Amber was so distraught, she couldn’t get out of bed in the morning. She couldn’t eat, couldn’t sleep, and eventually dropped out of school.
Singer ‘Chilli’ of TLC cried for nine years after suffering the same trauma. Julie Lambotte was even worse. She was so overcome with grief, she killed two of her three children.
But they are among the many women who have suffered severe mental health problems after taking part in a controversial procedure many champion as “a freedom.”
Though pro-choice advocates call abortion “reproductive freedom,” research consistently shows that many women who have abortions will later suffer from depression and other mental health disorders.
After having an abortion, Amber Pike not only couldn’t eat or sleep, she dropped out of school and became so depressed, she stopped paying her student loans.
“I can’t survive that again. It would destroy me,” she said on the Netflix dating show “Love is Blind.”
According to LiveAction.com, TLC band member Chilli told VH1 in 2010 that her abortion “messed me up” so bad that “it broke my spirit.”
“I feel like I became kind of not my strong self anymore,” she said. “I would break down, I would just cry because I wasn’t a mommy.
“I cried every day for almost nine years, and then I was caught up [and] I had to have a baby.”
Allison Duhon told the Ethics and Religious Liberty Convention that her abortion was so traumatic “it hurt me physically.”
“I remember screaming, but the nurse told me to stop as to not scare other women.”
Then the emotional turmoil set in.
“I remember going numb for months after my abortion,” she said. “I remember the trust issues I had with everyone.”
Duhon said she became overprotective of her daughter because she thought “I didn’t deserve a healthy child.”
When she found out her son had autism, she said she felt like she was “being punished,” and felt “unforgivable.”
“I still cry for my baby,” she said. “I have to live forever with the excruciating reality that I ended my baby’s life.”
Another woman suffered depression, anxiety and deep regret after being traumatized by an abortion she had after becoming pregnant from a rape.
“Deep inside it kills me every day knowing what I did was very stupid. I don’t think I could ever forgive myself,” she told AbortionChangesYou.com.
“If I could only go back to that day, I would have never done it.”
In one of the most horrific stories to emerge in recent studies, Julie Lambotte aborted her daughter who had Down’s syndrome. Afterward, she suffered so much grief that she killed two of her three birth children and stabbed the other one.
She told authorities in Belgium that she did it because she “missed her little girl.”
More and more studies show the traumatic effects of abortion on women.
The Catholic University of America collected data from 8,000 women over a 13-year period and the 2016 study showed that abortion led to an increased risk of mental health disorders and substance abuse in late adolescents and early adults.
The study found that the risk of mental health disorders increased by 45 percent in women who had abortions.
A 2005 study in Norway concluded that women who had abortions had “significantly higher” rates of anxiety and depression than women who had suffered miscarriages.
And a 2019 study by the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health studied the mental health impact on women who aborted “wanted” babies compared to women who ended “unwanted” pregnancies.
The study showed that both groups suffered increased risks to their mental health, but women who wanted their babies suffered mental disorders 1.43 times more often. Women who aborted “unwanted” babies had a 94 percent higher risk of suicidal thoughts, and were 270 percent more likely to suffer from alcohol abuse.
Even men have suffered traumatic effects, saying abortions by their wives or girlfriends “left deep scars.”
One man even said he didn’t know if he was going to survive after her girlfriend’s abortion, according to one study.
“I wasn’t going to jump off a bridge, but I probably would have drank myself to death,” he said.
“I’ve thought about what happened every day for the last 32 years.”
Yet pro-choice advocates continue to deny that abortion trauma exists, often shaming women who admit regret and applaud their “right” to reproductive choice.
They deny the research to protect their agenda and industry.
“I think the fear in the [abortion rights] movement is if we admit abortion is hard for some women, then we’re admitting that it’s wrong,” Rosemary Candelario, director of the Massachusetts Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice, told LiveAction.com.
For women like Duhon, the trauma is very real.
“All my ‘right’ did was cause me a lifetime of pain,” she said. “There was no empowerment in that.”