AFTER going through with an abortion, Christina Milford, founder of Pregnancy Resource Centre of Jamaica in Montego Bay, St James, says a lot of the women are plunged into grief, caught in a cycle of wanting to get pregnant again, being successful in their efforts, but still opting for an abortion.

Milford said that in 2005, while working at the then Youth Enhancement Service, she catered to students 16 and over who did not make it through school, empowering them to reach their personal goals. Her first client, she said, was a post-abortive woman who expressed a great sense of regret for aborting her child.

“She was 18 years old, a beautiful girl, and she was in tears because the girls were talking about their children, and she couldn’t talk about hers because they were dead. At age 16, she had two abortions. I took her through the process of healing, just listened to her and let her release the guilt,” she told the
Jamaica Observer Press Club last week Friday.

A month later, she said the woman came back to say that she was pregnant; however, she again wanted to abort the child.

“Post-abortion grief is very real. I’ve seen time and again that after a woman has had an abortion, she wants back a baby, but then she might find that when she gets a baby nothing has changed from what it was before so she will still revert to getting rid of this baby again but still want it back,” said Milford.

Later in her career, when she started the Pregnancy Resource Centre, she said she encountered another woman with a similar experience.

“This woman came, and she said, ‘Miss, if I have another baby, you think the pain will go away?’ and I started to feel the heartache. I said, ‘Lord no, no, no I can’t deal with that pain’. But I had to tell her the truth is I don’t know because sometimes the Lord only gives you one child,” she told the
Observer.

“She was going through sexual dysfunction. Every time she saw her partner, she wanted to be sexually active to get back a baby. When the period would come at the time, she would cry and get frustrated because he can’t make the baby, and she wanted him to make a baby. So the whole family was devastated,” she recalled, adding that more support is needed in Jamaica for women who experience this kind of grief.

Researchers Albert Cain and Barbara Cain name this phenomenon the ‘replacement child syndrome’.

The phenomenon states that in an action of compensation for an induced termination, parents may attempt to replace the lost child with a “wanted” child soon after the abortion.

While grief and trauma is often a common characteristics in women post-abortion, some researchers have found that others feel a sense of relief when they have an abortion.

A 2020 study, published in the Journal of Social Science and Medicine by Julia Steinberg, found that 95 per cent of women, moments after terminating their pregnancy, felt that their decision was the right. Additionally, 99 per cent of women, five years after their abortion, held the belief that they made the right decision.

The study further noted that relief was the most common emotion felt by the women, and regret did not emerge over time.

“These results and others from studies conducted globally counter assertions by abortion opponents that women are not certain of their decisions, or that women regret or have mainly negative emotions about their abortions if not in the short run then after a long period of time,” the study found.