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Despite weak theoretical grounding and ample research indicating women feel high levels of decision rightness and relief post-abortion, claims that abortion is inherently stressful and causes emergent negative emotions and regret undergirds state-level laws regulating abortion in the United States. Nonetheless, scholarship does identify factors that put a woman at risk for short-term negative postabortion emotions—including decision difficulty and perceiving abortion stigma in one's community—pointing to a possible mechanism behind later emergent or persistent post-abortion negative emotions.

Using five years of longitudinal data, collected one week post-abortion and semi-annually for five years from women who sought abortions at 30 US facilities between 2008 and 2010, we examined women's emotions and feeling that abortion was the right decision over five years (n=667). We used …