Reclaiming Our Children: A Blog About Healing After Abortion

by Evelyn Birge Vitz and Paul C. Vitz

This past semester, in a course taught by one of
us at New York University, the class spent considerable time reading
women’s stories about their abortions, focusing particularly on a
website called www.afterabortion.com.
This website was founded by a pro-choice woman and on it no mention of
politics, religion, or morality is allowed. The website contains
thousands of women’s stories about their abortions—and about their
post-abortion feelings. And many of these women are in acute pain; some
are almost totally incapacitated. One writes in a post: “I am not coping
at all; I feel as though the top of my head is going to fly off.”
Another says: “I am just grieving like crazy!” A third: “I don’t
understand why I am not getting better, but worse all the time! I am so
depressed!” (Stories on this website are protected by copyright, and it
is not permitted to quote directly from them. Quotations provided here
are therefore faithful rewordings.)

Many of these women cannot go outside for fear of “triggers”—the
sight or sound of things that will bring back the abortion experience
and cause panic attacks. Triggers include the sound of a vacuum cleaner
(many abortions are done by the vacuuming out of the fetus from the
uterus) or the music that was playing at the abortion clinic while the
abortion was being performed. The sight of pregnant women, or maternity
clothes, or babies, or toddlers, or school-children, or of the place
(even the neighborhood or town) where the abortion took place can all
serve as triggers. Other triggers are anniversaries of all kinds,
especially of the abortion and of the EBD (expected birth date), and, in
particular, Mother’s Day.

read the rest here: http://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/2010/09/1657