Relief

Relief

Many abortion advocates claim that a measure of the success of an abortion is measured as "relief." Many even claim that "relief" is the "most common" reaction to abortion. But that latter claim is especially misleading, since the same studies claiming that "relief" is more common than depression, for example, also reveal that negative feelings are more common than positive feelings, and that women often experience both negative feelings and relief (such as relief that the dreaded procedure is over) at the same time. Indeed, while as a single reaction, relief may be more common than depression, it is not more common than the combined cases of depression, grief, anxiety, guilt, suicidal thoughts, and sleep disorders.

Another huge problem from such claims is that the women who are most unhappy about their abortions are the least likely to participate in such studies, as evidenced by the fact that over half refuse to participate in followup interviews.

Reports of "relief" are inconsistent and vague as relief can mean anything. Relief to have survived. Relief that one's boyfriend is no longer badgering her to have an abortion. Relief that the abortion is simply over. In short, "relief" is not necessarily a sign of an substantial improvement in mental health or well being, much less evidence that there is not some co-concurrent harm. The survivor of a plane crash may, for example, feel both relief and pain, including PTSD, shock and internal bleeding.

Abortion clinic workers also report that the relief women experience following abortion may be mostly superficial. In her article "Working at an abortion clinic challenged my pro-choice views — and confirmed them" Amy Beeman wrote: "When I started at the clinic, all I saw was the individual moment of pain, but over the years I began to see a much richer portrait — women coming out the other side, relieved, even if it was simply a relief to have the procedure behind them. They could go back to their lives."

How meaningful is it to compare "relief to have the procedure behind them" to feelings of loss, depression, and guilt. Yet that is exactly what has been done by numerous researchers, without any clarification or qualification regarding what kinds of relief women are feeling.

For example, in one widely cited study, Brenda Major reported that at one hour after their abortions, women reported feeling more relief than positive emotions, more relief than negative emotions, and more positive than negative emotions. Yet when a minority of the women were interviewed again, two years after their abortion, the levels of relief had declined as had the average score of positive emotions. Meanwhile, negative emotions had significantly increased.

But Major dismisses the decline in relief and rise in negative emotions with the claim that feelings of relief were still more common than the average of negative emotions. But again, the question asking women to rank feelings of relief on a scale of 1 to 5 does not tell us much about what that relief really means...much less how it differs from women who are relieved that their abortion is over and done with two years ago compared to the women who are relieved that they do not have a child to raise or to the women who are relieved that no one knows about their abortion or those who are relieved that they finally received some post-abortion counseling to help heal from negative feelings.

How is one to really interpret the average score on a scale of 1-5 for relief of 3.53 for 386 women one hour after their abortions and an average of 3.11 for two years later? How many of the women are even relieved about the same things. Indeed, on a scale of 1 to 5, a score around 3 is neutral, indicating very little if any relief.

Yet Major's study is frequently cited as proof that negative emotions after abortion are less common than relief. But this claim is actually very suspect.

Major's study actually compares the single score for relief to a composite average of six scores for negative emotions: "sad," "disappointed," "guilty," "blue," "low," and "feelings of loss." This comparing of a single measure to averaged measures can be very deceiving.

Consider a single woman who answers a neutral 3 for "relief" and "5" for guilty and "1" for the other five negative variables. This would produce an just 1.6 for negative feelings compared to 3 for relief, when in fact an examination of her strongest reaction to all seven variables clearly indicates that guilt is her strongest emotion. Indeed, a 5 for guilt and a 5 for sad would still give only a 2.3, still well below a neutral relief score.

The selection of negative emotions used by Major is also problematic. A scale for negative emotions should include the most commonly reported negative emotions of women. These most commonly reported negative emotions should have been identified from prior studies, particularly interviews or open-ended questionnaires where women describe their negative feelings in their own words.

If this had been done, the variable "disappointed" would not have been included in Major's list of six negative emotions. In prior interview based studies with women, there is no indication that the emotion of feeling "disappointed" commonly occurs. Guilt, sadness, loss, depression, yes. But disappointed? No.

Similarly, the decision to include "sad," "blue," and "low," as three separate variables is also odd. Admittedly, all three are terms used to describe feelings of depression. But many people consider them at least closely related if not synonymous. The problem, from a study design perspective, is that asking women to rate each of three nearly synonymous feelings separately is likely to suggest that women should try to tease out which of these three they felt the most, therefore rating one of these "blue," for example, higher and the other two "sad" or "low" lower in order to better clarify which specific flavor of depressive feelings she was experiencing. By contrast, if Major had chosen to use a single word, or if she had even shown all three words "sad, blue, or low" as a single variable to inquire about any of these commonly used words for depressive feelings, that single score would likely have been higher than the average of these these three words when treated as separate and distinct feelings.