USA – Some could use support after abortion. But quality care can be hard to find.

Counseling, care options for patients seeking truly impartial emotional support can be limited across the U.S.

BY: KELCIE MOSELEY-MORRIS
MAY 1, 2023

Alex D. turned 23 on the day the U.S. Supreme Court released the decision to overturn Roe v. Wade. She was visiting the Omaha Zoo in Nebraska on vacation, riding the chairlift over the rhino exhibit when she saw the news alert on her phone. She was also eight weeks pregnant and needed an abortion.

“I felt hated. And I was like, ‘Nobody knows that I’m pregnant right now,’” she said. “I remember walking around the zoo and also feeling like everyone knew at the same time, like they were all looking at me and like my life was falling apart.”

Continued: https://idahocapitalsun.com/2023/05/01/some-could-use-support-after-abortion-but-quality-care-can-be-hard-to-find/

USA – The Most Important Study in the Abortion Debate

Researchers rigorously tested the persistent notion that abortion wounds the women who seek it.

By Annie Lowrey
JUNE 11, 2022

The demographer Diana Greene Foster was in Orlando last month, preparing for the end of Roe v. Wade, when Politico published a leaked draft of a majority Supreme Court opinion striking down the landmark ruling. The opinion, written by Justice Samuel Alito, would revoke the constitutional right to abortion and thus give states the ability to ban the medical procedure.

Foster, the director of the Bixby Population Sciences Research Unit at UC San Francisco, was at a meeting of abortion providers, seeking their help recruiting people for a new study. And she was racing against time. She wanted to look, she told me, “at the last person served in, say, Nebraska, compared to the first person turned away in Nebraska.” Nearly two dozen red and purple states are expected to enact stringent limits or even bans on abortion as soon as the Supreme Court strikes down Roe v. Wade, as it is poised to do. Foster intends to study women with unwanted pregnancies just before and just after the right to an abortion vanishes.

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/06/abortion-turnaway-study-roe-supreme-court/661246/

Getting An Abortion Doesn’t Have To Be So Heavy

Sometimes being able to laugh during or after this common medical procedure is a radical act of defiant, unwavering self-love

By Danielle Campoamor
Oct 15, 2021

Elaine Saenz, 26, found out she was pregnant just a few weeks before her high school graduation in June of 2013. Her parents had made it clear that if she ever got pregnant, she would be kicked out of the house. So she called a friend in San Antonio, about three hours from where she lived, to tell her that she wanted an abortion. She scheduled an appointment at a Planned Parenthood for a medication abortion, so she could induce a miscarriage from the comfort of her friend’s home.

Her friend accompanied her to the appointment, supporting her as she waited for a nurse to pull her in and give her the pills that would end her unwanted pregnancy. And that’s when it happened — a moment of levity that left everyone laughing.

Continued: https://jezebel.com/getting-an-abortion-doesnt-have-to-be-so-heavy-1847873233

15.10.2021

Commentary

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The Study That Debunks Most Anti-Abortion Arguments

For five years, a team of researchers asked women about their experience after having—or not having—an abortion. What do their answers tell us?

By Margaret Talbot
July 7, 2020

There is a kind of social experiment you might think of as a What if? study. It would start with people who are similar in certain basic demographic ways and who are standing at the same significant fork in the road. Researchers could not assign participants to take one path or another—that would be wildly unethical. But let’s say that some more or less arbitrary rule in the world did the assigning for them. In such circumstances, researchers could follow the resulting two groups of people over time, sliding-doors style, to see how their lives panned out differently. It would be like speculative fiction, only true, and with statistical significance.

A remarkable piece of research called the Turnaway Study, which began in 2007, is essentially that sort of experiment.

Continued: https://www.newyorker.com/books/under-review/the-study-that-debunks-most-anti-abortion-arguments

USA – Do women feel guilt after having an abortion? No, mainly relief

Do women feel guilt after having an abortion? No, mainly relief
Most women don’t regret their decision to have a termination – and that outlook could help us protect reproductive rights

Suzanne Moore
Mon 13 Jan 2020

Women know themselves! Shock! Women can make the right decisions about their own bodies. Isn’t that amazing? Though I and most of my friends who have had abortions know this, I guess that’s just anecdata. You can’t trust women when they tell you that the main feeling was relief and that they didn’t really want a load of counselling about adoption or to wait another few weeks.

Still, a study conducted over five years across 21 states in the US has found that this is true. Of all the emotions that women were asked about – including sadness, guilt, regret, anger and happiness – it was relief that was the main one expressed.

Continued: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/jan/13/do-women-feel-guilt-after-having-an-abortion-no-mainly-relief

13.01.2020