To understand Post Abortion Syndrome (PAS), one must first understand Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) - victims of PTSD are said to have "experienced, witnessed, or were confronted with an event or events that involved actual or threatened death or serious injury, or a threat to the physical integrity of self or others, and the person's response involved intense fear, helplessness, or horror."
This event could be any number of things, including war, rape, witnessing a murder, being a victim of a violent crime, or surviving the devastations of an earthquake or hurricane. For the woman who has had an abortion, it is the act of taking the life of her own unborn child (Terry, 1990).
While abortion is perceived by our society as being an acceptable option to giving birth, most women, at some deep level of their being, realize that abortion is an act against nature, and must "shut down" any maternal instincts they may have in order to carry through with an abortion. After the abortion is over, many women are unable to reconcile the fact that they were responsible for the death of their child, and struggle for years with unresolved feelings of guilt and grief.
These women usually struggle with their grief in isolation, and rarely feel free to discuss their abortion experiences with others for fear that they will be condemned or abandoned by those close to them. While many women around the world are suffering from PAS, most believe that they are alone in their pain - that their negative experience with abortion is unusual or unique - thus compounding their feelings of loneliness and isolation (Candace, 1997).
When a woman does seek help, or attempts to talk to her friends and family about her experience, she is often met with resistance and a lack of understanding. Counselors, abortion providers, doctors and peers may all tell the woman that she needs to put her experience behind her, or get on with her life......
