Do women who decide to have abortions regret their decision?

The general belief that women, after having an abortion, experience guilt and depression has been discredited by a new study.

An organization called Advancing New Standards in Reproductive Health (ANSIRH) followed a number of women who had abortions for three years after terminating their pregnancies and later discovered that almost 95 percent of them admitted they were very much satisfied with their decision.

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Researchers did not find any difference in mental health outcomes between those women who had first-trimester abortions and late-term abortions.

The organization's goal is to make sure that reproductive healthcare and policies are grounded on credible evidence, and its recent findings will definitely change the discourse of the ongoing abortion debate, according to Daily Mail.

Doctors are not in the position to authorize an abortion just simply because a woman does not want the pregnancy only if continuing it would cause them mental distress, as per The Guardian.

Currently, there are 35 states that require mandatory counseling for any woman who would want to have an abortion, seven of which require that a woman be informed of the possible psychological repercussions after abortion, emphasizing on the negative emotional responses such as what they call the "postabortion traumatic stress disorder," which is a term adopted by pro-life supporters but is still not accepted by the American Psychological Association or the American Psychiatric Association, according to Yahoo Health.

There were 956 women selected from among 30 facilities that offer abortion services across the United States that was included in the study. These facilities were specifically chosen because they had the latest legal gestational limits within 150 miles. This means they are the ones that offer women the option to terminate at the latest stage possible, which is determined by local state law and the preferences of the facilities all the same.

The mean age of the participants was 25 years old, and not even a single pregnancy had known fetal anomalies, so these women did not choose to abort because of any health problem of the fetus.

After the selection, the women were divided into 2 groups before they were monitored from 2008 to 2010. The first group underwent abortions within 12 weeks of the first trimester. The second group had much later abortions, performed within two weeks of the local facility's gestational limit.

Every six months, the participants completed a telephone survey where they were asked whether or not they felt that the procedure was right, and how they felt about their decision.

ANSIRH found that 53 percent of the women reported that it was difficult to decide whether to terminate the pregnancy or not but still 95 percent said it was the right decision, whether they were asked immediately after, weeks, months or even years later.

Another important finding in the study is that those countable women who said that they regretted their decision were among those who did struggle with the idea of getting one beforehand. Only a very small percentage reported they regret terminating their pregnancies, and only a few said they had feelings of less-than-happy emotions post-abortion.

One week after the procedure, 25 percent of the women admitted some kind of negative feelings but they were not necessarily pertaining to regret. Those who did not get support from friends and family said that they felt the guilt. As for those women who lived in areas where there was social stigma with regards to abortion, they felt poorly about it. But all those emotions, both the negative as well as the positive, all diminished as time passed.

TagsAbortion, Study