be true, it had to be true, but I have never heard anyone say it before.’ Which is mad.” 

The columnist adds: "As for her male friends, many of them had no idea what abortion even involved." (But note that the fathers of aborted children can also suffer severe mental distress. See here.)

I find it interesting that the women friends would say "It had to be true", about the anguish over having an abortion. Women appreciate that abortion involves guilt in the ending of a life; they know that within the woman is what will be a child, that is, that there now exists a separate entity that has a unique gene structure, that has distinctly female or male cells, an entity that is already experiencing the change in bodily form that will continue until natural death. Of course, necessarily, guilt is in the emotional and spiritual mix affecting the mother's mental state.  

This relates to a rhetorical line from the Guardian columnist: about pro-life supporters being "still bogged down in emotive, religious arguments about when life begins".

When, then, does that writer accept that a new life exists? Is it purely at viability despite the fact that early on there is a separate genetic identity and defined sex? Those "cells" are not the woman's but the "alien" baby's. Would that writer support the killing of a healthy baby close to full term, or one born alive as a result of an induced abortion as would be permitted under the legislation recently passed by the US House of Representatives?

That legislation, the so-called Women's Health Protection Act, would prohibit restrictions on abortion after fetal viability "when, in the good-faith medical judgment of the treating health care provider, continuation of the pregnancy would pose a risk to the pregnant patient's life or health". Note, "health" is not defined, meaning completely unrestricted abortion in practice. 

Partial birth abortion was only used on late-term children and involved cutting a hole in the base of their heads and sucking their brains out with an aspirator. (Source)

There is another concern arising from the freedom young people feel about aborting human life, as if it had no significance for the rest of society. Burns writes: "I’m not ashamed that I had an abortion", and the same attitude is highlighted by the Guardian columnist:

Accepting that abortion will be traumatising for some women adds force to the argument that no one should have to jump through hoops or stick to a legally mandated script in order to access it. To have to subject your feelings about an unwanted pregnancy to a box-ticking exercise is not a sign of a humane, holistic system.

Rather, legislation about this important act is seen to be crucial because of its significance, brought into perspective by the fact of the mental illness - distress, at least - that runs at a noticeable level, and the loss of a new member of society. Society certainly has a role to institute measures that are "humane, holistic" - but to protect its members, whether women or babies. Society exists to protect its own.

Insight on this matter is offered by Giles Fraser in the British publication, Unherd.  He states in an article titled, "The oppressive individualism of human rights":

Much that has been achieved by an appeal to human rights has been laudable. But I remain cautious about the inherent individualism of human rights, that a right is regarded as the property of individual human beings and as the foundational basis for this whole moral philosophy. Cautious because, for most of human history, ethical consciousness has been structured around a sense of corporate responsibility – of the ‘we’ coming before the ‘I’.

Writing in the Human Rights Law Journal in 2016, Hurst Hammun, Professor of International Law at Tuft University, offered the following warning:

“Unless there is a conscious attempt to return to the principles of consensus and universality, the increasingly strident calls from European and other ‘Western’ human rights activists for adherence to the contemporary liberal European construct of society is likely to create a backlash in the rest of the world. This tendency is concurrently exacerbated by activists who see an expansive concept of ‘rights’ as the primary means to effect domestic social and political change.”

[...] in the ideology of human rights, the rest of the world and all other people are regarded as satellites to the solitary individual who is demanding their ‘rights’ as a form of moral self-assertion. And as self-assertion knows no limits, so the sense of what rights one is entitled to inevitably grows and grows.

This is the mission creep of human rights language. “The defence of human rights has reached such extremes as to make society as a whole defenceless,” wrote Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. And that was way back in 1978. Since then human rights have demanded ever greater jurisdiction.

There are those, especially in Muslim countries, who regard human rights as a means of ushering in Western liberal values against the will of the majority. They argue that the expansion of human rights language has coincided historically with the liberal hegemony in the West and that it fails to respect other moral systems like Islam – or even Judaism and Christianity with their communitarian moral consciousness.

But the doctrine of human rights was substantially the creation of seventeenth century Christian political theology. It was John Locke that argued that human beings had been granted their rights by God and as protection against tyrannical government. “All men … are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights” as the Declaration of Independence put it, drawing on Locke.

And the protection of minorities – women, children, ethnic minorities, homosexuals – against the power and prejudice of the majority has been at the heart of its moral successes. But no one considered that the language of rights could itself become a form of tyranny – a means of imposing liberal values on the majority of society against their will.

Fraser worries that "without (Locke’s) God to underwrite its claims to an unbreakable connection between morality and the human individual, it becomes ever plainer that human rights only exist because we believe in them". 

This description of the effort to believe in "rights" that have no deeper significance than they seem a good idea creates the image in my mind of a political rally where policies are being launched, not with a clearly enunciated argument and firm principles but with flags and banners and chanting activists. All too often, it does not matter to those campaigners that the policy may be destructive, as long as it espouses a fashionable cause and promises a feel-good future.

[*] Reardon D. C. (2018). The abortion and mental health controversy: A comprehensive literature review of common ground agreements, disagreements, actionable recommendations, and research opportunities. SAGE open medicine, 6, 2050312118807624. https://doi.org/10.1177/2050312118807624 See at https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6207970/ 

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