Universal Responses to Abortion? Attachment, Trauma, and Grief Responses in Women Following Abortion

Twenty-six million legal abortions occur each year worldwide. Of these an
unknown percentage of women have adverse psychological sequelae. This article reports on interviews with a
nonrandom sample of fifty women regarding reproductive history, abortion experiences and emotional
responses in the former Soviet Union country of Belarus, where abortions are often used as a primary form of
birth control. Both positive and negative responses were queried but emphasis was on cross-cultural
comparisons with western samples regarding posttraumatic sequelae, depression, grief and guilt, and using an
objective measure of trauma symptoms, the Impact of Events Scale-Revised (IES-R). Comparisons with
existing Western literature allowed the question of: Similar to the cross-cultural concept of posttraumatic stress
disorder are their possibly universal responses to abortion as well? As in western samples, attachment and
recognition of life during pregnancy were present for many women despite choosing abortion, and eightytwo
percent of the sample reported posttraumatic sequelae, which is high. Grief, guilt, dissociation, depression,
anxiety and psychosomatic responses were also in common across cultures. The authors conclude that despite
disparate circumstances and abortion use, women who have adverse responses are very similar across these
two divergent cultures. They call for more research using representative samples to learn what percentage of
women are likely to have adverse responses and which variables predict negative responses. Headnote KEY
WORDS: PTSD, abortion, attachment, avoidance, grief, guilt, pregnancy decision-making, physicians and
abortion, cross-cultural aspects.