Research – clementine

Third Trimester Abortions Leaves Woman with a Lifetime Of Trauma

Pregnant woman face a huge misconception that third trimester abortions are harmless, when in reality, getting third trimester abortions can be super gruesome and hard. Numerous studies have been performed by many doctors to prove that woman who have had an abortion are more susceptible to having their physical health be diminished over time, but more significantly on their mental health. Woman who have had a third trimester abortion also struggle with maintaining a satisfactory life for themselves, and even families in some cases. If pregnant women today were informed that they could possibly endure a painful emotional disorder called Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome after going through the process of having a third trimester abortion, woman will want to give birth instead of aborting the baby. 

The goal for most woman, in fact all people, is to have a satisfactory life. We can also say that we would do anything it takes, if is laid out before us, to improve or increase the status of our life. For some pregnant woman who know they can’t support their baby, think that having abortion will improve their quality of life. According to Understanding Abortion: From Mixed Feelings to Rational Thought, woman who believe that abortion does not violate any morals, feel as though having an abortion lets them to have a better quality of life if not the same quality of life than if you were to give birth. However, woman who have an abortion in their third trimester unweariedly allow a diminished life to walk through their door. Post-Traumatic Stress Syndrome is sadly, commonly seen in woman who have had an abortion in their third trimester. When Posttraumatic Stress Syndrome (also a parallel to Post Abortion Syndrome) is addressed in woman, many studies show that their abortion is a traumatic experience. 

Woman are not informed on the matter of late-term abortion and how you can contract many mental health issues and physical distortions on the body. Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome is a condition in which pregnant woman after a third trimester abortion has persistent mental and emotional stress as a result of their phycological shock. In accordance with Andrew Dadlez in “Post Abortion Syndrome: Creating An Affliction,” Post Abortion Syndrome is the specific name given to woman with PTSS that is specific to abortions, specifically going through a third trimester abortion. Phycological shock is misunderstood in the sense that everyone thinks that we need to see a traumatic event happen before our eyes in order to contract this shock. In fact, phycological shock can happen to us without us even realizing it. In this case, abortion is an event that most people overlook when talking about phycological shock. When a woman is pregnant with a baby, they create a phycological attachment, so when the baby is taken away through abortion, they go through this shock.

It is undeniable that pregnant woman have a developmental relationship with their unborn fetus. Since the fetus is quite literally attached to the mother, there is an obvious physical connection between them. Surprisingly, there is a psychological connection between the mother and the fetus as well. According to Journal of Reproductive and Infant Phycology, the MFR (Mother Fetus Relationship) grows the longer they are pregnant. Like normal relationships, the more you put into the relationship, the more you are likely to grow and become more attached to it. For example, a woman who treats her body well by eating healthy is subconsciously demonstrating care and commitment for the fetus without her ever having the intentions to care and commit for it. Being able to physically feel the fetus move around their stomach creates intimacy between the two. Furthermore, the saying “Seeing is Believing” is quite true in the third trimester since the article “Posttraumatic Stress Symptoms Following Childbirth: Associations with Prenatal Attachment in Subsequent Pregnancies” states that more than fifty two percent of woman have more of an attachment to the fetus once she sees her stomach bulging. All of these examples of the MFR are unavoidable when pregnant in the third trimester. When the fetus is displaying signs of life inside the woman, everyone can agree that any pregnant woman would have second thoughts on terminating the baby. Woman go through reluctancy mostly because they create a relationship with the baby without ever having the intention to.  There are many more examples of the unavoidable intimacy between the mother and fetus but it doesn’t stray away from the fact that woman still go through with their abortion procedures.

When having guilt, it is to be described that you are to recognize/believe that your thoughts, feelings, or actions have violated personal and/or moral standards of behavior values, believing one is responsible for the event, perceived lack of justification for behavior, and/or beliefs that the event was foreseeable and thus preventable according to “Dimensions of Decision Difficulty in Women’s Decision-Making About Abortion: A Mixed Methods Longitudinal Study.” It could be argued that woman who do not feel reluctant to have an abortion does not induce guilt because most who don’t feel reluctant believe that abortion doesn’t violate their own moral standards. For someone who feels reluctant, based on the information that is stated above, inevitably experiences things in their third trimester that might go against their formally established moral standards. However, whether a pregnant woman is in her first or third trimester, they will have internal conflict since the fetus’s intimacy with the mother is already there.

To cope with this conflict, the mother either decides if she is the “victim” or “aggressor” of abortion subconsciously. If she is the victim, the mother is already going through traumatic guilt and stress but if she thinks she is the aggressor and wanting to get rid of the baby for sure, she is trying to get it over with and put her feelings aside because the abortion is what she needs to do. Being the “aggressor” will not cause as much guilt as the “victim” because the mother made the decision that it was something she needed to do. It is stated that both the “victim” and the “aggressor” will experience guilt, but the “victim” puts the blame on themselves, which ultimately causes more guilt in them by the article “Post Abortion Stress.” About forty-seven percent of eighty who had a third trimester abortion in a phycological test study by revealed that their brain wanted to avoid their guilt as much as possible. You could conclude that the forty percent of woman felt like they were a “victim” in the act of their abortion. A pregnant woman who is reluctant about having an abortion feels like they are a “victim” since she is subconsciously recognizing that she could of prevented the abortion and it was also foreseeable. Whether a pregnant woman is an “aggressor” or a “victim”, they both experience guilt but the difference is that the “victim” recognizes things before the “aggressor” does before getting the abortion. The attitude of being a victim pours into the argument that feeling reluctant about going through with an abortion causes massive amounts of guilt trauma. 

Reluctancy to go through an abortion is caused by the uncontrollable intimacy you have in the three trimester you carry the baby for which ultimately makes the mother go through more guilt trauma. Guilt comes into play even before the mother even goes through the pregnancy if she is feeling reluctant about it. That is shown through the relationship mothers make with the baby without having the intent to. For a mother who is not reluctant to have an abortion in the third trimester, she doesn’t have as nearly as much as guilt as if someone who is reluctant because having reluctancy shows that they could of prevented it from happening. Since guilt trauma has a direct correlation to PTSS, MFR factors dramatically affects the reluctancy of woman but also affects how severe their syndrome is.

For some woman, they might not feel guilty about aborting but will experience mental chronic stress due to the MFR every mother has psychologically. However, for the woman who do feel unsure about their decision to abort and still go through with the procedure, make it a whole lot worse for themselves by continuing. The types of procedures done for third trimester abortions are hard to imagine which makes a woman who is reluctant about getting a third trimester abortion more stressed. Abortions that are performed after the fetus being 20 weeks in the womb, when not done by induction of labor (which leads to fetal death due to prematurity), are performed by having the woman go through the “Dilation and Evacuation” procedure. According to “The Reality of Late-Term Abortion Procedures,” these horrid surgical techniques include crushing, removal, and dismantlement of a fetus from a woman’s uterus, weeks before, or after the fetus reaches the developmental age where they could survive without the mother. In some cases, especially when the fetus is past the stage of being healthy enough to live on its own, late term abortion may involve the lethal injection into the fetus’ heart to ensure that the fetus is alive when it is pulled out or has the ability to survive. That means that without a lethal injection, when the baby is taken out of the woman’s vagina, it has a possibility of surviving. However, according to E. Johnson, that is very rare. This means that when the fetus is extracted from the women’s vagina, there could be developed parts of the baby that the mother herself could see. This can be fairly traumatic if the women are not informed that there is a possibility for her to see a dismantled baby. Woman who are reluctant about getting a third trimester abortion will go through extreme mental conflict and make their PTSS symptoms worse. 

As scary as it sounds, woman who contracted PTSS after their abortion can affect their own household because it has been proven that PTSS can be contagious. In the article “Is PTSD Contagious,” a report was done on a military family of how a family was affected by one’s PTSD in the home. The guy who has PTSD is a veteran named Caleb Vines who was sent to Iraq to serve in the war and happened to come back with the condition. His wife Brannan and their daughter, both were experiencing symptoms of their loved one’s disorder even though they never been to war. Branna Vines experiences hyperawareness, hypervigilance, and also has triggers. She ended up having secondary traumatic stress which is still super severe. Trauma is a contagious disease. Their daughter would lash out for no reason and Branna knew that it came from the trauma of Caleb. They classified this as secondary trauma. They sent their daughter to a school therapist to help her as well. The family has had a hard time keeping together because of how much it has changed their life. Since PTSD and PTSS are fairly similar, if exactly similar, PTSS would have the same effect on a home. 

A major reason why some woman choose abortion over giving birth is that they are afraid of bringing another life into her family will negatively impact her lifestyle. There is a false narrative that when woman give birth to their baby, society does not cater to their needs. Many woman argue that giving birth to a baby would effect their family whether it is financially speaking or relational speaking. They may be right, however, society caters to their needs without them realizing it. For example, many women in the United States and even around the world are infertile, which means that they are unable to reproduce. In fact, in the United States, ten percent of woman between the ages of 15 and 44 are infertile, which is the equivalent of 6 million woman. We can say that out of these women, there are definitely a good portion of them that wish to have kids of their own. A lot of woman desire to create their own family and wait on unborn child adoption. However, some mothers who give birth to unwanted children suffer so much, but not as much as the unwanted child.

If a mother gives birth to an unwanted child, the mother-child relationship is a very important role in how the child will develop behaviorally. In the article “Unwanted Childbearing, Health, and Mother-Child Relationships,” their research indicates that wanted children have better relationships with their mothers throughout childhood and even into adulthood than children who were unwanted by their mothers. Mothers who had an unwanted pregnancy spank their children more frequently and Doctor Logan found one study that concluded unwanted children are more likely to be a victim of physical abuse as well. The negative relationship between unintended births and mother-child relationships continues into adulthood. Unwanted children felt that their mother’s affection was not enough because they know the pre-destined relationship the mother had in mind when she was pregnant with them. Overall, this research concludes that unwanted children are susceptible to lower quality relationships between their mothers. There was another research done by Najman Hayatbakhsh who studied 4,765 unwanted pregnancy children’s behavior up to when they turned 14. In this study, Hayatbakhsh monitored anxiety, depression, aggression, externalizing, delinquency, attention problems, withdrawal problems, cigarette smoking, alcohol drinking, and many more. He found that the highest issues in these children at 14 were externalizing, cigarette smoking, and alcohol drinking. All of the issues listed were still high but the three that he highlighted were the most prevalent. This shows that having an unwanted pregnancy doesn’t just affect the child phytologically and physically, it also affects them behaviorally. 

Along with the unwanted child suffering, an unwanted child being born into a family affects the whole family negatively. Barber suggests that the mother would suffer from depression, perceive time pressures that prevent them from spending time with all of their children, and experience lower quality spousal relationships. We all know that having parental issues affects the whole home no matter what which ultimately will lead their intended pregnancy children to feel unwanted. Having parental issues could also result in divorce which would in turn bring distress to the children, especially the unwanted children.

Arriving at the decision to go through with an unwanted pregnancy is a hard decision in itself. Once the unwanted child is born, it is intertwined into the mother’s life. Giving birth to an unwanted child might be very inconvenient for the mother’s career path or lifestyle, but the mother’s lifestyle is not an excuse to be neglectful to their child. However, society can cater to mothers needs if she feels like she will be neglectful to the child. If the mother wants a better life for her baby, she can put her baby up for unborn child adoption. Many women in the United States and even around the world are infertile, which means that they are unable to reproduce so this way of adoption benefits them greatly. In fact, in the United States, ten percent of woman between the ages of 15 and 44 are infertile, which is the equivalent of 6 million woman. We can say that out of these women, there are definitely a good portion of them that wish to have kids of their own. A lot of woman desire to create their own family and wait on unborn child adoption which is great alternative for mothers who do not want their baby to have a bad life.

In America, we have amazing freedom in this country to which woman have the right to abort. However, nobody talks about the fine line print. Woman have supported the right to abort so much that they always have left me with the impression that abortion was a positive thing. According to “Post Abortion Stress,” abortion-rights advocates have stated that abortions after 20 weeks in the womb are performed because of health complications or lethal baby anomalies discovered late in the pregnancy.  However, data from the medical literature and late-term abortion providers, and some planned parenthoods, indicates that most of these procedures are not performed for these reasons. Pregnant woman who are not sure what safe adoption alternatives are out there need to know that there is other woman who desperately want children. It is safe to say that pregnant woman who have an abortion, especially when they are in their third semester when the baby is mostly grown, are selfish to not make this decision. Having a third trimester abortion ruins your lifestyle and mental health for long term. Why would woman have a third trimester abortion knowing the consequences for it when they have numerous opportunities before them? Pregnant woman who choose to abort are doing a disservice for themselves because they accept the risk of contracting mental illness when they have an opportunity to do good. 

Pregnant woman who want to go through with a third trimester abortion will always inevitably go through internal conflict of whether it is a good decision or not. There is internal conflict because there is physical intimacy between the baby and the mother. The intention to abort will always be a conflict with the per-existing tendency to be attached to their un-born child. This conflict that woman go through is in itself an experience of emotional stress. PTSS is a very concerning issue in mother’s who choose to abort in the third trimester. More pregnant woman who are looking to abort in the third trimester need to be informed by the horrible disservice they are doing for themselves. It can lead them with a life long time of metal suffering along with the suffering of those around them. PTSS is highly contagious in a family home setting which can cause relational problems Considering all of the emotional stress leading up to and after a third trimester abortion, conceiving the baby would eliminate the risk of contracting PTSS that they would’ve brought into their life if they made the decision to abort.

References

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Johnson, E. A. (2015, January 20). The Reality of Late-Term Abortion Procedures. Charlotte Lozier Institute. https://lozierinstitute.org/the-reality-of-late-term-abortion-procedures/

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  Hayatbakhsh, Najman. “A Longitudinal Study of Child Mental Health and Problem Behaviours at 14 Years of Age Following Unplanned Pregnancy.” Psychiatry research 185.1 (2010): 200–204. Web.