While abortion proponents do their best to suppress any narrative that questions the morality, ethics, and safety of snuffing out human life in the womb, an account from North Carolina clinical therapist Adam Fadel further solidifies the reality of what many women actually experience after choosing abortion: grief and trauma.
In a recent column for the North Carolina-based paper The Fayetteville Observer, Fadel shared the story of his anonymous patient, whom he referred to as Sarah. Sarah had previously had an unexpected teen pregnancy and subsequent abortion, but instead of feeling of empowered, as the pro-abortion camp promises, she was left with “trauma” and “complicated grief.” According to Fadel, Sarah feared rejection and judgment for sharing about the horrific experience she and her unborn child endured.
“Sarah wasn’t a pro-life advocate or a religious person; she was a woman who made a choice, and that choice had been generating years of sadness, grief and suffering that she had never shared,” Fadel recounted.
Sarah was not Fadel’s only patient who told him about her experience with abortion. “Out of all of my patients, perhaps 20 have admitted to having an abortion,” Fadel wrote. “And for each of them, the abortion was a traumatic experience on top of many traumas beforehand, often including sexual abuse. They saw abortion as the only way out of a terrible situation — an abusive relationship, being kicked out of their home, or being unable to find a job and earn an income.”
These post-abortive anecdotes support data Fadel cites from the pro-abortion Guttmacher Institute about reasons women choose to discard their preborn children. According to a 2005 study, Fadel wrote, “almost 75% of women couldn’t afford a child and 48% of women were having relationship issues.”
For women like Sarah, abortion was not the solution to a “terrible situation”; it was just the beginning of new trauma and horror — a trend that’s been well documented. In 2018, the British Journal of Psychiatry released an analysis of research on a whopping 877,181 women — 163,831 of which had experienced abortion — and concluded that post-abortive women were 81 percent more likely to struggle with mental health issues.
Pro-abortion groups say an estimated 23.7 percent of total women have had abortions and that only 5 percent of them regret that decision. But even if these biased figures are accurate, that still means that today, there are about 2 million women who regret ending the life of their unborn child and experience all the accompanying trauma — an astronomical number of women suffering in silence.
Like Fadel’s story, Live Action’s new series “I Regret My Abortion — Can’t Stay Silent” shares the firsthand testimonies of post-abortive women who have experienced the deep grief of losing their child, and share the pain and emptiness abortion has left them with.
Both Fadel’s story and the testimony videos produced by Live Action serve to share this reality with other women before they make a decision that will potentially leave them with the same trauma and grief.
In both anecdotes and data analysis, it’s clear abortion doesn’t liberate women — it traumatizes them. There’s power in stories like Sarah’s, which can help break through to other women before they choose a path that they believe is a solution, but really just leads to lasting heartache.
