Names have been changed to protect privacy.

Pressured. Afraid. Alone. Rachel wanted to have her baby, but the father of the child, her mother, and her stepfather were pressuring to abort. As a young college student, the lack of support made her feel as if there were no other options. She had previously visited an abortion facility in Huntsville, Alabama, to learn more about the procedure. It terrified her. But with all her major relationships hanging in the balance, she felt like she had no choice.

Before making an appointment at the abortion facility, Rachel visited a pro-life pregnancy center called the Lighthouse Women’s Center (TLWC) in Demopolis, Alabama.¹ According to Tanya Carter, executive director of the center, “One of her biggest concerns was, medically, physically, what are they going to do?”

Rachel was at TLWC for hours. The staff performed an ultrasound and discovered she was 20 weeks pregnant, at the halfway point in her pregnancy. They gave her resources and counseling for continuing with her pregnancy. But the pressure from her family remained constant.

So Rachel underwent an abortion procedure in Atlanta—she immediately felt regret. Less than a week later, she returned to TLWC “an absolute mess.” Carter recalls that Rachel shared how “she was bawling in the lobby of the abortion facility. Someone from the front office coldly snapped, ‘If you don’t stop crying, the doctor is not going to do this.’”

In the months that followed, Rachel ended up in the hospital several times on suicide watch. TLWC stayed in contact with her, providing gifts and offering support. Eventually, Carter explained, “We did lose contact with her because of the unique dynamic of the way that [the abortion] affected her mental health. I felt like I could not reach out to her anymore. She could come to us, and she could call us, but I didn’t want to be the one initiating that, [being] that trigger for her.”

Rachel’s story was one of the “extreme cases that we were directly connected to,” said Carter. But her abortion experience is by no means unique.

“We just hear story after story from girls coming in with a new pregnancy that share a past abortion experience. Every once in a while, they will say, ‘I don’t regret it.’ But I would say 9 out of 10 walk in and say, ‘I regret it, and I could never do that again.’ That’s our experience.”

The Reality of Post-Abortion Suffering

Pregnancy resource centers like the Lighthouse Women’s Center regularly hear stories from women with negative abortion experiences. While the women who come are not representative of the general population due to self-selection bias, they nonetheless speak to the negative impact abortion has on many women seeking options.

Evidence on the relationship between negative mental health outcomes and abortion is largely minimized in popular discourse despite the data being well established. High-quality studies² link abortion to higher rates of anxiety, depression, eating disorders, substance abuse, and suicidality. Research shows that some women are predisposed to negative outcomes. Two important risk factors that correlate with these negative outcomes are the woman’s experiencing pressure to abort and perceiving the pregnancy as wanted or meaningful. In other words, stories like Rachel’s are not uncommon among women who desire to parent their child, but for one reason or another, whether due to coercion or shame, end up getting an abortion. A recent study further confirmed the relationship between negative mental health outcomes and coercion, with 24 percent of women reporting that their abortion was either unwanted or coerced. ³

Despite this evidence, people watching pro-abortion media might conclude that women don’t ever experience regret or negative mental health outcomes following an abortion. Most prominently shared is the claim that 95 percent of women don’t regret their abortion. This statistic comes from the abortion advocacy group Advancing New Standards in Reproductive Health (ANSIRH). The famous “Turnaway Study”⁴ sought to compare the experiences of women after having an abortion to those of women who carried an unwanted pregnancy to term. The study claims to have found that “women who have an abortion are not more likely than those denied the procedure to have depression, anxiety, or suicidal ideation.” Being turned away from abortion, they claim, leads to higher levels of anxiety and financial insecurity.

The Turnaway Study, however, suffers from major methodological flaws and several misleading claims that make its findings inapplicable to the general population of women who abort. Director of the Elliot Institute Dr. David Reardon, who has critiqued the study in several detailed articles, concludes the Turnaway Study “is based on a non-random, non-representative sample of women that grossly underrepresents the experiences of the majority of women undergoing abortions.”⁵ The study features an abysmally low participation rate (31 percent after the first interview) and a 50 percent attrition rate. The result, writes Reardon, is:

. . . clearly biased toward a subset of women who expected the least negative reactions to their abortion, experienced the least stress relative to discussing their abortions, and perhaps may even have experienced therapeutic benefits from talking about their abortions with researchers who affirmed the “rightness” of their abortion decisions.⁶

Further, of the women who turned away from an abortion and carried to term, 88 percent reported after six months that they were happy not to have received an abortion. After 5 years, 96 percent were happy. In another Turnaway report, after one week,⁷ the majority of aborting women reported negative feelings: sadness (64 percent), guilt (53 percent), regret (41 percent), and anger (31 percent). ANSIRH obfuscates these findings by conflating women’s perception of decision rightness with mental health, although the two are not the same. Given the Turnaway Study’s sample bias toward women who have positive perceptions of their abortion decision, its frequently cited statistics in media suggest that the number of women with negative outcomes is far greater than reported.

ANSIRH and pro-abortion media consistently reveal bias against identifying and acknowledging women who do experience negative mental health outcomes after abortion. This narrative is so pervasive, it effectively gas-lights women who carry abortion wounds into compartmentalizing and minimizing their pain. What they are often left with is disenfranchised grief. ANSIRH has refused requests to examine and re-analyze their survey data, contrary to standard research practice.⁸

Helping the Rachels of the World

To address the needs of women who suffer mentally from abortion and end up regretting their decision, we must first acknowledge that they exist. For these women, the need for healing is vital.

In response to this dilemma, the Vitae Foundation conducted their eleventh study on the emotional effects of abortion, titled “No Regrets?: How to Reach People with Healing Resources after an Abortion Decision.”⁹

The goals of the study were threefold: (1) to understand the grief patterns after abortion; (2) to discover effective messaging approaches that encourage women to seek healing and to help pro-life organizations reach out to these women; and (3) to identify common characteristics of the ideal abortion healing center or program.

Vitae Foundation has been researching the emotional dimensions of abortion decision-making for over 30 years. Their first study, “Abortion: The Least of Three Evils,” sought to understand the psychological factors that drive women to seek abortions.¹⁰ The study received greater attention in a First Things article by Paul Swope11 and soon became instrumental in the success of Vitae Foundation’s efforts to assist the outreach of pregnancy centers across the nation.

Like other Vitae studies before it, “No Regrets?” used a consumer research methodology called “Emotional Research.” Emotional Research is a type of qualitative research that seeks to understand the emotional reasons behind consumer decision-making. In the context of abortion, Emotional Research focuses on abortion as it functions as a brand, asking questions to discover the emotional needs and barriers that make abortion more or less appealing. For the study, Vitae conducted in-depth interviews with individual participants, gathering crucial insight into the psychological dimensions of abortion decision-making, abortion regret, and mental-health harms induced by abortion. In reviewing women’s experiences, the study identified four trends: (1) women who say they don’t regret, but reveal strong and discernible defense mechanisms related to their decision; (2) women who say they don’t regret, but have clear sadness and/or other issues related to their abortion decision; (3) women who admit regret, but use minimization and rationalization to try to move past it; and (4) women who admit regret, and hide/avoid their pain through compartmentalization, a psychological defense mechanism in which thoughts and feelings that appear to conflict with one another are separated and contained in distinct mental compartments.

The Findings: Understanding Abortion-Wounded Women

Compartmentalization was the most prominent defense mechanism found in the “No Regrets?” study. This response was observed in women from all four groups. Women with any level of regret revealed attempts (some more successful than others) to disassociate abortion from their lived experience. For some women, the one-on-one interview was the first time in years that they had shared about their abortion. Many used phrases signaling compart-mentalization. The reality for many women is that the pain associated with abortion is too much to bear. For those unable to handle the emotional stress, it’s easier to try to forget.

“I just hold it inside. There’s nothing really I can do,” one woman said, who only confided in her husband. “I never told a friend. I never told my sister. I never told anybody about it.”

Another woman who didn’t tell anyone for years shared, “I tried to ignore [it] for many years and would push aside and not deal with the feelings I was having from it because of the shame and the guilt. I didn’t tell anybody I did it. It wasn’t something I was going around sharing. So, I didn’t seek help with it.”

Women from all four groups expressed a variety of emotions related to abortion regret; sadness and guilt were the most prominent. Many women expressed loneliness, loss, grief, disappointment, shame, and worry over possible judgment from others. Some expressed fear that they would never be mothers again. “I wonder if I’ll ever have another chance . . . ” one woman reflected. “You know, you could have taken care of it. Why were you so selfish?” Of those who experienced sadness and guilt, regardless of their perceived decision-rightness, many women would visualize the life of the preborn child lost to abortion. Some women expressed an innate sense of whether the child was a boy or girl: “Sometimes, deep down, I feel like I knew it was a little girl . . . All my kids, all five of my kids look just like their dad. I mean, he’s there, all the spitting image of their dad . . . I wonder if that one kid was one that would have looked like me.”

Another woman was reminded of her abortion while watching her two younger daughters play at the park with an older girl. When the three of them were holding hands one day, she somberly reflected, “that’s what I should have had . . . it just felt like that’s how it was supposed to be.”

Other common defense mechanisms revealed in women’s accounts were justification and rationalization. The reasons women gave for choosing abortion and/or the situations in which they said it is acceptable were varied and diverse. They included things like timing, poor relationships, finances, health problems, and a lack of social support. These justifications and rationalizations varied in emotional intensity, but they were especially high in the group of women who, although they say they don’t regret, reveal strong and discernible defense mechanisms related to their decision. (Previous Vitae studies have explored in greater depth why women choose abortion.¹²)

Many women expressed an intellectual understanding of the preborn child as a developing life. Some even used the word “killing.” But the reasons given for abortion were so emotionally powerful that this knowledge was over-ridden. One such woman, Beth, reflected upon her decision as something she would do again in the same circumstance, yet throughout the interview revealed evidence of regret. For example, after attending a baby shower, she remembered going to the bathroom to cry. In that moment, she explained, “I’m feeling guilty because I feel like what I did was kind of unfair to my baby and just feeling really like I kind of made the wrong decision.”

Two and a half months after her abortion, Beth recalls leaving a party in Washington, DC: “I am just completely crying my eyes out. I’m drunk. I have a full-on realization that I was bottling this abortion up . . . I really realized that there’s no way I can keep going on with my life without really talking about it.” What followed was excessive crying and daily drinking. “I was a complete mess . . . Now that I understand, I was really grieving.” Still, during the interview, Beth justified her decision to get an abortion, saying, “it made me the person I am today.” While she eventually sought therapy and, upon reflection, articulated no decision regret, it was apparent her abortion heavily contributed to serious behavioral and mental problems.

This is an important finding, because Beth’s story was by no means unique. Many respondents said they had no regrets, but their emotional responses, mental-health issues, relationship problems, drug and alcohol abuse, and other problems point to abortion-related distress. If Vitae had conducted their study like ANSIRH’s Turnaway Study, however, they would have captured an admission of decision-rightness as evidence that a woman doesn’t regret abortion. But as Vitae’s “No Regrets?” study found, decision-rightness alone does not sufficiently measure the role of abortion-induced harm. The reality of abortion regret is far more complex.

When Regret Is Minimized or Hidden

Minimization was most prevalent in the first three identified groups. It was especially strong in the third group of women identified, those who admit regret but focus on minimizing their abortion to avoid the emotional discomfort associated with the experience. Women who minimized said things like: “I just don’t think abortion is that big of a deal anymore. I don’t know . . .”; “we were raised to deal with our own stuff. You process it, and you let it go. And that’s kind of like how I did my abortion”; “I made the best decision I made for myself. . . I don’t have any traumatic hang-ups about [the abortion]

. . . It’s a traumatizing thing to experience.”

Women in the fourth identified group were far less likely to minimize their abortion experience. These women regularly used the word “regret,” indicating a negative view of their decision. These women frequently said things like: “the abortion is impossible to forget,” “stays with you forever,” and “still hurts after many years or even decades.” Those who experienced guilt expressed a desire for emotional resolution and forgiveness. Some felt like abortion was “unforgivable” and that the guilt was a punishment they must carry for the rest of their lives. Many talked about asking God for forgiveness. This group of women was the most aware of their emotional wounds and were the most open to healing, either in the form of counseling, therapy, or a program focused on abortion-specific trauma.

The openness of many women to pursue healing reveals a profound need. How can we better help these women?

Nicole’s Story

Many women recounted the important role post-abortion healing played in their lives. One such woman was Nicole.

As a child, Nicole had a very unstable family life. By the age of 12, her family had moved 21 times. By the age of 15, she had lost both her father and stepfather. As a response to the instability and grief around her, Nicole started to drink and participate in high-risk behavior. “I knew there was a decent chance I was going to get pregnant, and I’d probably have an abortion,” she said. In her mind, it was an empowering thing. It was 1988, “abortion is just normal. It’s just what you do.” And at 15 years old, Nicole became pregnant and had an abortion.

“It was a clear demarcation in my life before and after,” she recalls. “I woke up, and I remember maybe a day or two later, standing on the sun porch of our house, watching the sun go down and thinking, ‘I should think that’s beautiful, but I don’t feel anything.’”

Nicole started to experience intense feelings of depression and anxiety, leading her to ask for help. She met with a high-school counselor who shared his faith, setting her on a path to explore her own relationship with God.

Looking back, Nicole said it took a while to figure out the connection between abortion and her mental health. “Here I was having all of this anxiety and pain and all this depression . . . grief. I was grieving, but I didn’t know I was grieving. What was I grieving?”

In college, Nicole became pregnant again. This time she was dating, and both she and the father (who is now her husband) wanted to have the baby. Dreadfully, upon finding out, both her mom and stepfather pressured Nicole to abort.

“They were horrible to me,” Nicole explained. “They were like, ‘You have to have an abortion . . . And at one point, I said, ‘I cannot have another abortion. I won’t survive it. I don’t know why, but I can’t do it.’”

But the pressure and emotional abuse were too much, and Nicole ended up at Planned Parenthood. “I felt alone. It was like I sacrificed my baby to my mom,” she said.

While at the abortion facility, she said, “I knew what I was doing. I just laid there waiting for God to kill me. I was like, he’ll just strike me dead. That’s what’s going to happen.”

Not long after her second abortion, Nicole decided to get pregnant again. Defiantly, she planned not to tell her mom until it was too late. “I was living with her still, but I managed to hide it.”

After the birth of her daughter, Nicole continued to struggle mentally. She knew the previous abortion experiences were affecting her. “I was just desperate,” she said. “I need[ed] help.”

Taking the advice of the high-school guidance counselor who led her to faith, Nicole visited a pregnancy center and enrolled in their post-abortion counseling program. This decision helped change the course of her life. Nicole recounts that the counselor gave her “one-on-one, essentially—therapy every week for years . . . For the first time I knew I wasn’t alone and I wasn’t crazy.” The counselor helped Nicole understand and move past the deep wounds she experienced from abortion. “She helped me process the feelings and experiences, accept God’s forgiveness, forgive others and myself, grieve my babies, and entrust them to God, knowing we would meet again some-day. This all helped me heal and move on.”

Nicole started to share her abortion experience at church services, pro-life groups, and other events. When she tells her story, she explains, “it’s often not just about the abortion. It’s also about the saving power of the Lord.”

“It’s a terrible thing to know that you took the life of your own child. There is no answer for that in this world—no justice, no relief, no comfort, no hope,” she said. “I was so racked with guilt and shame, I would have settled for a loveless pardon. But God is a good father, and He wanted more for me . . . When I repented and gave my life to God, God gave me back the life I had lost; and he gave me back my voice, my babies, my community, and my hope. He has blessed me in ways I never would have dared to ask.”

Nicole now works with an abortion-healing ministry, Deeper Still,¹³ to help women with similar experiences find healing.

Paths to Healing

Organizations like Deeper Still are part of a widespread pro-life effort to help women with abortion stories like Rachel’s and Nicole’s. Nonprofits like Support After Abortion, Rachel’s Vineyard, Project Rachel, Abortion Recovery and Care, and Save the One offer free resources, retreats, and programs with the specific goal of healing. Abortion recovery programs are becoming a significant feature of most pregnancy centers in the United States. In their last annual report, Heartbeat International reported that 71.4 percent of its 3,100+ network providers offer abortion recovery services. Unfortunately, the “No Regrets?” study found that most abortion-wounded women don’t know about these resources.

As a result, the study makes several marketing recommendations, such as crafting messages that resonate with different groups’ emotional experiences in the hope of helping more women find abortion healing ministries and programs.

In addition, the Vitae Foundation worked to identify common characteristics of the ideal abortion healing center or program. Surprisingly, most participants’ descriptions of the ideal counseling center sounded much like programs that already exist. This should be both an encouragement and a motivator for abortion healing providers to creatively brainstorm new outreach strategies. We already have services that many abortion-wounded women say they need and desire; better marketing and outreach can help bridge the knowledge gap.

The pro-abortion lobby has spent considerable resources to promote the narrative that women do not suffer from abortion. We know this is not true—there are many Rachels and Nicoles in the world.

Even pro-abortion websites dedicated to post-abortion help (the few that exist) reveal the profound desire many women have for healing. One organization, Pro-Voice Exhale, has an “After-Abortion Stories Hub” full of heartbreaking, first-hand accounts from remorseful women. Their stories are tragic: “For weeks, maybe months, after my abortion I was suicidal and hat-ed myself for what I had done”; “At first, I was completely okay with our decision—or at least I lied to myself well enough to think I was. Now, 5 months later and it eats at me every single day. I wish I would’ve never made the decision I made.” Testimonies like these reflect the emotional realities uncovered in “No Regrets.”

It is deeply wrong that these women suffer while the source of their pain goes unacknowledged. Because of the mainstream narrative on abortion regret, many women aware of their abortion grief are led to believe their pain does not matter. As a result, many end up believing that their lives don’t matter. Injustice perpetuates injustice.

Identifying and reaching out to these women are vital steps toward creating a pro-family society—a society where healing and love suffocate the demand for abortion. Studies like “No Regrets?” play a significant role in helping the pro-life movement understand the women most impacted by abortion. In helping them, we help thousands of young women and girls know that their lives are valued and cherished, regardless of prior decisions they have made. It is through these efforts that the pro-life movement demonstrates and will continue to demonstrate why the pro-life cause is pro-woman. No one deserves to be cast aside.

NOTES

1. For more information about the Lighthouse Women’s Center, see https://lighthousewomenscenter. com/

2. Consider, for example: David M. Fergusson, L. John Horwood, and Joseph M. Boden, “Abortion and mental health disorders: evidence from a 30-year longitudinal study,” British Journal of Psychiatry 193, no. 6 (2008): 444-51, https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19043144/ Also:

David M. Fergusson, L. John Horwood, and Joseph M. Boden, “Reactions to abortion and subsequent mental health,” British Journal of Psychiatry 195, no. 5 (2009): 420-6, https://pubmed. ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19880932/

David M. Fergusson, L. John Horwood, Elizabeth M. Ridder, “Abortion in young women and subsequent mental health,” Child Psychology and Psychiatry 47, no. 1 (2006): 16-24, https://pubmed. ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/16405636/

Donald Paul Sullins, “Abortion, substance abuse and mental health in early adulthood: Thirteen-year longitudinal evidence from the United States,” Sage Open Medicine (Sept 23, 2016): https://pmc. ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5066584/

3. David C. Reardon, Katherine Rafferty, and Tessa Cox, “The Effects of Abortion Decision Rightness and Decision Type on Women’s Satisfaction and Mental Health,” Cureus 15, no. 5 (May 11, 2023), DOI: 10.7759/cureus.38882

4. The Turnaway Study, conducted by a team of scientists from the University of California San Francisco, resulted in ANSIRH (Advancing New Standards in Reproductive Health) publishing over 50 research papers on which pro-choice proponents have based their argument that abortion does not cause regrets or adversely affect the mental health and wellbeing of any but a small and anomalous minority of women. https://www.ansirh.org/research/ongoing/turnaway-study

5. David C. Reardon, “Turnaway Study Report Unethically Violated Participants’ Privacy and Misleads Public with a Non-Representative Sample, Selective Reporting, and Overstated Conclusions,” Issues in Law and Medicine 39, no. 2 (Fall 2024), https://doi.org/10.70257/TWGF1217

6. David C. Reardon, “The Embrace of the Proabortion Turnaway Study: Wishful Thinking? or Willful Deceptions?” The Linacre Quarterly 85, no. 3 (June 20, 2018): 204-212, https://doi. org/10.1177/0024363918782156

7. Corinne H. Rocca, Katrina Kimport, Heather Gould, Diana G. Foster, “Women’s Emotions One Week After Receiving or Being Denied an Abortion in the United States,” Perspectives on Sexual and Reproductive Health 45, no. 3 (September 2013):122-131, https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/ doi/10.1363/4512213

8. David C. Reardon, Diana Greene Foster, “Email communications between David Reardon and Diana Greene Foster regarding the Turnaway Study,” https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.10850034

9. Vitae Research Institute, “Abstract of No Regrets?: How to Reach People with Healing Resources after an Abortion Decision (2023),” https://vitaeresearchinstitute.org/research/no-regrets/

10. Vitae Research Institute, “Abstract of Abortion—The Least of Three Evils (1994),” https:// vitaeresearchinstitute.org/research/abortion-the-least-of-three-evils/

11. Paul Swope, “Abortion: A Failure to Communicate,” First Things 82 (April 1998): 31-35, https:// vitaeresearchinstitute.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/03/First-Things-Article-for-Web.pdf

12. Vitae Research Institute, Dr. Charles Kenny and Right Brain Research, “Its Own Time and Its Own Season,” “The Dilemma of Choosing Life,” “Choosing a Life for Vitae,” “Ready for Responsibility?” “A Higher Calling,” https://vitaeresearchinstitute.org/research/

13. See Deeper Still website, deeperstill.org

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Original Bio:

Liam Siegler is a research and education specialist for the Vitae Foundation. His work can be found in National Review, The Federalist, and The Lion.