By Sarah Terzo
From a pro-choice author who interviewed post-abortion women:
“Linda’s initial reaction to both abortions was a deep physical sensation of sadness; she recalled a period of time after each procedure when she felt an overwhelming sense of loss. Reporting on her response to the first abortion, Linda said, “I felt astonished at how sad my body felt. I was really amazed. It’s like feeling sad in your chest, but it wasn’t emanating from my chest—it was emanating from my womb. It was an ache that was more than just the ache of the D and C [dilation and curettage]. It was a terrible feeling of loss. And it was physically based. It wasn’t just all the stuff in my mind about, ‘I should have had a baby, or I shouldn’t have had a baby.’ It was just the fact of this rich environment being robbed. And so it made me feel a kind of fragile feeling, like, ‘Take everything very slowly because you’re so sad. You have to be careful with your feelings.’ And it was even harder three days later. I went back to work teaching, and I was with all these little kids.”
Linda experienced a similar kind of sadness after her second abortion.”
Cara J. Marianna, Abortion: A Collective Story (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2002)p. 127.
Editor’s note. This appeared at Clinic Quotes and is reposted with permission.