Reproductive Rights and the New "Abortion-Pill Reversal"

What the anti-abortion movement has thought through carefully is how to tell stories about abortion's impact. Early activists, who were mostly Catholics, were almost solely concerned with saving the life of the fetus. Feminists arguing for choice, in turn, made a convincing case for their own rights — and accused people opposed to abortion of not caring about women at all. In the years after Roe v. Wade, however, some of the millions of women who procured newly legal abortions began to complicate that conflict by speaking publicly about their own experiences and emotions, including their regrets. Anti-abortion activists founded ‘‘abortion recovery'' organizations and advanced the idea of ‘‘post-abortion syndrome,'' a relative, they claimed, of post-traumatic stress disorder.