Grief and Loss: Issues for Abortion

Abstract

I had my first abortion just after my seventeenth birthday; in 1966 abortions were legal only to save the mother's life. My parents took me to Mexico, under the guidance of their psychoanalyst. But we never talked about it. While we were gone our dog had puppies. It seemed a powerful irony-but we never talked about it. I had two more abortions years later, each linked to the ending of a marriage. I began to notice a pattern-but no one helped me talk about it. And so I wrote-vignettes, journals, poems, dreams, parts of short stories-never realizing that I was struggling with the unacknowledged, unresolved grief of three abortions, three deaths. Then in 1987 I took the class, “Death, Society, and Human Experience,” as part of my preparation for a master's degree in counseling. All of my fragmented, aborted efforts at writing came together: each vignette had been a part of my grieving. These writings finally helped me resolve my grief-over twenty years of it. I can't help but wonder what differences specific grief therapy might have made in my life-in 1966, in 1972, or in 1976. Whatever your position on the issue of abortion, we must acknowledge that at least one death occurs. In addition to the fetus, there is often the death of youth, of innocence, of dreams, of illusions. Grief therapy must be a part of any abortion counseling. Without a healthy resolution, the guilt and pain continue. For some, it becomes a numbness, a heaviness carried deep inside. For others, relationships, pregnancies, and self concept are affected.