We compared children born after their mothers were denied abortions to the next children born to women who received abortions. Writing in JAMA Pediatrics, we showed that children born to women who were denied abortions fared worse.
Women are also much more likely to report poor maternal bonding — feeling trapped as a mother, resenting their baby, or longing for the “old days” before they had the baby — with the child born after abortion denial than with the next child born following a wanted abortion.
A woman in the Midwest who had an abortion six months after the birth of her first child and who had another baby five years after her abortion told us, “It would have been probably the worst thing for that child to come into this world because it would have never had the support it needed. I wasn’t mentally stable for that child.
We also saw a small but significant reduction in achieving developmental milestones among children whose mothers were denied abortions compared to those who received them, possibly related to the increased financial strain on the family.