When we talk about the risks of pregnancy after abortion, we should distinguish between physical risks and psychological risks. Nowadays, induced abortion is not illegal anymore nor considered immoral in certain circumstances, regarded sometimes as a means of contraception to the limit and achieved by specialized surgery.
Today, this surgery is relatively safe, but pregnancy risks after abortion depend on how the intervention was made, on the health of the woman who resorts to this surgery, her age and the month of pregnancy when the surgery was performed. Abortion made after the second quarter or in older age increases a woman’s subsequent difficulties to get pregnant afterwards and carry it through successfully.
In areas where abortion is legal and accessible they involve reduced risks for the health and lives of women, but if we talk about the illegal or illicit one, sub-standard and unsanitary, it leads to a higher rate of complications, resulting in a woman’s future inability to give birth, various trauma and sometimes even death.
Abortion is an abrupt interruption of all anatomical and hormonal changes that take place in a woman during pregnancy and can have serious consequences for subsequent fertility. Pregnancy risks after abortion assume difficulty or inability to get pregnant, and also various problems that can occur during pregnancy, including hormonal dysfunctions – for example, to the mammary gland.
Of course, induced abortion is a main cause of post-abortion infections, provoked either by accidental cervical lesions, or inadequate cleaning of the uterus and can lead after surgery to sterility or can cause premature births in the future or ectopic pregnancy.
When we talk about the risks of pregnancy after the abortion – the physical one- we must also refer to the risk of perforating the uterus during the surgery. This trauma has a much higher frequency if the interventions are made after the fifteenth week of pregnancy. In case that during the final control – after surgery – uterine perforation is observed, there may be the risk of jeopardizing the intestines or the appearance of lesions that can even endanger a woman’s life. These cervical injuries will have negative effects in the evolution of future pregnancies.
But pregnancy risks after abortion are more obvious when we refer to a woman’s mental health. Post-abortion syndrome is recognized almost everywhere in the world. This disorder has been accepted by the American Psychiatric Association, defined as a type of anxiety disorder, caused by great stress, which occurs after a negative event whose evolution grows with time. (Larisa Ciochina, Constantin Iftimie, A vision of life).
Lots of women experience various symptoms after abortion, including depression which frequently occurs through various neuroses and suicidal thoughts associated with certain disorders of consciousness. The symptoms of depression and disorder may be intense or superficial, being more acute with more suggestible, highly sensitive or young and inexperienced women. Some authors show that post-abortion syndrome is in itself a product of the attack on the meaning of life, which shapes thoughts of self-destruction. Various negative states after surgery are caused by physiological changes – a procedure causing hormonal imbalance. One of the risks of post-abortion pregnancy is that the low fertility level, which may occur after abortion, emphasizes the guilt.
Pregnancy risks after abortion refer to the fact that the sensitive woman’s mental self-preservation system gives in – many women, especially very young ones, become depressed, sick, sad and reluctant to life, accusing insomnia or obsessive nightmares. It presents physical symptoms related to certain psychosomatic disorders characterized by headache, dizziness, basin aches, intestinal disorders, and bulimia. And although this general negative feeling decreases in intensity as time passes, during the next pregnancy that woman is likely to face intense remorse, consciousness processes and serious depression that can even lead to suicidal thoughts.
In most cases, pregnancy related risks after abortion especially reside in the feeling of acute guilt that follows it. Abortion inevitably takes away something essential in every woman’s nature – that is, giving life. During pregnancy many women are fully aware that a real baby grows within and that they are going to kill it on their own and free decision. Hence the appearance of a great feeling of intense guilt, remorse and continuous depression, as well as the occurrence of obsessions. A psychiatrist recently stated that it is much easier to remove a child from the mother’s bosom, than deleting the thought of him from her mind.
Pregnancy risks after abortion also refer to another obsessive idea that some women may have: that of a imminent punishment – divine or not – for what they did, this punishment falling upon the child in the womb, who will not survive or will be born with different diseases. Some women have accused of frightening nightmares which describe a horrific scene: after birth the newborn was placed next to his mother and cut into strips – how the baby was treated during abortion.
Pregnancy risks after the abortion do not refer only to the mother: both mother and father may have the idea that because of the abortion in the past they will not do well as parents in the future and will not rise up to expectations. Knowing the fact that they killed their own child can affect the development of an attachment and of a dysfunction between parents and the child. After an abortion, an anxious attachment between the mother or father and the child who was allowed to be born is likely to develop. This type of attachment refers to the excessive protection of children by parents, caused by obsessive fear that nothing bad should ever happen to them – as punishment for the abortion committed in the past.
So, the mother who wants to carry a pregnancy through, after having dealt with the disturbing experience of abortion, needs as much support from the partner and the entire family as possible, understanding and communication. And if the past experience had an intense, negative impact on her, in order to reduce pregnancy risks after abortion, turning to a specialist is recommended.