Unspeakable admission: I regret my abortions
Older women lament early-life decisions, face senior years alone
Published: 13 hours ago
In a poignant essay, a Barbados woman confesses the unspeakable: she regrets having aborted her two children.
The 47-year-old unnamed woman wrote, “Each time I hear a child laughing or see children playing, I regret not having any. I truly regret that I did not have at least one child to leave all that I have worked so hard for. It’s not easy knowing that as you grow old, and friends pass on, that there is no one there to take care of you if the worst happens.”
In today’s permissive culture, such an admission is tantamount to heresy. Women are not supposed to regret abortions; they’re supposed to feel liberated.
Admitting she was too young with her first pregnancy (at 17) and not ready to face motherhood alone when her boyfriend abandoned her during her second pregnancy (at 23), the woman now laments the emptiness of her life without children.
“I guess that’s the irony of life – something comes your way and you reject it; but when you want that same thing later, it never comes your way again,” she wrote. “My two closest friends and I have gone through the same thing, and when we get together all we do is sip wine and laugh at how our lives have turned out. Each of us say that had we known how empty our lives would have been now without a child, we would have brought ours into the world. Unfortunately, each of us is way past that age that we can have a child now. I am 47 and they are 48 years old. This guilty feeling is why I decided to talk about my biggest regret. Young women need to hear from people like me who have walked in their shoes, did what we were told, but now are unhappy because of it.”
The woman does not believe in making abortion illegal, but merely advises young women to anticipate what their future might be like without children. “I firmly believe that as long as a girl is over 18 years old and gets pregnant, she should bring that child. The only reasons I would even consider abortion is if I was raped, or tests show that the baby would be disabled.”
Read the tested and proven strategies to defeat the abortion cartel, in “Abortion Free: Your Manual for Building a Pro-Life America One Community at a Time.”
Regret for abortions is something progressives have attempted to downplay at all costs. In July, Time magazine reported on a three-year study by the multidisciplinary academic journal PLOS ONE that showed “hardly any” women regret having an abortion.
The PLOS ONE study reported, “Women experienced decreasing emotional intensity over time, and the overwhelming majority of women felt that termination was the right decision for them over three years. Emotional support may be beneficial for women having abortions who report intended pregnancies or difficulty deciding.”
Time magazine summarized, “Ninety-five percent of women who have had abortions do not regret the decision to terminate their pregnancies. [The study's] conclusions come after a three-year research period in which nearly 670 women were regularly surveyed on the subject of their abortions. The sample group was diverse with regard to standard social metrics (race, education, and employment) and on the matter of what the study calls pregnancy and abortion circumstances. Financial considerations were given as the reasons for an abortion by 40 percent of women; 36 percent had decided it was ‘not the right time;’ 26 percent of women found the decision very or somewhat easy; 53 percent found it very or somewhat difficult.”
However, this study “has a number of flaws that belie the conclusions drawn by the authors,” according to the website AfterAbortion.com, which called the study “deceptive.”
“Among the flaws:
The study’s findings and conclusions are overreaching due to self-selection and high drop out rates. … This means 62.5% of women refused to participate in the study, at first request, and another 15% dropped out before or during the baseline interview, yielding only a 31.9% participation rate at baseline.
With 68.1% percent of eligible women refusing to participate in the study at baseline, it is improper for the authors to suggest that their findings reflect the general experiences of most women. … In a … post-abortion interview study by Soderberg, the author reported that in interviews with those declining to participate “the reason for non-participation seemed to be a sense of guilt and remorse that they did not wish to discuss. An answer often given was: ‘Do do not want to talk about it. I just want to forget.’”
It is very likely that the self-selected 31.9% percent of women agreeing to participate were more highly confident of their decision to abort prior to their abortions and anticipated fewer negative outcomes.
Despite the initial selection bias, 15 percent of those agreeing to be interviewed subsequently opted out of the baseline interview and another 31 percent opted out within the three year followup period. This indicates that even among women who expected little or no negative reactions, the stress of participating in follow up interviews lead to a change of mind.
The deceptive practices of the research team are made clear in press releases and an infographic purporting to summarize the study. In these “summaries” the research group conceals the details regarding the high non-participation rate and boldly claims “95 percent of women who had abortions felt it was the right decision, both immediately and over 3 years” — omitting the fact that 62.5 percent refused to participate at the time of their abortion, another 15 percent dropped out prior to the baseline interview, and of those interviewed another 31 percent dropped out by the third year. The fact that the abstract, press release, and other summarizing materials published by the authors consistently omit mention of the high rate of non-participation is problematic itself. The fact that they, to the contrary, consistently imply that their results apply to the entire population of women having abortions is clearly deceptive.”
AfterAbortion.com also lists numerous points demonstrating why the study was not representative of the generation population of women seeking abortion.
It’s worth noting this study did not include older women who had abortions at a young age, such as the Barbados woman who had later-life regrets. In fact, Theresa Bonpartis of Reclaiming Our Children notes, “The study only looked at three years after a woman’s abortion. Most women do not even begin to deal with an abortion until around seven years after.”
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Bonpartis adds, “To be honest, this [study] makes me angry. Mostly because it perpetuates the feeling of being crazy if your abortion does bother you, like there is something wrong with you if it does.”
The Barbados woman who now regrets her two abortions has advice for young women: “[N]one of us could see the future. We never could have imagined back then that we would be so close today. And that is why I take the position that I do on abortions. Avoid them at all cost.”
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