What They're Not Telling You About "Choice"

The mental health data that the abortion debate keeps leaving out

Four years after Dobbs, the conversation has calcified into two camps: those who say the ruling was an attack on women, and those who say women are better protected without it.

But somewhere in the middle of the political war, a quieter story is being erased , the story of what actually happens to women after. Not politically. Emotionally. Physiologically. Mentally.

And if we actually care about women, not just as symbols in a culture war, but as full human beings with complex inner lives — we owe them the full picture.

The dominant narrative in reproductive rights coverage follows a consistent structure: women's autonomy, extreme circumstances, and the medical consequences of restricted access.

The article often leads with infant mortality data, accounts of delayed emergency care, and the deaths of women who couldn't get treatment in time. These are serious stories, and they deserve to be told.

But there is a conspicuous gap.

Across years of abortion coverage in mainstream media, one question is almost never asked: how are the women who had abortions doing afterward? Not in the courtroom. Not at the ballot box. In their lives. Their mental health. Their emotional reality, months and years down the line.

Do they have regrets, or are they thriving? Did having an abortion actually solve the problem — or have their opinions shifted with time? And perhaps most importantly: how are they really doing, years later, when no one is asking for their vote or their story?

Thses question does not appear in these articles. And that absence, consistent, across outlets, across years , is itself a story worth examining.

A 2023 systematic review and meta-analysis of 15 studies covering more than 18,000 participants found that the pooled international prevalence of depression in women following abortions was 34.5%. That's not a fringe number from an advocacy website. That's peer-reviewed data published in BMC Psychiatry. AFP

A 2025 Canadian study by Auger et al., tracking nearly 29,000 abortions and over 1.2 million births, found that for five or more years after the procedure, women who had abortions were significantly more likely to be hospitalized for mental health reasons compared to women who had live births.

Even after controlling for prior mental health history and other risk factors, women who had abortions had an 81% greater risk of psychiatric hospitalization, a 157% greater risk of hospitalization for a substance use disorder, and a 116% greater risk of hospitalization for a suicide attempt. Lozier Institute

A 2025 cross-sectional survey of nearly 2,000 American women aged 40 to 45 found that those who had undergone abortions were twice as likely to have attempted suicide than those who had not. AFP

These are not small numbers. These are not footnotes.

Here is what feminism once promised women: that their choices would be taken seriously. That includes the full emotional aftermath of every choice — including the hard ones. But somewhere along the way, the movement that championed women's complexity began insisting that one particular decision could only ever produce relief. That it was simple. That grief was a political liability.

Multiple meta-analyses have found that abortion is associated with a 37–49% greater likelihood of depression and a 34–43% greater likelihood of anxiety. Lozier Institute

Women already knew this. They've been telling doctors, friends, and journals for decades. What they received in return was silence , or worse, the suggestion that their grief wasn't real, that they'd been influenced by religion or politics rather than their own lived experience.

That is not care. That is dismissal dressed up as empowerment.

Let's be absolutely clear about what this piece is not saying. It is not saying every woman who has had an abortion is permanently broken. It is not saying women who are relieved are wrong to feel that way. Emotional responses to pregnancy and loss exist across a spectrum. Grief shows up differently.

What it is saying is this: arbotian is a real issue , a issue of human rights, both for the living mother and an unborn child. More so, the real mental crisis women who follow though find themselbes dealing with, so women deserve to know the trith, they deserve to know what could be the outcome and what are the pottential consiquesnces of their choice. if we are going to have a serious conversation about what protects women, we have to stop selecting only the data that supports the conclusion we've already decided on.

Protecting women means:

• Telling them the truth about documented mental health risks before they make irreversible decisions

• Funding post-abortion counseling and support, not pretending the emotional aftermath doesn't exist

• Refusing to let political convenience flatten a deeply personal, often painful human experience into a slogan

The piece in Cosmo frames the post-Dobbs era as a story of women fighting to reclaim something taken from them. And some women absolutely feel that way — their experience is valid.

But there is another group of women whose story never makes it into these essays: women who wish they'd had more support, more time, more honest information. Women who grieve quietly because the culture told them they weren't supposed to. Women who scan through mental health statistics at 2am wondering why no one warned them.

A movement that truly centers women must make room for all of them.

Researchers and physicians have called for healthcare providers to prioritize post-abortion counseling, care, and emotional support, noting that "the occurrence of post-abortion depression has been observed to be widespread globally." Cincinnatirighttolife

That is not a conservative talking point. That's a clinical recommendation from a peer-reviewed journal. And it's one that women deserve to hear.

The question isn't only "who controls the law." It's also: who controls the narrative around women's wellbeing?

Right now, the loudest voices are those who treat abortion as political leverage , either to restrict it or to defend it. Women's actual emotional and psychological outcomes are inconvenient to both camps.

We choose a different path. We believe women are strong enough to handle the full truth. We believe the data on mental health after abortion deserves the same airtime as the data on maternal mortality. We believe that real empowerment includes being informed — not managed.

The fiercest thing a woman can do is demand the whole story.

And then decide for herself.

Sources: BMC Psychiatry (2023), Journal of Psychiatric Research / Auger et al. (2025), American Family Physician (2025), Lozier Institute Fact Sheet on Abortion and Mental Health (2026), AAFP Letters (2025)