NYT: Is There a Post-Abortion Syndrome?
By EMILY BAZELON
Published: January 21, 2007

Early on a a windy Saturday morning in November, Rhonda Arias drove her Dodge Caravan past a Wal-Mart at the end of her block and onto the Interstate. She was beginning the 50-mile drive from her house in southwest Houston to Plane State Jail, where she is, as she puts it, an “abortion-recovery counselor.”

To Arias, that means helping women at the prison who have had abortions to understand how that procedure has stained them, and how it explains what has gone wrong in their lives. The prisoners’ abortions, she told me, “have a great deal to do with their pain.”

Arias, who is 53, often wears silver hoop earrings and low black boots, and she has a weakness for edgy zingers. She started doing post-abortion counseling 15 years ago. After what she describes as a revelation from God, she decided that her own pain and unhappiness were rooted in the abortion she had in 1973, when she was 19. “It was the year Roe v. Wade was decided, and I remember saying, ‘No guy in Washington is going to tell me what to do with my body!’ ” Arias said with a sharp laugh as we were driving. But after the procedure, she says, strange feelings washed over her. “I remember having evil thoughts, about hurting children,” she said. “It was like I’d done the worst thing I could possibly do. A piece of evil had entered me.” the rest