Ireland’s parliament, the Dáil, voted down a reproductive rights amendment bill this month that would have abolished the country’s mandatory three-day waiting period for access to an abortion. Supporters of the unsuccessful reform bill, tabled by the Social Democrats, argued that the delay serves no medical purpose.
As the bill moved through political debate and media coverage, those defending the requirement to wait three days from the time of requesting an abortion before care can be accessed barely attempted to argue otherwise, instead structuring their opposition to reform around the idea that women cannot be trusted to know what they want. The waiting period, which is not required in most European countries, was repeatedly described as “a cooling off” period; time to “reflect”, “reconsider”, “rethink”. Supporters of the status quo spoke extensively of wanting to save women from feelings of regret.
That framing is deliberate. In reaction to more accepting cultural attitudes around abortion, the modern anti-choice movement increasingly presents itself not as punitive, but protective. Women are no longer primarily portrayed as selfish or immoral; instead, they are framed as vulnerable, emotionally confused, incapable of making their own decisions. The role of the state, then, becomes one of slowing them down, supervising them, warning them against themselves.
The concern, of course, isn’t really regret itself. Regret is ordinary. Adults regret relationships, careers, relocations, financial decisions, marriages, affairs, voting choices and, yes, even parenthood – yet we do not build legal frameworks around the possibility that people may later feel ambivalence or conflict about their decisions.
We also understand that regret isn’t always total or all-consuming. Regret can be fleeting, it can dissipate, it can coexist alongside relief, self-compassion, happiness. People can regret certain aspects of a situation and not others. We understand and accept that regret is a nuanced, manageable and everyday part of life – except, that is, when it comes to abortion.
Then, regret is sharpened into a threat. An all-consuming, emotionally tormenting, life-defining threat.
This threat hasn’t been shaped by research or evidence, but activism. The term “post-abortion syndrome” was coined in 1981 by Vincent Rue, a US anti-abortion advocate who stated that women who had abortions experienced a form of post-traumatic stress disorder characterised by feelings of regret, guilt, anxiety and depression. Rue’s research has been widely disparaged and dismissed by scientific and academic communities. Nevertheless, anti-choice campaigners have found in it a politically useful tool: the threat of lifelong torment for any woman who has an abortion.
This threat of lasting guilt and regret is pervasive, insidious and effective. In 2016, I completed a master’s in sexuality studies at San Francisco State University, where I conducted qualitative interviews with Irish women about their experience of having an abortion. They all expressed absolute certainty and relief around their decision. However, anti-abortion narratives are so ubiquitous that many interviewees expressed a fear of being tormented by guilt and regret for the rest of their lives – feelings that never arrived.
This is what anti-abortion discourse often achieves. It manufactures distress where none previously existed. Women become frightened not by their abortion, but by the social expectation that they should be emotionally ruined by it. The threat of future guilt and regret becomes a disciplinary tool.
Women celebrate the result of Ireland’s referendum on liberalising abortion law, in Dublin, May 26, 2018. Photograph: Clodagh Kilcoyne/Reuters
That threat is reinforced constantly in popular culture. Women entering abortion clinics only to dramatically change their minds at the last second has become a trope in film and television. In Juno, the teenage protagonist confidently seeks an abortion before fleeing the clinic in panic and deciding to continue her pregnancy. In Blue Valentine, Michelle Williams’s character changes her mind while lying on the examination table. In Sex and the City, Miranda – consistently portrayed as pro-choice and deeply ambivalent about motherhood – ultimately abandons plans for an abortion, only to be enthusiastically embraced by her previously judgmental friend, Charlotte.
Again and again, abortion clinics are portrayed not as places where women access healthcare, but as sites of revelation where women discover their “true” maternal instincts and run back towards respectability, family and motherhood. Embedded within these portrayals is the implication that women don’t know their own minds, and that motherhood is the natural destination women will arrive at if only they are made to pause long enough.
The reality is that abortion has almost unprecedentedly low regret rates. Peer-reviewed studies following women in the US for between three and five years after an abortion show that the rates of women experiencing any feeling of regret remain between 1% and 5% and dissipate over time. Any distress is often linked not to the abortion itself, but to experiences of social stigma, judgment and lower social support.
There’s another type of care that has even lower regret rates yet is comparably politicised and legislated against: gender affirmation surgery. Politicians, legislators and anti-trans campaigners frequently use regret narratives to argue against trans rights and healthcare, even though research shows that, globally, regret after gender affirmation surgery is extremely rare – ranging between 0.03% and 1%. Repeated studies suggest that regret among trans people is often caused by social stigma.
In comparison, knee replacement surgery has a dissatisfaction rate of up to 30%. Elective rhinoplasty has a general regret rate of 5%-15%, but studies from Iran show regret rates can reach 40%. Yet nobody proposes mandatory reflection periods before nose jobs. And when cis men want hair transplants or cis women want fillers, Botox or breast augmentation – themselves all forms of gender affirmation treatment – no politicians demand legal safeguards against possible future sadness.
double quotation markNobody proposes mandatory reflection periods before nose jobs
Because regret isn’t the issue. We tolerate regret when it occurs within traditional gender roles and heteronormative life scripts. If someone is moving towards traditional gendered expectations – motherhood, heterosexual family life, normative masculinity or femininity – their autonomy is rarely treated as suspicious. But if someone seeks to move away from those structures, suddenly regret becomes an emergency requiring state intervention. Regret is weaponised selectively, deployed only where it serves a patriarchal purpose.
The debate in Ireland thus cannot be separated from a wider global political climate in which reproductive autonomy is increasingly being treated as socially destabilising and in need of policing. Across the US, a rollback of abortion rights has unfolded alongside escalating attacks on contraception access, sex education and trans rights, all under the language of “protection”, “family values” and concern for long-term wellbeing. At the same time, a growing pronatalist movement – fuelled by anxiety around falling birthrates, demographic panic and deeply conservative ideas about gender – increasingly frames women’s independence, queer lives and reproductive choice as cultural threats.
In this context, the debate in Ireland over a three-day waiting period is not some isolated political disagreement about medical procedure. It is part of a broader ideological project attempting to reassert traditional gender roles through emotional governance. Women are told they will regret not becoming mothers. Trans people are told they will regret becoming themselves. The message underneath both is the same: autonomy that moves people away from traditional ideas of gender, family and reproduction is inherently suspect, and must be slowed down, restrained and ultimately prevented.
Stay in line, patriarchy says, or you’ll regret it.
