Abortion and Survivor Guilt!

Survivor Guilt is a very insidious thing.

It plays like the background music to your life, always a low hum droning on.

After having an abortion many women go through the thought process of survivor guilt.

It goes something like this:

"Because I chose to terminate another being's life therefore I have to make my life mean something.

I have to live for the two of us because my baby never got to live.

I have to somehow be more than I was intending to be.

I can't be super happy because if I am then I'm reminded of the terrible thing I did so how can I be happy when another being never got to be.

I have to be very very good because I got to live and my baby didn't. Good means that my baby's death wasn't in vain.

I have to feel privileged and grateful for being alive because my baby never got to me."

This way of thinking is a huge pressure to have to live under. It's not natural and it's not healthy. The bar is set way too high. All of us have a wide range of emotions and feelings, and thinking that however you are feeling isn't elevated enough or isn't grateful enough or isn't grieving enough is very controlling and damaging.

Women particularly do guilt really well. And having an abortion for some of us goes against our natural and biological emotional make up. We're damned if we do and damned if we don't.

The key is to catch yourself doing it, to realise that there was a point at which you decided to adopt this mindset and the way out of it is to take your side, you don't have to qualify to live your life because you had an abortion.

There are many many reasons why women have abortions and on a spiritual level it's not black and white.

There will be lessons to be learned through the journey of abortion and it's not a case of either/or. Because you're alive and this baby was aborted does not mean you were selfish and have to punish yourself with this frame of thinking.