But a new study suggests that only very rarely do women regret having an abortion.
Researchers looked at 667 women who had abortions between 2008 and 2010 at 30 U.S. clinics.
The participants answered questions about their experiences every six months for three years after the procedure.
The study found that 99 percent of the women said that they felt they made the right choice in terminating their pregnancies, up to three years afterward, according to the findings published July 8 in the journal PLOS ONE.
"Claims that women suffer from psychological harm from their abortions, and that large proportions of women come to regret their abortions over time, at least in these data, are simply not true," said study researcher Corinne Rocca, an epidemiologist at the University of California, San Francisco.
Post-abortion emotion
The notion of abortion regret is often cited in legislation requiring that women undergo mandatory ultrasounds or waiting periods before an abortion.
The concern has risen to the level of the Supreme Court: In 2007, Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote a majority opinion upholding the federal ban on a procedure sometimes called partial-birth abortion, and used the possibility of regret to support the court's decision.
"It seems unexceptionable to conclude some women come to regret their choice to abort the infant life they once created and sustained," Kennedy wrote.
But the actual emotional experiences of women after abortions were less well-studied than the political debate has suggested, Rocca said.
"People make arguments about emotions, but actually we have not had good data examining these questions to date," she told Live Science.
Most studies that have followed up with women after they have had an abortion have been short-term studies, and they have found mixed emotions but predominantly relief after the procedure.
Most longer-term studies have been retrospective, asking women to look back at their abortion experiences months or years later.
Retrospective studies often return unreliable information, because people have a hard time remembering how they felt in the past without their current emotions biasing their memories.
A few studies have followed women prospectively, meaning the womenwere enrolled in the study at the time of the abortion, and then called later to give real-time updates about their emotional experiences.
Those studies have generally found that women are satisfied with the decision, but returned mixed results about whether women's emotions about the procedure were positive or negative over time.
Rocca and her team used data from the Turnaway Study, a project that compares women who obtain abortions with women who hit the time limits for having an abortion and were turned away.
The study is still ongoing, and the women will be followed for at least five years total so researchers can detect emotional trends over time, Rocca said.
"No study has been done like this in the United States in the past couple of decades," she said.
Few regrets
Every six months, the women were asked whether they felt their decision to have an abortion was the right choice. They were also asked about positive and negative emotions, including CONTINUE READING
SOURCE: LIVESCIENCE
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