The Decision-Making Process and the Outcome of Therapeutic Abortion

The American literature on abortion suggests that an immediate negative response to abortion is not uncommon among women undergoing this procedure and that short-term unhappiness and guilt may be part of the normal response. The proportion of women with serious psychiatric complications is probably less than 10 percent. Four case reports of postabortion psychiatric illness are presented that indicate (in agreement with the literature) that there is high risk in abortion when any of the following elements is present: strong ambivalence, coercion, medical indication, concomitant severe psychiatric illness, and the woman’s feeling that the decision was not her own.