Post-Abortion Trauma Syndrome

Post-abortion trauma syndrome or post-abortion syndrome (PAS) is a term primarily used by anti-abortion advocates who posit there is a relationship between abortion and adverse mental health effects in women. It is derived from the term post-traumatic stress disorder and, for women who have had abortions, is said to occur frequently and include long-term consequences such as depression, substance abuse, sexual dysfunction, and/or suicidal tendencies. As outlined below, PAS is important in the current abortion dialog because it is used to argue for more restrictive abortion access. It is important to note that the American Medical Association, the American Psychiatric Association, and American Psychological Association have found no empirical support for this concept

The term PAS originated in 1981 when psychologist Vincent Rue, testifying before a subcommittee of the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee, used it to describe what he perceived as women's severe reactions to abortion. In 1984, under the Reagan administration, the antiabortion president requested then Surgeon General C. Everett Koop, a known abortion foe, to report on the effects of abortion on women. Despite his personal beliefs, Koop was unable to conclude that abortion had either significant positive or negative effects on women's health. This finding remains true almost three decades later.

Neither the American Psychological Association nor the American Psychiatric Association recognizes PAS as a legitimate condition. Moreover, in 2008 the American Psychological Association released a task-force [Page 1126]report indicating that while women may experience grief, sadness, or a sense of loss after undergoing one abortion, there is no evidence that these feelings are specifically caused by having had an abortion. Rather, such feelings are generally attributed to preexisting emotions or the woman's life circumstances influencing the abortion decision.

Further evaluations suggest that the studies that are done to demonstrate the existence of PAS are methodologically unsound. A recent survey by Johns Hopkins University scholars Charles, Polis, Sridhara, and Blum found flaws with most investigations conducted between 1989 and 2007 regarding the mental health effects of abortion. They identified two key weaknesses with such studies: the failure to identify what the women's pregnancy intentions were (i.e., whether the pregnancies were unplanned or unwanted) and the erroneous attribution of cause to certain variables. Specifically, they were critical of studies that found a relationship between having an abortion and adverse mental health effects since such studies failed to explore alternate explanations for women's emotional health following an abortion. They concluded that the higher-quality studies deduced that there is little or no difference between the mental health of women who had undergone abortions and the comparative group of women who did not terminate their pregnancies.

PAS is important to the abortion debate because it is used to argue for antiabortion legislation. In 2007, the U.S. Supreme Court referenced negative mental health effects as justification for limiting late-term abortions. Such research also is used to implement “informed consent” laws that require women to be given certain information, including disputed medical facts, before having an elective abortion. Such misinformation, like the possibility of experiencing adverse mental health effects, could, as Weitz, Moore, Gordon, and Adler argue, adversely affect the mental health of women who seek elective abortions.

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