Abortion and Reenacting Sexual Abuse: An Expert's View

Theresa Burke, Ph.D., with David C. Reardon
 
The following is excerpted from the book Forbidden Grief: The Unspoken Pain of Abortion by Theresa Burke, Ph.D., with David C. Reardon.

It has been my experience that a high proportion of women suffering post-abortion trauma also have histories of molestation, sexual abuse, or incest. Most other post-abortion counselors with whom I deal have reported a similar observation.

In a survey of women in post-abortion counseling groups, 21 percent reported a history of childhood physical abuse and 24 percent reported childhood sexual abuse.1 And in a random sample survey of the general population, Dianne Russell reports that approximately one in three girls is sexually abused before age 18 and one in four is abused by age 14. These alarming statistics have a good deal to do with patterns of abuse and crisis.

Sexual abuse, at any age, can impair one’s ability to be healthy in the present. Sexual abuse is even more injurious when it is experienced during the formative years of childhood, since the distortions sexual trauma inflict can be deeper, more stunting, and more ingrained into the child’s developing personality.2 Sexual abuse survivors describe a sense of lost selves, wounded souls, and stolen psyches.

It was not until television talk shows began to open the window on the experiences of those affected by sexual abuse that millions of people received permission to talk openly about this issue. They began to examine the reality and prevalence of sexual abuse and started to discuss the wide-ranging detrimental effects it has caused in their lives.

So much of human behavior, healthy and unhealthy, can be motivated by conflicts and psychological cravings, unmet needs, and compulsive behaviors that feel normal because they are familiar.
 
If a history of sexual abuse has existed before an abortion, the woman may experience the abortion itself as simply a continuation of the violation she has experienced before.

The way in which abortion resembles sexual abuse is striking.

In the abortion, the abortionist’s hand or instrument penetrates deep into the woman's organs. The abortionist is usually a male, and the entry point is the same as where the woman has been violated by men in her past. The abortion’s destruction of the child growing inside her echoes the way sexual abuse destroyed her own innocent and childlike nature. In such cases, abortion can take on elements of a symbolic suicide. The death of the innocent “inner child” is a reenactment of the traumatic loss of the abused woman’s own self.
 
The effects of trauma often provide numerous invitations to crisis. Desires, beliefs, longings, past experiences, and fears can be employed by the traumatized person in the form of fantasies, reenactments, or repetitions which are unconsciously assembled around the issues of the trauma.

Most experts in the field of trauma and abuse support the idea that victims recreate their abuse or trauma in many ways. It is unfinished business, and the victims will continue to act it out until it is somehow resolved or completed. The reenactment can be a ritualized means through which a woman will intensely grieve and mourn.
 
The grief of abortion, like the grief of incest, is often hidden yet acted out in various ways. It is a powerful recreation of the intrusion forced upon the woman during sexual abuse, in which she is once again called upon to lie helpless on her back, silently enduring the invasion of her body.

Afterward, just as after episodes of sexual abuse, she must be prepared to hide her shame, guilt, despair, and grief behind a painted mask of normalcy.
 
Reenacting Abuse
 
Sheila was sexually and physically abused in her childhood. Not surprisingly, she often ended up with abusive partners. She “looked for love in all the wrong places” and repeatedly found herself pregnant with no partner support. She wrote the following about her five abortions:
 
There is an enormous hole in my heart, a source of tremendous grief at not having my children. I usually experience deep depression during the holidays, especially at Christmas. Abortion for me has been as inhumane as any abusive relationship I have ever been in. My abortionist took the place of my abusive father and my abusive partner. Neither had any comprehension of my real needs as a little girl or later as a woman.

Now I continue to be punished by empty memories of what could have been—what should have been. It’s a stark reality that I must live with. The truth of my life is hideous. My abortions, like my childhood, are a pain that will never go away.
 
Sheila’s abortions served as a way to symbolize the damage done to her by mimicking the deprivation of love, childhood, and life that had occurred during her own traumatic childhood. Sheila terminated each pregnancy with tremendous grief and heartache, yet each time she felt helpless to do anything differently, seeing the procedure as another casualty in her life. Her road to recurrent trauma was predictable, even habitual.

Abortion was a continuation of a pattern begun in childhood and extended into her adult life. It only served to reenact her trauma, while also depriving her of the joy of having children who might have restored meaning and hope in her life.

Maggie had a long and violent history of sexual abuse, which began at the age of four in a child prostitution ring. Years later she described her abortions as her own sentencing and execution.
 
I remember walking into the clinic and feeling like I was about to take my rightful place in an electric chair. I knew a part of myself would die. I wanted that baby. I wanted all of them. Yet each time I felt like abortion was something that I just had to do.
 
Maggie felt compelled to sacrifice her children through abortion because of an abusive history. Her own “inner child” had been sacrificed when she was repeatedly and violently sexually abused as a young girl. For Maggie, the analogy of an electric chair verified abortion as a life-threatening shock, similar to many episodes of abuse she had endured as a child.

Her inability or unwillingness to carry a child to term and to take on the responsibilities of being a mother arose from the developmental handicaps she suffered as an abused child. She saw herself as that stunted, abused child and could not see how to make the developmental leap to becoming a responsible, loving parent. She felt emotionally stuck and thus trapped in a pattern of abortion, which recreated the traumatic themes of grief, loss, powerlessness, and violence which had shaped her childhood.
 
Barbara’s history of sexual abuse, followed by six abortions, began with her mother’s abortion when she was only seven.
 
After her abortion, my mother was never the same. She suffered depression and became a heroin addict. The family split up because of my parent’s drug abuse. I was abandoned by my family and spent years in foster homes, where I was sexually violated by my caretakers. I became a prostitute. I sought love and human touch with sex. Many men had me, many times.

I remember times when guys sat at a table playing a game of cards over me—I was the winner’s prize. They played the same game when it came time to see whose turn it was to take me to the abortion clinic. I was high most of the time, trying with futile effort to drown my pain.
 
Abortion had become just another tough break in life that Barbara felt she had to accept and endure. It kept her trapped in despair and pain. As a seven-year-old child, she experienced feelings of "survivor guilt" associated with the knowledge that one of her siblings had died in an abortion, while for some unknown reason she had been allowed to survive.

As her mother’s life deteriorated, so did Barbara’s life. Sexual abuse and prostitution led her full circle back to abortion, again and again. She kept returning to the disparaging arena of prostitution because she did not feel worthy of anything more. Her sexual degradation and multiple abortions echoed unresolved issues related to her mother’s abortion, and her own survival guilt and childhood sexual abuse.
 
With counseling and the support of those who understood and accepted what she had endured, Barbara is now free of all the secrets that held her bound. She is now capable of speaking about the unspeakable and connecting private anxieties and fears to their source, instead of acting them out in destructive repetitions. She is married to a patient man who is a stable and loving support in her life and is developing a spiritual life that furnishes her with hope and strength.

These are the ingredients that will help her continue to heal as she continues to do extensive grief work related to all these agonizing losses...

The rest of this story can be found at -- http://www.afterabortion.org/articles/abortionsexabuse.htm