OBGYN.net Women and Patients - Book Reivew |
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Healing Choice: Your Guide to Emotional Recovery after an Abortion Editors Note: I have read and re-read this book and each time I read it I understand more what a much needed and most often ignored topic this book is about. I also understand that this book is not for everyone so I ask you to allow those that are suffering to have the right to find peace.
Women have feelings. The ability to grow and learn from their emotional life is one of the many strengths women possess. This is the good news. But it can also be bad news when emotions are complex, not easily resolved and are culturally charged --- such as the feelings a woman might have around a past abortion. Feelings that most often last a lifetime. If not recognized and delt with these feelings can ruin a womens life for ever. They never leave her. 1.4 million American women have abortions each year and the authors of The Healing Choice: Your Guide to Emotional Recovery after an Abortion believe that these women not only have normal and natural feelings about their experience but need a safe and private place to explore these emotions. In The Healing Choice authors Candace De Puy, Ph.D. and Dana Dovitch, Ph.D. are fearless, kind and uncompromisingly constructive in their attempt to assist a woman as she explores her abortion experience. The Healing Choice is a clear, moving, non-political, non-religious and unbiased self help guide to achieving emotional resolution and understanding after an abortion. Filled with thought provoking journal exercises and meaningful quotes from women who have chosen to terminate a pregnancy, The Healing Choice takes a woman from the experience of her pregnancy, through the day of termination and onto the weeks, months and years after the event. In the end she comes to a personal understanding of what post-abortion healing and acceptance means for her. Drs. De Puy and Dovitch are psychotherapists and educators. Their concern isn’t about what is politically correct in Washington, D.C., spiritually correct in churches, socially correct in women’s groups or around the dinner table. Their concern is for the millions of post-abortion women who are wisely hesitant to openly share their "choice" in a country where the moral debate over abortion rages on and a woman may be called a "killer" or a "sinner" for deciding to terminate a much wanted child due to medical problems or an unwanted pregnancy. What other reproductive life-cycle events (the onset of menses, miscarriage, infertility or menopause) have the cultural stigma of abortion or have lead to fierce debates on Capital Hill? Why would any woman risk talking about her abortion in this environment? She must suffer alone in her silence. Just as cancer is no longer spoken of in cloaked terms such as "CA" or the "Big C," De Puy and Dovitch hope that The Healing Choice helps to take the sting off of abortion. It is important to do so since feelings of loss, anger, fear, confusion and guilt are exponentially hurtful if not dealt with in the context of their actual cause. And this book is not only intended to address the psychological needs of post-abortion women, but has great relevance for physicians and other health-care workers, family members, and significant others. Barbara Nesbitt |