Eve also characterizes how some Christians deal with abortion regret/grief:

"Many of my clients have felt regret after abortion that is as deep (as far as I can tell) as any regret they've ever felt. They then confess to Christ, ask for forgiveness, and know that Jesus forgives; and they move on, as they move on from other actions that they know are grave sins. Because all this is private and can happen in a moment (praying the Sinner's Prayer, for example, or responding to an altar call), I think it can look, to people raised outside this particular strain of Protestantism, less weighty and less of a relief of a terrible burden than it really is. These women speak very precisely about how they've dealt with their grief and moved on; but the way they deal with grief and regret over abortion is the way they would deal with grief and regret over any terrible sin. They give it to God and move on."

What Eve describes is something I've also seen. Left there, though, it is rarely sufficient for moving on in peace. Very few women who find themselves on an abortion table got there without commissions/omissions from others.

Abortion recovery that buys into the idea that the woman is the only person responsible doesn't help her consider how she may have been let down, abandoned, sometimes coerced, by significant others in her life.

Many women resist assigning any responsibility to others. For some people, it's easier to be chronically angry at oneself than to consider the possibility that others let us down.

The point of this kind of work isn't to find someone else to blame. It is to do the kind of "anger work" that allows a person to identify whether she has been suppressing painful anger or hurt as a result of what others did, or failed to do. It's important to consciously identify that suppressed hurt or anger and make some kind of decision about forgiveness.

As forgiveness student Robert Enright argues (see "Uncovering"), unacknowledged anger is often what keeps us from experiencing peace or serenity about the past.


Chapters 5 & 6 of Enright's Forgiveness is a Choice explore suppressed anger in detail.

I know very few women who have successfully resolved abortion experiences who have dealt with it purely as their own sin and grief issue. They also have to reflect on the interpersonal nature of what happened in their life at that time.