“Abortion is a preventable tragedy. No woman gets excited about having an abortion.” It’s a line you’ll soon hear if you spend any time in pro-choice circles. It’s intended to redirect the conversation to the causes of abortion, and to call out anti-choicers for their failure to support policies that could reduce abortion rates, like comprehensive sex education and free contraception. People who use this line also hope to counter the Republican narrative that women get abortions because they hate children or are of low moral character. Instead, it stigmatizes women who have had abortion, painting them as victims. It cedes the moral high ground, and allows anti-choicers to frame abortion as a bad and shameful thing.
When we call abortion tragic, we shift the conversation away from the causes of abortion. We don’t call chemotherapy tragic, or mourn the need to take antibiotics or have a root canal—even though the situations that necessitate these treatments range from frustrating to tragic. Treating abortion as an aberration among medical procedures, as inevitably tragic, treats it as something other than the medical procedure it is.
Abortion clinics across the country are sites of hope and redemption for hundreds of thousands of women. When we reframe abortion as a medical procedure, as a way of restoring hope to a suffering woman, as an antidote for the ills society has refused to fix,
The Real Tragedy is Not Having Access to Abortion
Women have abortion for a wide range of reasons: poverty, inadequate access to healthcare, fear of abuse at the hands of parents or partners who don’t want them to be pregnant, the need to finish college or secure a good job, lack of access to paid maternity leave, a history of pregnancy complications, deadly fetal anomalies.
More than 324,000 pregnant women are abused by their partners each year. Murder is the second-leading cause of death among pregnant women. Five percent of rapes end in pregnancy, and 32,000 women get pregnant from rape each year.
The tragedy for women who seek abortions isn’t the abortion. It’s the circumstance that led to the abortion. And in many cases, these circumstances are the creation of a political culture that claims to value life while doing everything possible to make abortions necessary and common. Right wing politicians create the very circumstances that lead to the “tragic” abortions they decry—low wages, inadequate healthcare, violence against women, inadequate support for mothers, poor access to contraception, and more.
The real tragedy would be not having access to abortion. Thanks to the Turnaway Study, which follows women denied abortions, we already know that the outcomes for women who can’t get abortions aren’t good. They’re more likely to live in poverty, to be abused, to need government assistance, and to struggle with poor mental health.
The United States has the worst maternal mortality rate in the developed world. Some states have higher maternal mortality rates than war-torn regions such as Iraq. Abortion is 14 times safer than giving birth. For women who can’t afford or access quality healthcare, the real tragedy is being forced to give birth in an unsafe health system. Abortion can save lives. It prevents tragedies.
Stigmatizing Women Who Get Abortions With the ‘Tragedy’ Narrative
No woman looks forward to taking time off of work to shell out hundreds of dollars and have surgery. That much is true. But it’s true whether she’s having an abortion or a root canal. We only call the abortion tragic, even though both procedures might have been prevented with better access to care, different socioeconomic conditions, or better luck.
That’s because pro-choice activists have accepted the framing of the far right. Rather than highlighting the ways that abortion can be life-saving and even life-affirming, we persist with the tragedy narrative. Discussions of abortion always frame women who have abortions as somehow other. Even though one in four women have had an abortion, we talk about “them” rather than “us.”
Fearing backlash, stigma, and even violence, women who have had abortions are reluctant to share their stories. This allows those who have not had abortions—those who do not know what the experience is like—to frame the pro-choice discussion.
This stigmatizing of abortion and silencing of women who have them is not a mere political tool. It has the potential to destroy lives. One recent study found that the more a woman internalizes abortion stigma, such as the belief that abortion is tragic, the more likely she is to experience physical health complications and psychological distress following an abortion.
The Most Common Emotion After Abortion: Relief
It’s true that abortion is often mired in tragedy. That makes it no different from any other medical treatment. So we need to stop calling it tragic and treat it as the valuable resource it is. We also need to stop stigmatizing abortion and listen to women who have had abortions.
The research tells us that women don’t regret their abortions, and that abortion is not linked to depression, addiction, or psychological distress. Instead, the most common emotion women report following an abortion is relief. In fact, 90% of women in one study said they felt relieved after their abortion. That’s not typically what people feel following a “tragedy” or “tragic decision.” Even among those who felt negative emotions about their abortion, 80% did not regret the decision.
The tragedy narrative feeds right-wing lies about abortion. It infantilizes women who seek abortions, turning them into victims of their own decisions. It also casts judgment on the overwhelming majority of women who seek abortions, by stigmatizing them for not seeing their decision as tragic.
Women are entitled to whatever emotions they feel about abortion—tragedy or relief, sadness or joy. We also must do a better job counteracting the forces that lead to abortion. Framing abortion as inevitably tragic will not accomplish that goal. Abortion is a medical procedure with immense social value. We must not treat it as something it’s not.