I chose to have an abortion, so why am I grieving?

Making the decision to have an abortion does not necessarily mean that the emotional response afterwards will be straightforward.

For some people, the predominant feeling following an abortion is relief. For others, there may be sadness, guilt, anger or a sense of loss. Sometimes several apparently contradictory emotions can exist at the same time.

You might know that ending a pregnancy was the right decision for you and still find yourself grieving. These two experiences do not cancel each other out.

There is no 'correct' way to feel after an abortion

One of the difficulties surrounding abortion is the expectation that we should be able to neatly categorise how someone feels about it. If the pregnancy was unwanted, perhaps you are expected to feel relieved. If the decision was yours, you may feel that you have somehow forfeited the right to feel sad. But human emotions rarely work that simply.

NICE guidance acknowledges that experiencing a range of emotions after an abortion is common and recommends that people are told how to access support if they need it. This can include support from friends and family, peer support, counselling or psychological interventions. The NHS similarly advises that experiencing many different emotions following an abortion is common.

Grief does not necessarily mean regret. You can grieve something, while still believing that the decision you made was right for you at the time.

Why might I grieve a decision I chose?

When we think about grief, we often associate it with bereavement. Yet grief can also arise around the loss of a possibility, an imagined future or a version of our life that will now not happen.

An abortion can therefore hold different meanings for different people. You might find yourself wondering how old the child would have been or thinking about the pregnancy around the expected due date. Feelings may emerge around another pregnancy, the birth of somebody else's baby or a significant birthday.

For someone else, the grief may have less to do with the pregnancy itself and more to do with the circumstances surrounding the decision. Perhaps you wanted to continue the pregnancy, but your relationship, finances, health or life circumstances made that feel impossible. Perhaps you felt pressure from a partner or family member. Perhaps the pregnancy was wanted but ended because of medical circumstances.

Each experience is individual, and sometimes the feelings we have about an abortion are not fixed. They can change as our lives change.

When feelings appear much later

Sometimes people are surprised when emotions surrounding an abortion emerge months or even years later. There is no timetable that says an experience must be emotionally resolved within a particular period.

Life events can cause us to revisit previous decisions from a different perspective. Becoming a parent later in life, experiencing fertility difficulties, entering a new relationship or reaching the age when you had imagined having children can all bring old experiences back into awareness.

This does not necessarily mean that you made the wrong decision for you. It may simply mean that something which happened at one stage of your life has acquired a different meaning at another. A decision can have been right for the person you were and the circumstances you were living in at the time while still bringing feelings of sadness when you look back on it later.

The impact of secrecy and stigma

Abortion can also be a particularly private experience. Some people tell very few people about it. Others tell nobody at all.

That can make difficult emotions harder to process because many of the rituals we normally associate with loss are absent. There may be no acknowledgement from other people and perhaps no space to talk openly about what happened.

Research has identified factors such as perceived pressure to end the pregnancy, having a wanted pregnancy and feeling the need to keep an abortion secret because of stigma as being associated with more negative emotional reactions for some women. It is therefore important that emotional support following abortion is non-judgemental.

Therapy should not begin with an assumption about what you ought to feel. Your experience does not have to fit somebody else's idea of what grief after abortion should look like.

How can counselling help after an abortion?

You don't have to feel overwhelmed or struggle to cope before asking for support. Sometimes, simply having a safe place to acknowledge and understand what you are feeling can help. Counselling provides a confidential space in which you can explore what the experience means to you without having to defend or justify your decision.

You might want to talk about sadness, relief, anger, guilt, relationships or the circumstances surrounding the pregnancy. You may simply want somewhere to say things that you have never felt able to say aloud.

For some people, counselling involves grieving. For others, it may involve self-compassion, understanding the circumstances in which a decision was made, or separating their own feelings from messages they have absorbed from family, religion, culture, or society.

Most importantly, therapy does not need to decide whether you should be grieving. Your feelings are allowed to be complicated. You can believe that an abortion was the right decision and still feel sadness about what might have been. You can experience relief and loss at the same time. You can grieve without regretting. Sometimes giving ourselves permission to hold those seemingly contradictory feelings is where healing begins.

References

National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) (2019, updated 2025). Abortion care (NG140). NICE.

Rocca, C.H., Samari, G., Foster, D.G., Gould, H. & Kimport, K. (2020). Emotions and decision rightness over five years following an abortion: An examination of decision difficulty and abortion stigma. Social Science & Medicine, 248, 112704. doi:10.1016/j.socscimed.2019.112704.

NHS (2026). Recovery after an abortion. NHS.