‘Abortion Regret’ Shows the Long History of a Favorite Anti-Choice Talking Point
April 19, 2019Abortion rights supporters tout relief as the signature emotion that most abortion seekers experience after their procedures. Anti-choicers have their own frequently publicized post-abortion feeling: regret.
As the recent book Abortion Regret: The New Attack on Reproductive Freedom by scholars Shoshanna Erlich and Alesha Doan argues, emotions don’t occur in a vacuum. As individual and in-the-moment as emotions appear, their meanings—and how they are expressed—are socially and politically constructed, sometimes in complex ways and sometimes in simplistic binaries that say “men punch walls when they get angry” and “women cry.”