Confronting Emotions After Abortion

Forget sex, politics, religion.

The woman who has had an abortion enters an alien land where none of the above compute. It is a land of buried emotion, where intellect and education are irrelevant, where other people’s judgments of you are never as harsh as your own.

Some women know they must grieve for what they lost. Others wrongly imagine that because it was their choice to abort, they don’t need to pause to explore buried pain.

Both groups are meant to benefit from “The Healing Choice, Your Guide to Emotional Recovery After Abortion,” by Candace De Puy and Dana Dovitch (Simon & Schuster).

“It is not a book about right or wrong,” the authors say.

“Beneath the clamor of the abortion debate, the quiet impact abortion has” on a woman’s psychological life “has gone unheard. [It] remains a significant personal experience that is not publicly recognized, socially sanctioned or frankly shared in the way a divorce, the death or a loved one, or a miscarriage might be.”

Because there is no charted course to help a woman heal, she is left to resolve her own feelings.

The book intends to chart that course. From pregnancy through abortion, to the aftermath of isolation from friends, to chapters on guilt, anger, spirituality, loss and healing, “The Healing Choice” is filled with homework-like exercises meant to help women explore where they are going and where they have been.

In the chapter on guilt, for example, the reader is asked to write in a journal:

1. What are you feeling guilty about?

2. How independent in your thinking were you when you got pregnant?

3. What were your reasons for having an abortion?

4 What did you sacrifice by having an abortion?

5. What did you gain?

The authors believe that the process of understanding, grieving and accepting is essential to heal the pain.