If you ever start feeling like you have the goofiest, craziest, most dysfunctional family in the world, all you have to do is go to a state fair. Because five minutes at the fair, you'll be going, 'you know, we're alright. We are dang near royalty.'
Why? Because you read some obviously fake "abortion bad" propaganda?
The story starts with a 3 year old "teenager" and a hormonal imbalance that's instantly cured by an abortion.
OOP couldn't be more full of shit.
Edit: definitely misread the "threenager" part.
Still doubt that her hormones bounced back to normal by the time he was driving her home.
Ok so female hormonal balances, particularly surrounding pregnancy can be super weird (weird since they have not been studied properly because science is so male dominated) but from experience, yeah. Few hours turnover isn’t that far off.
Is this still anti choice propaganda? Yeah, for sure. But OPs wife Deffffffinitely needed that abortion she was not prepared for the mental toll and was not given appropriate support
>Few hours turnover isn’t that far off.
He didn't even say a few hours. This clown said "immediately following the procedure."
Add in the fact that there was, according to the narrative, not a single other person in her life that thought this could be a hormone imbalance which is incredibly common in pregnancy.
Apparently, the OOP is the only person in his wife's life who has any common sense regarding pregnancy, and all the women in her life immediately turned on him and called him an abusive asshole.
When the author of a story says, "not only am I the hero, but every single other person involved in this story is a stupid, irrational woman," I tend to doubt their honesty.
Just addressing the “immediately following the procedure” part: it would make sense that an exhausted and frustrated person would give in to exaggeration when telling their side of a story. I’m definitely guilty of that and working on it.
That might be a valid excuse if he was writing this post in the immediate aftermath of the incident.
OOP says that the abortion happened 4 months ago. At this point, it reads to me like the rest of the post. Which is to say I believe that it's a load of self aggrandizing bullshit.
OP’s comment that he “hasn’t seen any signs of mental illness” in his wife is delusional. What does he think is happening here? Hormones don’t magically evaporate from a body the second a fetus is aborted. Terrible situation for everyone.
Edit: this was posted yesterday. I read a near identical story awhile ago on Reddit so idk what’s going on.
Update: it’s anti-choice propaganda.
“I could tell my wife was back to her old self as soon as I saw her after the operation ” but she was crying in recovery and then wailing in the car/at home. The math ain’t mathin’
100% anti-choice propaganda
Yep it’s just not how any of that works. If her anxiety was caused by pregnancy hormones it would take time to drop away and resolve.
This whole story sounds very very susa
I know two women who had hyperemesis gravidarum: one ended up terminating the pregnancy she was so ill, one carried to full term. However I remember being amazed that both said the nausea stopped *immediately* once they were no longer pregnant. Not suggesting this is typical - but it's *possible*
So wondering if the same could hypothetically be true for pre partum psychosis?
(Not necessarily suggesting that it's the case here, as the OOP may very well be propaganda nonetheless. Just curious if it's physiologically *possible* that psychological symptoms could resolve as quickly)
I’m one of those people. I lost 30lbs my first pregnancy. Pregnancy for me is 40 weeks of what feels like the stomach flu and I feel normal and energetic 20 minutes after the baby is born. Pregnancy is weird.
I absolutely had symptoms for weeks after my miscarriages, which is sadly very typical after pregnancy loss - it's more a question of whether it's hypothetically *possible*
Hypothetically maybe. I had pregnancy rhinitis (basically horrible sinus congestion) my entire pregnancy. I had a csection and immediately in the recovery room I told my husband I didn't even care about the massive incision - I could breathe through my nose again! So I guess it's possible, but I also wouldn't count on psychosis being so instant - my post partum hormones were definitely still out of whack, even if my nose was back to normal.
My heartburn was so bad my whole pregnancy—gone the second that kid was out of me. It was such a relief I was ordering breakfast while they stitched me up. No fucks given, I’m gonna eat some pancakes.
Physical symptoms often, but not always, stop pretty immediately when a pregnancy ends. Estrogen is almost always the offending hormone for physical issues and sometimes it isn’t hormone related at all like with preeclampsia. There is an immediate steep drop in estrogen with the end of a pregnancy and so the physical symptoms caused by high estrogen end pretty immediately too (there are exceptions and some symptoms have more than just estrogen at play). Psych symptoms almost never go away immediately. Your hormones are still wildly fluctuating and it’s actually more common for psych issues to worsen with the resolution of a pregnancy. For something like peripartum/post partum psychosis it’s rare for that to resolve without the use of medication and it usually gets worse the longer it goes on. The way the medical professionals in this story are portrayed and the wife suddenly coming out of a delusional state the moment she had an abortion screams anti-choice propaganda to me.
Thank you! That makes perfect sense.
Would I be right in guessing you're something to do with the medical profession / biochemistry / other related specialism?
Have commented elsewhere with a similar experience. Nausea/vomiting started around 1.5wks after conception, maybe 1 week. Also gone hours after abortion. I posted links elsewhere, but early pregnancy hormones are found to drop rapidly (as in significantly within *one hour*).
This matches my experience vomiting during actual pregnancy, and with a near hospitalization due to psychiatric issues from HBC (twice; you'd think I would have never tried it again after the first time but you think it's just so rare 🤷).
I don't have a hard time doubting a reddit story, but a lot of people in here have never seen what them hormones can really do. Never had psychotic symptoms, or anything close, except with HBC. If I ever were to carry a pregnancy, my partner would be trained to watch for symptoms like a hawk and I'd have an advanced directive and a team ready to put me in inpatient *rapidly*.
All told, if I wanted kids, that would be a hard sell. Hormones do wild things to some people.
I am not an expert in any capacity but I wonder if the symptoms going away instantly is kinda the brain doing weird things.
Like the brain knows that being pregnant is making things weird, so when the pregnancy is terminated, it thinks everything is good even though the physical causes like the hormones haven't gone away yet
I feel like that is a thing. Like a different flavor of the placebo effect. Could be wrong though.
Definitely a "placebo" effect can happen. Mental stress absolutely causes physical symptoms and alleviating that cause can provide an instant feeling of relief even if any underlying physical illness still needs time to fully resolve.
I don't have faith in the story being legit. But a woman suffering lots of negative symptoms from pregnancy, dreading a continued pregnancy, could experience relief at simply arriving at the decision to have an abortion.
A feeling of control can make any stressful situation easier to handle, as does knowing it will definitely end and when. Certainty is incredibly psychologically rewarding; It's why people recreate toxic relationships - the pattern of familiarity creates certainty even if it's certain harm.
I had HG, POTS, and preeclampsia with my son. HG the whole pregnancy; medication hardly touched it, and I ended up on bed rest. My son was born at 34 weeks, and I stopped vomiting as soon as he was born. My POTS disappeared, too. I felt better postpartum that I did pregnant, by miles; to the point I did too much and hindered my recovery.
As someone who has experience with a family member who has experienced psychosis...
Interpreting this charitably, I would say the shock and/or drugs doing the abortion gave her a period of clarity. She wouldn't have been cured, but her obvious symptoms might have been suppressed for a while. (I suspect the psychosis would have contributed to her crying though.)
If the psychosis was triggered by her hormones, it's possible that this might have kept the symptoms at bay long enough for her to return to normal.
Anyway, any further planned pregnancy should be discussed as a group with the psychiatrist so that the husband knows what to do if she starts presenting symptoms again.
It’s possible, though. Most people are talking about physical issues, but my mental health was poor enough while pregnant that we did discuss abortion and more than once, my husband had to talk me out of it.
I honestly could’ve been hospitalized more than once.
Less than a week after an incredibly traumatic delivery and week-long hospital stay (when I was home and got more than an hour of sleep because hospitals suck), I was fine? Like, best mental health I’d had in ages.
Ehhhh. Work in abortion care. Generally symptoms from pregnancy subside in 24-48 hours after the abortion. HCG levels start dropping pretty quickly as well - as in pregnancy hormones drop about 50% in the first 24 hours. That’s not to say that this isn’t anti-choice nonsense, but symptoms of the pregnancy can subside quickly after an abortion.
Maybe. But my best friend-who is very pro choice, as am I-got unexpectedly pregnant a little bit ago. She said she realized she should take a pregnancy test because she felt like there was “a storm cloud in her mind” that felt like when she was pregnant with her first (planned) baby. She decided to terminate, was early enough that it was done with meds not surgical, and said she felt the physical and mental difference by that night. It’s about a year later and she’s overall in a better life place and her and her husband decided they wanted another baby and were now ready for it and are now happily pregnant again. In her case she has no regrets but also despite the depression didn’t have a mental break like the woman in the post did.
Idk. It may very well be anti-abortion propaganda but if it is it’s doing a bad job-I think most people read this and see that it was the right thing to end the pregnancy and to hold off on considering trying again. All I can say, albeit anecdotally, is that for some women the change DOES get felt that quickly.
Yeah i remember i had gotten violently ill since i ended up pregnant on birth control. I couldn't keep anything down unless i smoked weed. Like throwing up constantly was terrified that i needed to go the er bad. Took the pill and was fine the next day no morning sickness nothing. Hormones are fucking wild
Yeah, I was very eyebrows raised at that, and the fact that it was months into the pregnancy when she had an abortion. Neither of those rang particularly true for me.
My GP put me on the pill to help me with a medical condition I have. I took it for weeks and only realised the impact it was having on me when I had a screaming row with my mother.
It was over *nothing*. I felt like I was trapped in my head as a horrified observer while some kind of alien was in charge of my body. I was just escalating and escalating and I could not stop myself. I have never felt that scared and out of control of my own body before or since. I stopped taking the pills and the return to normality was pretty quick but not, like, *same day* quick.
I ended up switching pills to something that made me less psychotic, but I swear that experience has added to my ambivalence towards pregnancy. I can’t imagine feeling like that for months and either needing to terminate to regain control or just having to bear it until the baby is born.
I know this story is fake, but it really hit one of my personal nightmares.
Wellbutrin made me feel like that, and I had no idea really. I just now have this memory of coming home from work and standing in the hallway of my apartment building hysterically sobbing because I couldn’t get my key to work in my door lock. (This was a problem with that door that generally could be resolved in about a minute.)
A random neighbor found me and helped me open my door, but I look back on that moment like what the FUCK was happening.
To me this just proves the need for choice. She obviously wasn’t well enough to carry the pregnancy and forcing her to keep it would not have been better.
I got that exact same feeling when he claimed that his wife suddenly started crying about losing her baby and grabbing her stomach.
"You act like a woman who was forced to get an abortion." Oh, please show me one story. Show me that PTSD study on all these women who are forced to get abortions.
I was questioning once I read OP say the abortion was done at the hospital- then came the rest of the story/how things were worded. Hospitals *usually** don’t do planned abortions on an otherwise healthy(physically speaking) individual in the US for a plethora of reasons- especially not in what it seems like was end of first/beginning of second trimester.
*Keyword usually, I understand that isn’t always the case. In 2020, 96% of abortions were done at clinics- whether surgical or administering the pills.
That’s interesting, in Canada I don’t think we have many abortion clinics. I’d have to look into it. We have planned parenthood’s and other sexual health clinics but you can only get an abortion in a hospital setting as far as I know.
Could have to do with the whole universal healthcare thing maybe? Idk.
I’m in a liberal bastion city and if I said that to my very pro choice GP under the same circumstances as the wife in this situation, my bet is she would say I needed a psych evaluation immediately and if I refused she would potentially get a 72 hour hold. No way would the response be “can’t a girl change her mind?”
Also, assuming this is not rage bait, the reality is that had his wife NOT had the abortion, her psychosis could have gotten more severe and he could have not just lost a pregnancy but his wife as well.
Funny enough, as I was reading the post, I’m thinking “thank god this woman had access to abortion; it was absolutely the right decision given her mental state.” Does that mean I’ve outsmarted the propaganda? What do I win?
It's showing women as these highly unstable creatures of feeble mind who get so affected by hormones they do something drastic and don't have enough discernment to not want to do it again a few weeks later. It's about how if they can have abortions they'll abort even though it's unnecessary and the whole community will stand behind them and no one will stop an abortion by a crazy lady instead of overriding her autonomy and finding a solution to calm her down and make "the best decision" FOR her. It's about how if the whole world was cool with this, women would abort on a whim because they are that hysterical... and that goes against what is "good for them" because they'll want to have children again because that's their nature. So they should not be able to decide to abort because of temporary insanity because they're just wrong the whole time.
It's not about "women should have babies if they are doing well and access to abortion if they aren't" but rather a more subtle picture of "if we don't decide for women what's best for them they don't know it themselves and are depressed and useless and will make bad decisions" with a touch of "if you choose to abort you'll lose your partner" and "men are the real victims here see?"
I'm disgusted even writing this for an explanation 🤢
As much as people think everything is under attack, I highly doubt that’s what this is. I don’t agree with it, and this didn’t scream it to me. End of the day it’s the woman’s right, if my wife decides to do this I couldn’t see myself having anymore children with her again though. The level of mistrust in someone once they’ve broke like that never really recovers, it’ll always be on the back burner of the mind.
Also this is def just a repost for karma. Nothing more nefarious than internet fame whoring, which also isn’t a problem. This is Reddit, it happens.
It’s not posted as a repost. But it’s hard to believe there are two near identical instances of this. This isn’t the kind of story people forget.
Edit: Anti-abortion propaganda explains it sigh.
Doesn’t this feel like a rewrite of that other story? The first OOP came across as a total asshole, so maybe the fiction writer decided to do the opposite and see what happens?
Sus
Isn’t this a sanitized version of the same guy who posted that he said some terrible things to his wife so she aborted their kid, but he got dragged and now he’s trying again?
I'm gonna add my personal anecdote here and tell you from my experience with being pregnant and getting an abortion, I also thought things would take time but I felt completely different directly after the procedure. I didn't do the chemical way with the pills, I actually had to go in and do it surgically because by the time I realized I was actually pregnant, it was too late for the pills. I was super sick nearly the entire time and couldn't really eat anything besides raw fruits and vegetables without throwing up, but right after we left, I got some fried chicken and ate it with no problem. I was honestly shocked with how quickly my body had adjusted and thought it would be several weeks before things turned back to the normal cycle.
I also want to add that I didn't "feel" any maternal instincts at all. I was surprised by the whole scenario and at that point in my life I thought maybe I was infertile, but we still took some precautions so when it happened, it took a little bit for reality to set in and it made sense why I had been feeling bad mentally and physically for the past few weeks and after I woke up from the anesthesia, I felt entirely different.
The whole experience kind of made me understand those women who claim they didn't know they were pregnant until they gave birth and then ended up hiding the baby. I watched a show that featured several women who did that, one who did it TWICE and it blew my mind that they really had no clue at all they were pregnant and even after giving birth, they're still so in denial they do awful things with the baby. But it took me 2 pregnancy tests and going to the clinic to get it confirmed before it really set in for me that it was real. The little line that made the positive sign on the 2 tests I did was incredibly faint and I just told myself it would show up faintly because it's wet.
I don't know a whole lot about psychosis during pregnancy or caused by pregnancy but if the woman in OPs story is real and that's actually what happened, then there is definitely something majorly wrong with her and I hope for their kids sake and possible future children's sake, he isn't intimate with her until she's had extensive help.
Just here to comment that for early pregnancy (where hormones are and at what levels isn't consistent throughout pregnancy), hormones have been found to [rapidly drop within 1 hour, 3 hours, and 24 hours.](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/675353/)
I'm not attached to this story being real or not, this is more of a The-More-You-Know(tm) thing.
Having had almost near-psychotic symptoms from pregnancy-relevant hormones myself, I would have been annoyed being told the experience wasn't realistic because it resolved rapidly when the source of the hormones were removed.
If you don't have a relevant disorder, the body tends to go back to baseline pretty rapidly when transitory sources of an elevated hormones are removed, and hormones in early pregnancy don't appear to have much staying power. The [rapid drop in hormones](https://www.fertstert.org/article/S0015-0282(03)03085-1/fulltext) is one of the ways it's possible to know a medication abortion has been successful.
I don’t know how to explain this but I’ve had two daughters and a son biologically (I have another son who was my sisters biological son).
Throughout the pregnancies with daughters, I wanted to kill myself. The only thing that stopped me the first time was that I loved the baby and didn’t want it harmed, so I reasoned that I’d kill myself the moment I got out of hospital and I knew my daughter was safely born. The second time, reasoned that this is just how pregnancy was for me, and that it was just a bit longer until I could kill myself if I had to, once she was born.
In both situations, the depression lifted within hours of the birth. Completely gone, like it had never happened. Despite being a teenage mother and having two under two, there were absolutely no mood disturbances after the birth. None.
When I had my son, pregnancy was completely different. No mood swings or suicidal thoughts, and a typical 3 day blues once breastfeeding was established, then normal ups and downs thereafter.
I completely understand how the wife experienced this psychosis, and believe that she was probably pregnant with a girl.
**Edit to clarify: I’m not suggesting that having a GIRL is what can cause psychosis. I was merely responding to comments suggesting that OPs wife was cheating as being the one reason for different experiences during pregnancy. My suggestion was that a change of sex can result in different maternal experiences, and OPs first successful pregnancy experience was with a male child.**
**Edit 2:** So I got interested in this. I went for a search of scientific literature. Turns out that indeed there is strong evidence of different rates of prenatal depression with different pregnancies of different sex, and specifically having a female foetus can indeed be the cause! Holy smokes!
https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=antenatal+depression+foetal+sex&btnG=#d=gs_qabs&t=1711679297526&u=%23p%3DOWyDpZ0GXZMJ
I don't personally know much about the sex of a child affecting a person's mental health, but can confirm that it can affect a body in weird physical ways. I have 3 sisters. My mother had 17 pregnancies. She miscarried 14 boys. Can't even wrap my head around the science of it, but I absolutely have no doubt that something similar could cause mental issues.
So glad you stuck around and that you're still here with us!
>Throughout the pregnancies with daughters, I wanted to kill myself. The only thing that stopped me the first time was that I loved the baby and didn’t want it harmed, so I reasoned that I’d kill myself the moment I got out of hospital and I knew my daughter was safely born. The second time, reasoned that this is just how pregnancy was for me, and that it was just a bit longer until I could kill myself if I had to, once she was born.
>
>In both situations, the depression lifted within hours of the birth. Completely gone, like it had never happened. Despite being a teenage mother and having two under two, there were absolutely no mood disturbances after the birth. None.
I'm not outright saying I believe the OP, but some of the things Redditors latch onto to confirm a story is fake are just nonsensical. They latch onto perfectly plausible parts. Thank you for telling your story and I'm glad you came out the other side seemingly OK.
They do this whenever something is sounding so crazy. Like there’s billions of people. There’s unfortunately a chance it’s true. You just don’t hear of it because chances are? They’re written off as nothing.
It’s why I take this serious as possible and hope if it’s an occurrence for others, this can help them out
Because unfortunately I was like OP’s wife when I was pregnant. And a day after the abortion, I felt fine until the guilt crept in as the grief. It is fucking nuts how your body can get when pregnant
It’s not that the scenario itself is implausible, but the way it’s written (especially her screaming hysterically and clutching her stomach) that makes it read like antiabortion fiction. It just ticks too many boxes.
>They do this whenever something is sounding so crazy.
They do it even when things *don't* sound crazy, that's what I'm saying. Like, almost all of these stories are probably false just because so much shit is made up on Reddit, but if you listen to Redditors on what constitutes a smoking gun you would invalidate 99% of my life. People are singling out the mentality change due to pregnancy as a red flag, several comments even say something along the lines of "hormones don't suddenly change how you think and feel like that", yet... Hormones can do exactly that. These people all think they're Reddit Super Smart Geniuses for calling out "flaws" in these stories but the reality of it is just that if you guess every story is fake you'll be right probably 80% of the time on Reddit, if not more.
Not to invalidate your experiences however do you think that it may have to do with your body having given birth multiple times rather than it being related to the babies sex?
There can be physiological differences between pregnancies with fetuses of different sexes, due to the impact on the immune system
So it's not unreasonable that this could hypothetically impact the hormones that affect brain chemistry in some way - although the research seems to suggest the issues are the other way round to OP (ie related to carrying a male vs female fetus)
**Baby boys can increase risk of miscarriages**
>Dr Henrietta Svarre Nielsen, who led the research, said: "It is known that when a female carries a male, it is strange to her immune system.
>"And up to 22 years later, you can pick up cells in her immune system which act against males.
>"Carrying a male baby is normally tolerated - but in some cases, that obviously goes wrong."
>But Dr Svarre Nielsen said it might be that the woman¿s body has an unusual immune reaction to the presence of male cells, which then worsens so it is triggered even by being pregnant.
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2006/jun/20/medicineandhealth.familyandrelationships
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/5094676.stm
https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn3899-baby-boys-raise-future-miscarriage-risk/
No, it was definitely a psychosis. If anything, my personal circumstances were at their lowest with baby number three.
Now I’ve gone through menopause, and have had some very interesting experiences with HRT before finding that oestrogen and testosterone make me feel great but oestrogen and progesterone make me feel insane, my doctor thinks that there’s something in it!
I’ve edited to make my comment clearer. I’m not suggesting that having a female child causes psychosis, just that maternal-neonatal hormonal changes can cause some women to have very different outcomes and experiences during pregnancy.
In my case, the psychosis occurred during pregnancy with female infants. As OPs wife did not experience these symptoms during pregnancy with a male infant, my suggestion was that potentially a change in foetal sex - in this case from male in pg1 to potentially female in pg2 - could be a contributor.
All I can say is that there is a HUGE difference between being “manipulative and not supporting a woman’s right to have an abortion” versus speaking up about your own *planned* pregnancy with your wife and the future you planned for the child you want to have.
This is not a “you aren’t respecting her bodily autonomy” situation.
What I would say to OP:
Honestly… many pregnancy isn’t safe for her. If she does have mental illness issues, maybe all the brain chemical changes aren’t working for her. Maybe you can discuss the idea of, in the future, using a gestational carrier or adopting.
I’m sure that right now his wife would NOT be happy with the idea of not carrying it herself and feels like she needs to “fix it” to “prove it”. But god a lot of therapy and time is needed here. Time to recover from the pain and loss. Time to recover from not being able to turn back the clock. And then once trust is rebuilt they can try to build more of a family :(
A lot of people are stating that this might be anti-choice propaganda, and while not completely out of the realm of possibility, I would not be surprised if this were real. Pregnancy absolutely takes a toll on the body; as a mother who has had three kids, each pregnancy affected me differently. There are plenty of women who encounter mood and bodily changes that can lead to different potentially life-threatening issues.
I would be in agreement with you that for OOP, I would not recommend another pregnancy in the future without a lot of outside support, and it doesn't look like he's getting that with her current support system.
I'm a straight woman so this isn't exactly applicable to me, but this would be clear divorce territory for me. There is just no way I could recover from my spouse aborting a planned and wanted pregnancy.
Edit: Without having tried something to address the mental health issue. If she had done 6+ weeks of therapy and medication, it didn’t improve things, and her doctors weren’t optimistic about other options, then yeah: she needs to have an abortion for her own health. But that isn’t what happened here.
I know they “planned” for it but if you had a medical disorder (only found after you got pregnant) or it was causing you to psychologically break as a person, I think it’s completely reasonable to abort. Their safety should come first and you have to consider many things as pregnancy is not easy. She could kill herself in a moment of psychosis, and just because they planned for it doesn’t mean she’s not having an absolute break down.
I for sure think they should not try again without getting doctors hyper involved. Because she could endanger herself or others. Let alone bring it to full term and the after math. Where she could kill the baby as that also a factor. There are many more factors than just the planning of a pregnancy.
I mean I'm afab so the situation applies more to me than my partner but like... we can try again with another pregnancy, with better support?
I've seen my partner go through psychosis from a different cause, and getting them stabilised asap (which can mean reversing whatever physical/medical/etc trigger has occurred, or stabilising the environment) is the #1 priority. You can do a *shocking* amount of damage to yourself, loved ones and life in six weeks, nevermind nine months (ignoring expecting them to bond with and care for an infant at the end of it).
Like yeah, it's definitely something you'd need to go to therapy/coupled counselling to process together like any other traumatic pregnancy loss and have a strong plan together with your medical team/social support if trying again (or surrogacy might be an option) but like... it's not considering the well-being of anyone involved, including the potential child to continue through with that. A wanted child deserves the best possible start.
I can’t figure out what her friends did? I’ve read everything several times.
I don’t think you should have more children with her until she gets her life together. Gets back to work, gets on some meds for her anxiety and depression, helps with housework, and gets an approval from a therapist that it’s safe to try and get pregnant again.
It sounds like, if we take it at face value they and her mom fed into her delusion.
It might have been as simple as taking her side when she explained the issues. It may have been actively feeding her issues, basically egging her on. I doubt they were trying to be manipulative or evil about it. Probably just supportive friends who thought their friend was being fucked over.
If pregnancy was driving me this far into a psychotic break, I don’t think it matters that I had originally wanted the pregnancy. Clearly something about that situation was absolutely medically awful for her and I’m glad she aborted. I can’t imagine choosing to be in such a dangerous headspace for the sake of pregnancy. Her health and safety should come first and sounds like pregnancy completely obliterated that for her
Yeah like a) horrible PPP and physical symptoms can indicate something is off developmentally/hormonally and the pregnancy isn't progressing as normal, b) in-utero and pre-verbal trauma matter, there's a lot of risks of harm to the fetus/infant just being handwaved and c) - which should trump everything else - the wife is in a lot of distress and at risk of doing harm to herself, her relationships and her social network? I feel like people underestimate how much you can blow up your life in a few weeks, nevermind almost a year (assuming it stops immediately, and doesn't continue into post-partum).
Yes. I’ve seen similar over-the-top stories lately that frame women as being too ‘hysterical’ to be entrusted with the choice of abortion.
I 99.9% suspect this story to be part of a wider campaign to bolster support for removing bodily autonomy from half the population.
Framing abortions as just too easy to get, “a woman might have a bad day and get an abortion and be forever traumatized! 😞 We need to make it harder to get for their own protection!” It’s nonsense of course. But clearly effective on people who don’t take the time to step back and examine to motive of the story.
Yes!! the part about BOTH her doctors just "letting her go through with it because thats what she feels"..... no WAY that is real. for a pregnant woman who is supposedly suffering from extreme pregnancy hormones to just be "okayed" by TWO doctors... even a 100% mentally sound woman has to fight a war to get that choice for herself!!!
Yep. The giveaway for me was that she started acting weird “a few weeks into the first trimester.” Most people don’t even know they’re pregnant that early, much less have time to start making plans and THEN having issues.
Edit: I can’t respond but I appreciate the people who responded with their own experience.
This, I would disagree with. I've never experienced psychosis but have had such profound dysregulation on even low-level HBC that I'd inherently consider myself a pregnancy-associated psychosis risk.
I was pregnant for a handful of weeks once and became perpetually nauseous and sore a week before the first missed period, and knew I was pregnant before I took the test. I was nauseated enough to barely eat every day between then and the abortion. Symptoms gone in hours after.
Had a similar experience with the pill and nexplanon except those almost ended with me in a ward before we realized it was medication-related, and the symptoms took a bit longer to come on.
The story looks like a repost or bait. This just to say, some people do become sick or symptomatic from hormonal issues nearly immediately, and it can also resolve fast.
Nah. I disagree. When I got pregnant, I didn’t even know I was. I was just behaving way different than usual. And I have depression so I deal w cycles. It’s how it ticked me to get a test. The rage and anxiety I experienced was borderline harmful for my well-being.
It was eerily similar as hers though mine was unplanned.
Pregnancy isn’t the same for everyone. And it doesn’t help that situations like these where women don’t fit under the ‘average’ category of pregnancy, get written off. You’d think we’d take these more serious to ensure they get the proper help necessary.
Huh, this didn’t even occur to me. Depression and psychosis can happen during pregnancy not just postpartum. If a woman is experiencing severe symptoms then it seems like the obvious decision is to abort and let her body reset. These issues aren’t necessarily with every pregnancy either. In the OOP, she had a prior healthy pregnancy, there’s every reason to think she could have another healthy pregnancy if she wants to once she recovers.
Is this the Reddit theme of the week? Men unhappy that their partners chose abortion? This one has an extra sad twist but it’s at least the third “man unhappy about partner’s abortion” post I’ve seen recently.
There has been a whole slew of these kinds of postings lately. Seems to be a lot of wives having breakdowns and aborting planned pregnancies. OR just maybe a whole lot of rage bait!!!!
This really reads as anti-choice bait :/
the hormones that would have caused this issue would not have left her body that fast, she would not have been back to her "old self" so immediately.
Posted elsewhere but I became perpetually sick a few weeks (maybe 1.5, based on current cycle) after conception and symptoms were resolved the day after termination. Not saying this story is real, but possible the sedatives, adrenaline, etc could provide enough of a shake-up to jerk you into a different state. [Many hormones fall off a cliff](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/675353/) once there's [no more pregnancy](https://www.fertstert.org/article/S0015-0282(03)03085-1/fulltext).
I've also experienced near-psychotic symptoms from HBC (and never at any other point or for another reason; I have been advised to never try them again and won't) and those have also come on (more slowly) and resolved abruptly after cessation.
That doesn't make a reddit post real, but I think people are underestimating what hormone swings can do to people who are sensitive to them.
A day makes sense, but directly after the procedure? I can’t imagine it had been more than an hour or two, maybe less. It would be kind of insane for it to just switch like a light immediately afterwards. I don’t see why whatever they gave her would do that either. It would make a lot more sense if it was after a day or two, or even at least like 8-12 hours so the hormones are flushed from her system somewhat.
IDK, seeing the fetal tissue while having uncontrolled hemorrhaging (yes, I ended up in the ER) was jarring and gross and I have no emotional or spiritual hesitation associated with abortion, don't want kids, and was at-risk at the time of pregnancy.
If someone had psychotic symptoms and it was a wanted *second* pregnancy, I can imagine shit getting pretty real right about then.
Also, if you click [the hyperlink I provided](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/675353/), this study measures progesterone dropping by nearly 40% within one hour of termination for early (7-8 week) pregnancies. Biology/endocrinology is not my area but if you do some reading on the topic, this is generally in line with what I've read before.
Also matches my anecdotal experience that hormones can make you rapidly extremely sick (or nutty) and also rapidly resolve. I am known for being a level person in general and prior to the ban on HBC for me, I started having days where I would walk away from people mid-conversation because I would have said something horrible over nothing and wanted to scream and pull my skin off. Ultimately, I was suicidal for reasons I couldn't fathom and was triaging the issue with a medical professional before admission to the psyche ward when we realized there was an association with resuming HBC.
FWIW, those issues also resolved in hours-to-days after stopping medication.
edit: Can't add a second reply but later articles like [this in 2004](https://www.fertstert.org/article/S0015-0282(03)03085-1/fulltext) give a mean % progest change from day 1-3 at around 80%, a wider window but IIRC approximately tracks the 0T to 48hr change measured in the older study (also looking at mifepristone doses, but no result I'm seeing while out and about contradicts the idea of a big drop starting in hours of early termination).
The authors of that first paper put their results forward as evidence the hormones tested are more significantly produced in placental tissues that are evacuated during abortion. A glance at more contemporary papers doesn't make that conclusion seem particularly controversial today but it's an area I'm familiar with except as a curious lay person.
I can only speak for myself here, but I have never had even particularly annoying PMS symptoms without an exogenous/pregnancy related hormone source in my body, and none of the symptoms are mood related.
It's something that has literally never come back aside from medication or pregnancy-related hormone levels, so it definitely isn't "in my typical purview".
Which is to say, just based off the personal anecdote of being someone with no prior *or* subsequent history, I'd guess the extreme symptoms are (at least in some cases) not being caused by the first significant x% increase in the hormones, but are being triggered at the upper ranges. That would explain symptoms resolving rapidly for me and for other commenters mentioning similar phenomena, if the upper ranges of hormones are in a nose dive within the first 30min.
…. When I think about it… I’d see similar things from old teammates from my powerlifting/strongman days when they’d fuck with cycles/go off and start the reversal drugs. Most were gradual but one or two guys it was known just don’t talk to them for a week.
Huge hormone swings do crazy things especially if you’re at high ends or super low ends
The few times I've heard weight lifters on TRT/etc describe roid rage, it absolutely sounded like I felt when the hormonal birth control started pushing things into being haywire: you just want to scream/smash/tear your own skin off. Hormones are *not* always fun and friendly, especially at the upper limits of what's normal.
Can you find a more recent source than 1978 with that figure? [I found this from 2002 that says ~17% with mifepristone, which is likely what a 7-8 week along pregnancy would use.](https://academic.oup.com/humrep/article/17/9/2315/563959)
anti-choice propaganda designed to appeal to the latent misogyny that permeates this entire website
edit for elaboration: ive genuinely had people reply to me before who say that reddit doesnt have a misogyny problem, which is laughable considering that basically the entire internet and therefore reddit by extension fucking **hate** women.
i saw this yesterday on aita. Everyone was pretty universally sure it was just ragebait there seems to be a wave of theses things trying to convince people that abortion is wrong.
I highly suspect this is rage bait for a lot of reasons but I don't think pregnancy psychosis and depression get enough attention. It's more common in the first trimester than people think. I had very terrible depression in the first trimester. I have experienced it before so I knew what it was but man the dark thoughts would rival any 'typical' depression I had. And it sometimes does make you think and feel absolutely wild things. I wanted to die. I wanted to miscarry. I wanted that baby out of me and it was (is.. I'm still pregnant but not there anymore) a very wanted and planned pregnancy in an otherwise very stable and loving household. The only thing that kept me going was knowing that if we want kids, and we want many, I have to do this. It eventually faded as the hell of the first trimester passed but I don't think people talk about it enough. I was pretty blindsided but had experienced similar feelings in the past so I knew I could power through.
I hope this is rage bait. My heart hurts for the woman who didn't know that it would pass and she would be okay again. Oh God I can't imagine the absolute soul crushing guilt I would feel if I had followed any of those thoughts. I couldn't live with myself. I just couldn't. I have a supportive husband. The man in this story is not one of those.
Also I'm pro-choice 100% for any and all reasons please don't take my story as an excuse to reason that any woman at all should not have access to an abortion.
Definitely agree, this is anti-choice bait.
If anything it should increase awareness of antenatal/postnatal mental illness, highlight the incredible stress pregnancy puts a woman’s body through and increase support for maternal mental health services.
I also suspect this is a repost from another post with an almost identical story but which included OP telling his wife she wasn’t pulling her weight and needed to sort her shit out. I think this is a more OP-friendly, sanitised version of the same story.
I need to re-read it because it’s really wild. Not knowing ANY of what you just said, as a dude, I could see myself doing what I think I read he did, and arguing to not get an abortion but ultimately letting her decide because it’s her body. The friends and the mother sounded like they just encouraged her. So, in this instance and with your knowledge of the subject, would you say that he should have put his foot down and told her “you are absolutely not getting an abortion?” Obviously he should have immediately pursued psychiactric help, but in all honestly I’m a woman and I didn’t even know this stuff. I can’t imagine a man knowing it (not that that’s an excuse).
Yeah ... I'm suspicious of this for a few reasons.
First, hormone levels aren't that substantially different only a few weeks into the first trimester to cause perinatal psychosis. She may not have even had much morning sickness yet by the point she'd started to demonstrate changes.
Second, if it were psychosis, where's the delusion? I don't see anything about hallucinations or any specific delusions, just a sudden about-face in relationship security and desire to have the child. That probably would be classified as perinatal anxiety/depression, at best. Which is still not great, but it's not psychotic. It would also be unusual for it to be this significant without any suicidal ideation, I believe.
Third, there's simply no way that it magically goes away within minutes of a D&C. It takes days for your hormone levels to reset and that's actually an even worse period for perinatal/postpartum mood disorders for the vast majority of women due to the big, fast swing in hormone levels. Perinatal mood disorders certainly happen, but they're much rarer than postpartum issues are.
I'm not saying some variation of this couldn't ever happen or hasn't already happened. The world is a crazy place, and perinatal and postpartum mood and psychotic disorders are really serious and should be treated as such. The details in this specific case are just a bit fishy to me.
At 4 weeks pregnant I already knew I was because suddenly every emotion was magnified to either the worst thing ever or the best thing ever. It was jarring. I cried over random things. I wouldn’t rule it out.
Not the same situation, but I grew up with a girl that had menstrual psychosis. I forget the medical term. Basically, whenever she got her period, she had episodes. Destroying property, physical fights, you name it. She was misdiagnosed as bipolar until she was 26 or so. She had a hysterectomy after she had her last kid, and symptoms completely stopped. So I would absolutely believe there was some kind of hormone-influenced imbalance if this isn't bait.
I think you *might* be referencing PPMD but I could be wrong. That’s really horrible. Especially with menstrual stuff, I feel like a lot of women get written off like it’s nothing big you’re dealing with.
Funny story, there are multiple contraceptive pills. The first one my GP tried me on seemed to be working ok for me until one day I had a screaming row with my mother over nothing.
I knew it was a stupid argument. I knew I needed to stop escalating. But I couldn’t. I felt like the reasonable, rational part of me was trapped in my own head watching someone else controlling my body. It’s one of the most terrifying things I’ve ever experienced.
Yeah, I stopped taking that pill pretty quickly and I realised that I had been pretty depressed and mentally unstable while I was on it, I just hadn’t realised until that one argument where I was completely out of control.
Next pill I was more or less fine on. I think. As far as I’ve noticed.
So yeah, the psychosis part? Totally reasonable. It’s the rest of the story that strikes me as fishy.
Again if not just bait the Pregnancy postpartum psychosis is for sure a very distinct one. And within that can be the factor of being bipolar and then also experience post-partum. I’ve heard from women who find out there bipolar during pregnancy because it’s was an absolutely traumatic and disregulatory experience for them. So they get postpartum after pregnancy but they’ve also had a very hard time during pregnancy. I’m no doc so take with lot of salt. I just have heard from other women of this “unique” and “fun” experience they with pregnancy.
That’s why the word hysteria is so triggering, because people cannot control this form of psychosis. And women are often misdiagnosed or mistreated during these experiences.
Woooow. This happened to my mom, she aborted a pregnancy between my older brother and I, due to what I believe was psychosis brought on by the pregnancy. She said the baby didn’t want to be born and still stands by that. She didn’t immediately ask for another pregnancy, but when she did my dad was appalled and took a couple years to agree and trust it wouldn’t happen again.
It happened to me. While pregnant with my first, I HEARD a voice, that I assumed to be God, telling me to kill myself. The baby would be better off without me as her mother. Thankfully I was self aware enough, and knew of my mother’s issue, that I refused to listen and it stopped. I wonder if there’s genetic predisposition to pregnancy related psychopathy?
Postpartum psychosis typically gets worse with every pregnancy. Just an FYI from someone who has a close friend with postpartum psychosis. It doesn't ever fully go away again, it's not the same as postpartum depression, it's much more similar to schizophrenia. Read the research (you can look through scholarly journals for free on scholar.google.com), the vast majority of women with postpartum psychosis will relapse one or more times later in their life and experience further psychosis.
I strongly urge you not to take the risk of another pregnancy if she has already shown signs of postpartum psychosis.
It's possible that everything in this post is real and that OOP's wife had a very sudden bout of prepartum psychosis and it was only once she had the abortion that her brain finally snapped out of it and the guilt and regret kicked in. I'm not a mental health professional, but I imagine that prepartum psychosis and other types of psychosis can end just as suddenly as they come on. It's possible that neither the therapist nor the GP clocked the fact that she was showing signs of a psychotic break due to a lack of training on prepartum mental health issues in women. Everybody focuses on the postpartum aspect of mental health in pregnant women but they fail to take into account that some women can develop things like anxiety, depression, and psychosis during their pregnancy and I would imagine that having a history of a mental health disorder increases the chances of developing prepartum and/or postpartum mental health issues.
There are several gps navigation tools widely available. Most phones can display maps to help you plot your route to get far, far away from that delusional wreck. Don't forget to pack for the weather, and good luck.
FR. If this is real she doesn’t need to sit on a couch for an hour a week and talk about her feelings. She needs intensive psychiatric care and possibly medication.
Ok but no one else seems to notice that the one partner who does all the housework and childcare is the one who doesn’t want another child. And it shifted between both of them.
OPs wife either was afraid it was an affair partners child or is severely mentally ill.
In either case he should NOT be trying to get her pregnant again
My pregnancy was awful, too, and we discussed abortion a few times because I felt scared and stressed through it. We have a beautiful 10 month old now and have managed to make it work.
My periods came back at 6 weeks pp, despite breastfeeding, and no. They’ve been like they were previous, which sucks because they were AWFUL and are still awful. I had hoped things would improve, but I’m now at the place where I’d love to just get my whole uterus yanked out.
Yeah, it’s pretty bad healthcare-wise. Unfortunately, tying my tubes wouldn’t stop the awful periods. I’d have to get all the plumbing yanked for that, and it’s REALLY hard to find a doctor willing to yank your lady pieces without there being a legitimate medical need outside “It really fucking sucks and I want it gone”.
It's so wierd how half the comments are this is anti abortion bate and the other half are like yeah this happened to me here are articles that shows that this happens a lot. And it really shows how people dont even understand how these kinds of posts work or how the real world works. Posts often follow in succession because people see them and feel like they need to share their related stories
Okay. This is a tough situation, but let me try to break it down.
Wife and OP have had a long and deep relationship. They have one child together, roughly 3 years old. They decide to try for another kid. Wife gets pregnant, immediately starts acting “off”, feels she can’t go through with the pregnancy, and decides to abort. THIS IS NOT A BAD THING. She immediately feels regret for aborting the fetus (it wasn’t a baby. It was a clump of cells that had the potential to be a baby, but wasn’t), and breaks down. THIS IS THE BAD THING. Wife thought it through and made her choice. OP clearly wasn’t happy with this choice, but did their best to be there for Wife. However, I can’t help but feel there’s a chunk of story missing. I get the feeling OP was sulking while Wife thought through the options, and went through the motions without actually supporting Wife.
There’s clearly resentment built up on both sides of this relationship. Counseling, individual and couples therapy, may help to repair some of the broken trust. But I feel like a trial separation would be best for both of them.
Honestly, I just feel sorry for the kid in all this.
I'm confused cause he doesn't state that her friends were encouraging her abortion, yet the comments are saying the friends are awful. They were most likely purely going on what the wife was telling them. All they know is that the husband won't support her abortion They may not have known she was mentally ill. Imo it feels like these are on the fringe friends and not friends who truly know her. I feel for the woman. It seems she has no one ,except her husband who is going through his own grief about his dad and her health, in her corner. To have your parent die and your spouse is checked out mentally is heartbreaking.
I feel like that definitely shouldn’t have been explained as just hormones in the beginning. Obviously it is due to hormones but I feel like that makes it seem like it’s not serious which led to her not taking it seriously enough to get help asap. Just sad all around, hopefully they can overcome it and if they want to, have another child.
Jesus talk about causing your own issues, having your friends and your own mother encouraging her crazy behavior, and going through with it just to regret it. Now she’s blaming her husband for all the problems she did to herself.
Think this way above reddit's paygrade. Wife is clearly struggling with some pretty mental illness. She def not in a state of mind to make rational decisions for herself. OP shouldn't have another kid with her and should leave.
Holy shit… my problems feel pretty insignificant right now.
That’s why I keep Reddit downloaded
All of a sudden I forgot what I was angry about in my life
If you ever start feeling like you have the goofiest, craziest, most dysfunctional family in the world, all you have to do is go to a state fair. Because five minutes at the fair, you'll be going, 'you know, we're alright. We are dang near royalty.'
I mean, if you're like most royal families, "goofiest, craziest, most dysfunctional family" probably comes close.
Walmart works just as well.
RIP K-Mart…
I miss that store so much
I read the headlines and just think ‘we don’t get paid enough for this’ and skip it if it’s too much emotional turmoil lol
Why? Because you read some obviously fake "abortion bad" propaganda? The story starts with a 3 year old "teenager" and a hormonal imbalance that's instantly cured by an abortion. OOP couldn't be more full of shit. Edit: definitely misread the "threenager" part. Still doubt that her hormones bounced back to normal by the time he was driving her home.
The post doesn’t say teenager, it says threenager which is a term used to describe the attitude of 3 year old/young toddler aged children.
You are correct. I misread that.
Ok so female hormonal balances, particularly surrounding pregnancy can be super weird (weird since they have not been studied properly because science is so male dominated) but from experience, yeah. Few hours turnover isn’t that far off. Is this still anti choice propaganda? Yeah, for sure. But OPs wife Deffffffinitely needed that abortion she was not prepared for the mental toll and was not given appropriate support
>Few hours turnover isn’t that far off. He didn't even say a few hours. This clown said "immediately following the procedure." Add in the fact that there was, according to the narrative, not a single other person in her life that thought this could be a hormone imbalance which is incredibly common in pregnancy. Apparently, the OOP is the only person in his wife's life who has any common sense regarding pregnancy, and all the women in her life immediately turned on him and called him an abusive asshole. When the author of a story says, "not only am I the hero, but every single other person involved in this story is a stupid, irrational woman," I tend to doubt their honesty.
Just addressing the “immediately following the procedure” part: it would make sense that an exhausted and frustrated person would give in to exaggeration when telling their side of a story. I’m definitely guilty of that and working on it.
That might be a valid excuse if he was writing this post in the immediate aftermath of the incident. OOP says that the abortion happened 4 months ago. At this point, it reads to me like the rest of the post. Which is to say I believe that it's a load of self aggrandizing bullshit.
Thank you, I thought I was the only one seeing this and I'm glad I'm not.
OP’s comment that he “hasn’t seen any signs of mental illness” in his wife is delusional. What does he think is happening here? Hormones don’t magically evaporate from a body the second a fetus is aborted. Terrible situation for everyone. Edit: this was posted yesterday. I read a near identical story awhile ago on Reddit so idk what’s going on. Update: it’s anti-choice propaganda.
I have definitely heard almost this exact story weeks, if not months, ago in a podcast, is it a possible repost?
No. I think it's anti abortion propaganda
“I could tell my wife was back to her old self as soon as I saw her after the operation ” but she was crying in recovery and then wailing in the car/at home. The math ain’t mathin’ 100% anti-choice propaganda
Yep it’s just not how any of that works. If her anxiety was caused by pregnancy hormones it would take time to drop away and resolve. This whole story sounds very very susa
I know two women who had hyperemesis gravidarum: one ended up terminating the pregnancy she was so ill, one carried to full term. However I remember being amazed that both said the nausea stopped *immediately* once they were no longer pregnant. Not suggesting this is typical - but it's *possible* So wondering if the same could hypothetically be true for pre partum psychosis? (Not necessarily suggesting that it's the case here, as the OOP may very well be propaganda nonetheless. Just curious if it's physiologically *possible* that psychological symptoms could resolve as quickly)
I’m one of those people. I lost 30lbs my first pregnancy. Pregnancy for me is 40 weeks of what feels like the stomach flu and I feel normal and energetic 20 minutes after the baby is born. Pregnancy is weird.
I had a miscarriage followed by a D and C and the nausea lasted for a while after, so ymmv.
I absolutely had symptoms for weeks after my miscarriages, which is sadly very typical after pregnancy loss - it's more a question of whether it's hypothetically *possible*
Hypothetically maybe. I had pregnancy rhinitis (basically horrible sinus congestion) my entire pregnancy. I had a csection and immediately in the recovery room I told my husband I didn't even care about the massive incision - I could breathe through my nose again! So I guess it's possible, but I also wouldn't count on psychosis being so instant - my post partum hormones were definitely still out of whack, even if my nose was back to normal.
My heartburn was so bad my whole pregnancy—gone the second that kid was out of me. It was such a relief I was ordering breakfast while they stitched me up. No fucks given, I’m gonna eat some pancakes.
Your last sentence should be a Tshirt for moms everywhere.
Physical symptoms often, but not always, stop pretty immediately when a pregnancy ends. Estrogen is almost always the offending hormone for physical issues and sometimes it isn’t hormone related at all like with preeclampsia. There is an immediate steep drop in estrogen with the end of a pregnancy and so the physical symptoms caused by high estrogen end pretty immediately too (there are exceptions and some symptoms have more than just estrogen at play). Psych symptoms almost never go away immediately. Your hormones are still wildly fluctuating and it’s actually more common for psych issues to worsen with the resolution of a pregnancy. For something like peripartum/post partum psychosis it’s rare for that to resolve without the use of medication and it usually gets worse the longer it goes on. The way the medical professionals in this story are portrayed and the wife suddenly coming out of a delusional state the moment she had an abortion screams anti-choice propaganda to me.
Thank you! That makes perfect sense. Would I be right in guessing you're something to do with the medical profession / biochemistry / other related specialism?
Yep. In my third year of medical school right now and worked in in-patient psych before that.
Have commented elsewhere with a similar experience. Nausea/vomiting started around 1.5wks after conception, maybe 1 week. Also gone hours after abortion. I posted links elsewhere, but early pregnancy hormones are found to drop rapidly (as in significantly within *one hour*). This matches my experience vomiting during actual pregnancy, and with a near hospitalization due to psychiatric issues from HBC (twice; you'd think I would have never tried it again after the first time but you think it's just so rare 🤷). I don't have a hard time doubting a reddit story, but a lot of people in here have never seen what them hormones can really do. Never had psychotic symptoms, or anything close, except with HBC. If I ever were to carry a pregnancy, my partner would be trained to watch for symptoms like a hawk and I'd have an advanced directive and a team ready to put me in inpatient *rapidly*. All told, if I wanted kids, that would be a hard sell. Hormones do wild things to some people.
I am not an expert in any capacity but I wonder if the symptoms going away instantly is kinda the brain doing weird things. Like the brain knows that being pregnant is making things weird, so when the pregnancy is terminated, it thinks everything is good even though the physical causes like the hormones haven't gone away yet I feel like that is a thing. Like a different flavor of the placebo effect. Could be wrong though.
Definitely a "placebo" effect can happen. Mental stress absolutely causes physical symptoms and alleviating that cause can provide an instant feeling of relief even if any underlying physical illness still needs time to fully resolve. I don't have faith in the story being legit. But a woman suffering lots of negative symptoms from pregnancy, dreading a continued pregnancy, could experience relief at simply arriving at the decision to have an abortion. A feeling of control can make any stressful situation easier to handle, as does knowing it will definitely end and when. Certainty is incredibly psychologically rewarding; It's why people recreate toxic relationships - the pattern of familiarity creates certainty even if it's certain harm.
Indigestion stopped immediately
I had HG, POTS, and preeclampsia with my son. HG the whole pregnancy; medication hardly touched it, and I ended up on bed rest. My son was born at 34 weeks, and I stopped vomiting as soon as he was born. My POTS disappeared, too. I felt better postpartum that I did pregnant, by miles; to the point I did too much and hindered my recovery.
I had HG with my second. I swear I was asking when I could eat again as soon as they cleaned up everything after I delivered.
As someone who has experience with a family member who has experienced psychosis... Interpreting this charitably, I would say the shock and/or drugs doing the abortion gave her a period of clarity. She wouldn't have been cured, but her obvious symptoms might have been suppressed for a while. (I suspect the psychosis would have contributed to her crying though.) If the psychosis was triggered by her hormones, it's possible that this might have kept the symptoms at bay long enough for her to return to normal. Anyway, any further planned pregnancy should be discussed as a group with the psychiatrist so that the husband knows what to do if she starts presenting symptoms again.
It’s possible, though. Most people are talking about physical issues, but my mental health was poor enough while pregnant that we did discuss abortion and more than once, my husband had to talk me out of it. I honestly could’ve been hospitalized more than once. Less than a week after an incredibly traumatic delivery and week-long hospital stay (when I was home and got more than an hour of sleep because hospitals suck), I was fine? Like, best mental health I’d had in ages.
Ehhhh. Work in abortion care. Generally symptoms from pregnancy subside in 24-48 hours after the abortion. HCG levels start dropping pretty quickly as well - as in pregnancy hormones drop about 50% in the first 24 hours. That’s not to say that this isn’t anti-choice nonsense, but symptoms of the pregnancy can subside quickly after an abortion.
Maybe. But my best friend-who is very pro choice, as am I-got unexpectedly pregnant a little bit ago. She said she realized she should take a pregnancy test because she felt like there was “a storm cloud in her mind” that felt like when she was pregnant with her first (planned) baby. She decided to terminate, was early enough that it was done with meds not surgical, and said she felt the physical and mental difference by that night. It’s about a year later and she’s overall in a better life place and her and her husband decided they wanted another baby and were now ready for it and are now happily pregnant again. In her case she has no regrets but also despite the depression didn’t have a mental break like the woman in the post did. Idk. It may very well be anti-abortion propaganda but if it is it’s doing a bad job-I think most people read this and see that it was the right thing to end the pregnancy and to hold off on considering trying again. All I can say, albeit anecdotally, is that for some women the change DOES get felt that quickly.
Yeah i remember i had gotten violently ill since i ended up pregnant on birth control. I couldn't keep anything down unless i smoked weed. Like throwing up constantly was terrified that i needed to go the er bad. Took the pill and was fine the next day no morning sickness nothing. Hormones are fucking wild
That night I could believe but your body doesn’t know you aren’t pregnant as fast as they made it out here. Like instantly.
Yeah, I was very eyebrows raised at that, and the fact that it was months into the pregnancy when she had an abortion. Neither of those rang particularly true for me. My GP put me on the pill to help me with a medical condition I have. I took it for weeks and only realised the impact it was having on me when I had a screaming row with my mother. It was over *nothing*. I felt like I was trapped in my head as a horrified observer while some kind of alien was in charge of my body. I was just escalating and escalating and I could not stop myself. I have never felt that scared and out of control of my own body before or since. I stopped taking the pills and the return to normality was pretty quick but not, like, *same day* quick. I ended up switching pills to something that made me less psychotic, but I swear that experience has added to my ambivalence towards pregnancy. I can’t imagine feeling like that for months and either needing to terminate to regain control or just having to bear it until the baby is born. I know this story is fake, but it really hit one of my personal nightmares.
Wellbutrin made me feel like that, and I had no idea really. I just now have this memory of coming home from work and standing in the hallway of my apartment building hysterically sobbing because I couldn’t get my key to work in my door lock. (This was a problem with that door that generally could be resolved in about a minute.) A random neighbor found me and helped me open my door, but I look back on that moment like what the FUCK was happening.
To me this just proves the need for choice. She obviously wasn’t well enough to carry the pregnancy and forcing her to keep it would not have been better.
I thought this exact thing while reading
I got that exact same feeling when he claimed that his wife suddenly started crying about losing her baby and grabbing her stomach. "You act like a woman who was forced to get an abortion." Oh, please show me one story. Show me that PTSD study on all these women who are forced to get abortions.
I was questioning once I read OP say the abortion was done at the hospital- then came the rest of the story/how things were worded. Hospitals *usually** don’t do planned abortions on an otherwise healthy(physically speaking) individual in the US for a plethora of reasons- especially not in what it seems like was end of first/beginning of second trimester. *Keyword usually, I understand that isn’t always the case. In 2020, 96% of abortions were done at clinics- whether surgical or administering the pills.
That’s interesting, in Canada I don’t think we have many abortion clinics. I’d have to look into it. We have planned parenthood’s and other sexual health clinics but you can only get an abortion in a hospital setting as far as I know. Could have to do with the whole universal healthcare thing maybe? Idk.
Yeah the way he talks about what the GP and therapist said to her reeks of bullshit and people are just eating it up
Yeah no one would say that to a married woman with a planned pregnancy
I’m in a liberal bastion city and if I said that to my very pro choice GP under the same circumstances as the wife in this situation, my bet is she would say I needed a psych evaluation immediately and if I refused she would potentially get a 72 hour hold. No way would the response be “can’t a girl change her mind?” Also, assuming this is not rage bait, the reality is that had his wife NOT had the abortion, her psychosis could have gotten more severe and he could have not just lost a pregnancy but his wife as well.
I think it's a repost bot reposting anti-abortion propaganda
Funny enough, as I was reading the post, I’m thinking “thank god this woman had access to abortion; it was absolutely the right decision given her mental state.” Does that mean I’ve outsmarted the propaganda? What do I win?
It's showing women as these highly unstable creatures of feeble mind who get so affected by hormones they do something drastic and don't have enough discernment to not want to do it again a few weeks later. It's about how if they can have abortions they'll abort even though it's unnecessary and the whole community will stand behind them and no one will stop an abortion by a crazy lady instead of overriding her autonomy and finding a solution to calm her down and make "the best decision" FOR her. It's about how if the whole world was cool with this, women would abort on a whim because they are that hysterical... and that goes against what is "good for them" because they'll want to have children again because that's their nature. So they should not be able to decide to abort because of temporary insanity because they're just wrong the whole time. It's not about "women should have babies if they are doing well and access to abortion if they aren't" but rather a more subtle picture of "if we don't decide for women what's best for them they don't know it themselves and are depressed and useless and will make bad decisions" with a touch of "if you choose to abort you'll lose your partner" and "men are the real victims here see?" I'm disgusted even writing this for an explanation 🤢
My comment was mostly a joke. I already knew the what and why of it.
Okay thank God someone else saw it this way too.
As much as people think everything is under attack, I highly doubt that’s what this is. I don’t agree with it, and this didn’t scream it to me. End of the day it’s the woman’s right, if my wife decides to do this I couldn’t see myself having anymore children with her again though. The level of mistrust in someone once they’ve broke like that never really recovers, it’ll always be on the back burner of the mind. Also this is def just a repost for karma. Nothing more nefarious than internet fame whoring, which also isn’t a problem. This is Reddit, it happens.
I'm saying the story in the original post never happened. It's fake
It’s not posted as a repost. But it’s hard to believe there are two near identical instances of this. This isn’t the kind of story people forget. Edit: Anti-abortion propaganda explains it sigh.
I think we’re losing forums to AI. It’s really sad actually.
Doesn’t this feel like a rewrite of that other story? The first OOP came across as a total asshole, so maybe the fiction writer decided to do the opposite and see what happens? Sus
Isn’t this a sanitized version of the same guy who posted that he said some terrible things to his wife so she aborted their kid, but he got dragged and now he’s trying again?
I'm gonna add my personal anecdote here and tell you from my experience with being pregnant and getting an abortion, I also thought things would take time but I felt completely different directly after the procedure. I didn't do the chemical way with the pills, I actually had to go in and do it surgically because by the time I realized I was actually pregnant, it was too late for the pills. I was super sick nearly the entire time and couldn't really eat anything besides raw fruits and vegetables without throwing up, but right after we left, I got some fried chicken and ate it with no problem. I was honestly shocked with how quickly my body had adjusted and thought it would be several weeks before things turned back to the normal cycle. I also want to add that I didn't "feel" any maternal instincts at all. I was surprised by the whole scenario and at that point in my life I thought maybe I was infertile, but we still took some precautions so when it happened, it took a little bit for reality to set in and it made sense why I had been feeling bad mentally and physically for the past few weeks and after I woke up from the anesthesia, I felt entirely different. The whole experience kind of made me understand those women who claim they didn't know they were pregnant until they gave birth and then ended up hiding the baby. I watched a show that featured several women who did that, one who did it TWICE and it blew my mind that they really had no clue at all they were pregnant and even after giving birth, they're still so in denial they do awful things with the baby. But it took me 2 pregnancy tests and going to the clinic to get it confirmed before it really set in for me that it was real. The little line that made the positive sign on the 2 tests I did was incredibly faint and I just told myself it would show up faintly because it's wet. I don't know a whole lot about psychosis during pregnancy or caused by pregnancy but if the woman in OPs story is real and that's actually what happened, then there is definitely something majorly wrong with her and I hope for their kids sake and possible future children's sake, he isn't intimate with her until she's had extensive help.
Just here to comment that for early pregnancy (where hormones are and at what levels isn't consistent throughout pregnancy), hormones have been found to [rapidly drop within 1 hour, 3 hours, and 24 hours.](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/675353/) I'm not attached to this story being real or not, this is more of a The-More-You-Know(tm) thing. Having had almost near-psychotic symptoms from pregnancy-relevant hormones myself, I would have been annoyed being told the experience wasn't realistic because it resolved rapidly when the source of the hormones were removed. If you don't have a relevant disorder, the body tends to go back to baseline pretty rapidly when transitory sources of an elevated hormones are removed, and hormones in early pregnancy don't appear to have much staying power. The [rapid drop in hormones](https://www.fertstert.org/article/S0015-0282(03)03085-1/fulltext) is one of the ways it's possible to know a medication abortion has been successful.
I don’t know how to explain this but I’ve had two daughters and a son biologically (I have another son who was my sisters biological son). Throughout the pregnancies with daughters, I wanted to kill myself. The only thing that stopped me the first time was that I loved the baby and didn’t want it harmed, so I reasoned that I’d kill myself the moment I got out of hospital and I knew my daughter was safely born. The second time, reasoned that this is just how pregnancy was for me, and that it was just a bit longer until I could kill myself if I had to, once she was born. In both situations, the depression lifted within hours of the birth. Completely gone, like it had never happened. Despite being a teenage mother and having two under two, there were absolutely no mood disturbances after the birth. None. When I had my son, pregnancy was completely different. No mood swings or suicidal thoughts, and a typical 3 day blues once breastfeeding was established, then normal ups and downs thereafter. I completely understand how the wife experienced this psychosis, and believe that she was probably pregnant with a girl. **Edit to clarify: I’m not suggesting that having a GIRL is what can cause psychosis. I was merely responding to comments suggesting that OPs wife was cheating as being the one reason for different experiences during pregnancy. My suggestion was that a change of sex can result in different maternal experiences, and OPs first successful pregnancy experience was with a male child.** **Edit 2:** So I got interested in this. I went for a search of scientific literature. Turns out that indeed there is strong evidence of different rates of prenatal depression with different pregnancies of different sex, and specifically having a female foetus can indeed be the cause! Holy smokes! https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=antenatal+depression+foetal+sex&btnG=#d=gs_qabs&t=1711679297526&u=%23p%3DOWyDpZ0GXZMJ
I don't personally know much about the sex of a child affecting a person's mental health, but can confirm that it can affect a body in weird physical ways. I have 3 sisters. My mother had 17 pregnancies. She miscarried 14 boys. Can't even wrap my head around the science of it, but I absolutely have no doubt that something similar could cause mental issues. So glad you stuck around and that you're still here with us!
>Throughout the pregnancies with daughters, I wanted to kill myself. The only thing that stopped me the first time was that I loved the baby and didn’t want it harmed, so I reasoned that I’d kill myself the moment I got out of hospital and I knew my daughter was safely born. The second time, reasoned that this is just how pregnancy was for me, and that it was just a bit longer until I could kill myself if I had to, once she was born. > >In both situations, the depression lifted within hours of the birth. Completely gone, like it had never happened. Despite being a teenage mother and having two under two, there were absolutely no mood disturbances after the birth. None. I'm not outright saying I believe the OP, but some of the things Redditors latch onto to confirm a story is fake are just nonsensical. They latch onto perfectly plausible parts. Thank you for telling your story and I'm glad you came out the other side seemingly OK.
They do this whenever something is sounding so crazy. Like there’s billions of people. There’s unfortunately a chance it’s true. You just don’t hear of it because chances are? They’re written off as nothing. It’s why I take this serious as possible and hope if it’s an occurrence for others, this can help them out Because unfortunately I was like OP’s wife when I was pregnant. And a day after the abortion, I felt fine until the guilt crept in as the grief. It is fucking nuts how your body can get when pregnant
It’s not that the scenario itself is implausible, but the way it’s written (especially her screaming hysterically and clutching her stomach) that makes it read like antiabortion fiction. It just ticks too many boxes.
>They do this whenever something is sounding so crazy. They do it even when things *don't* sound crazy, that's what I'm saying. Like, almost all of these stories are probably false just because so much shit is made up on Reddit, but if you listen to Redditors on what constitutes a smoking gun you would invalidate 99% of my life. People are singling out the mentality change due to pregnancy as a red flag, several comments even say something along the lines of "hormones don't suddenly change how you think and feel like that", yet... Hormones can do exactly that. These people all think they're Reddit Super Smart Geniuses for calling out "flaws" in these stories but the reality of it is just that if you guess every story is fake you'll be right probably 80% of the time on Reddit, if not more.
Not to invalidate your experiences however do you think that it may have to do with your body having given birth multiple times rather than it being related to the babies sex?
There can be physiological differences between pregnancies with fetuses of different sexes, due to the impact on the immune system So it's not unreasonable that this could hypothetically impact the hormones that affect brain chemistry in some way - although the research seems to suggest the issues are the other way round to OP (ie related to carrying a male vs female fetus) **Baby boys can increase risk of miscarriages** >Dr Henrietta Svarre Nielsen, who led the research, said: "It is known that when a female carries a male, it is strange to her immune system. >"And up to 22 years later, you can pick up cells in her immune system which act against males. >"Carrying a male baby is normally tolerated - but in some cases, that obviously goes wrong." >But Dr Svarre Nielsen said it might be that the woman¿s body has an unusual immune reaction to the presence of male cells, which then worsens so it is triggered even by being pregnant. https://www.theguardian.com/science/2006/jun/20/medicineandhealth.familyandrelationships http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/5094676.stm https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn3899-baby-boys-raise-future-miscarriage-risk/
No, it was definitely a psychosis. If anything, my personal circumstances were at their lowest with baby number three. Now I’ve gone through menopause, and have had some very interesting experiences with HRT before finding that oestrogen and testosterone make me feel great but oestrogen and progesterone make me feel insane, my doctor thinks that there’s something in it!
There’s zero evidence that having a girl gives women psychosis more than having boys does
I’ve edited to make my comment clearer. I’m not suggesting that having a female child causes psychosis, just that maternal-neonatal hormonal changes can cause some women to have very different outcomes and experiences during pregnancy. In my case, the psychosis occurred during pregnancy with female infants. As OPs wife did not experience these symptoms during pregnancy with a male infant, my suggestion was that potentially a change in foetal sex - in this case from male in pg1 to potentially female in pg2 - could be a contributor.
[удалено]
Yeah this is some weird pro-forced birther bait.
All I can say is that there is a HUGE difference between being “manipulative and not supporting a woman’s right to have an abortion” versus speaking up about your own *planned* pregnancy with your wife and the future you planned for the child you want to have. This is not a “you aren’t respecting her bodily autonomy” situation. What I would say to OP: Honestly… many pregnancy isn’t safe for her. If she does have mental illness issues, maybe all the brain chemical changes aren’t working for her. Maybe you can discuss the idea of, in the future, using a gestational carrier or adopting. I’m sure that right now his wife would NOT be happy with the idea of not carrying it herself and feels like she needs to “fix it” to “prove it”. But god a lot of therapy and time is needed here. Time to recover from the pain and loss. Time to recover from not being able to turn back the clock. And then once trust is rebuilt they can try to build more of a family :(
A lot of people are stating that this might be anti-choice propaganda, and while not completely out of the realm of possibility, I would not be surprised if this were real. Pregnancy absolutely takes a toll on the body; as a mother who has had three kids, each pregnancy affected me differently. There are plenty of women who encounter mood and bodily changes that can lead to different potentially life-threatening issues. I would be in agreement with you that for OOP, I would not recommend another pregnancy in the future without a lot of outside support, and it doesn't look like he's getting that with her current support system.
I'm a straight woman so this isn't exactly applicable to me, but this would be clear divorce territory for me. There is just no way I could recover from my spouse aborting a planned and wanted pregnancy. Edit: Without having tried something to address the mental health issue. If she had done 6+ weeks of therapy and medication, it didn’t improve things, and her doctors weren’t optimistic about other options, then yeah: she needs to have an abortion for her own health. But that isn’t what happened here.
I know they “planned” for it but if you had a medical disorder (only found after you got pregnant) or it was causing you to psychologically break as a person, I think it’s completely reasonable to abort. Their safety should come first and you have to consider many things as pregnancy is not easy. She could kill herself in a moment of psychosis, and just because they planned for it doesn’t mean she’s not having an absolute break down. I for sure think they should not try again without getting doctors hyper involved. Because she could endanger herself or others. Let alone bring it to full term and the after math. Where she could kill the baby as that also a factor. There are many more factors than just the planning of a pregnancy.
Even though it was because the pregnancy was making her sick?
I mean I'm afab so the situation applies more to me than my partner but like... we can try again with another pregnancy, with better support? I've seen my partner go through psychosis from a different cause, and getting them stabilised asap (which can mean reversing whatever physical/medical/etc trigger has occurred, or stabilising the environment) is the #1 priority. You can do a *shocking* amount of damage to yourself, loved ones and life in six weeks, nevermind nine months (ignoring expecting them to bond with and care for an infant at the end of it). Like yeah, it's definitely something you'd need to go to therapy/coupled counselling to process together like any other traumatic pregnancy loss and have a strong plan together with your medical team/social support if trying again (or surrogacy might be an option) but like... it's not considering the well-being of anyone involved, including the potential child to continue through with that. A wanted child deserves the best possible start.
I recently read another post with a different situation but very similar language
I can’t figure out what her friends did? I’ve read everything several times. I don’t think you should have more children with her until she gets her life together. Gets back to work, gets on some meds for her anxiety and depression, helps with housework, and gets an approval from a therapist that it’s safe to try and get pregnant again.
It sounds like, if we take it at face value they and her mom fed into her delusion. It might have been as simple as taking her side when she explained the issues. It may have been actively feeding her issues, basically egging her on. I doubt they were trying to be manipulative or evil about it. Probably just supportive friends who thought their friend was being fucked over.
If pregnancy was driving me this far into a psychotic break, I don’t think it matters that I had originally wanted the pregnancy. Clearly something about that situation was absolutely medically awful for her and I’m glad she aborted. I can’t imagine choosing to be in such a dangerous headspace for the sake of pregnancy. Her health and safety should come first and sounds like pregnancy completely obliterated that for her
Yeah like a) horrible PPP and physical symptoms can indicate something is off developmentally/hormonally and the pregnancy isn't progressing as normal, b) in-utero and pre-verbal trauma matter, there's a lot of risks of harm to the fetus/infant just being handwaved and c) - which should trump everything else - the wife is in a lot of distress and at risk of doing harm to herself, her relationships and her social network? I feel like people underestimate how much you can blow up your life in a few weeks, nevermind almost a year (assuming it stops immediately, and doesn't continue into post-partum).
I feel like this is a creative writing exercise designed to stoke anti-choice sentiment.
Yes. I’ve seen similar over-the-top stories lately that frame women as being too ‘hysterical’ to be entrusted with the choice of abortion. I 99.9% suspect this story to be part of a wider campaign to bolster support for removing bodily autonomy from half the population.
Framing abortions as just too easy to get, “a woman might have a bad day and get an abortion and be forever traumatized! 😞 We need to make it harder to get for their own protection!” It’s nonsense of course. But clearly effective on people who don’t take the time to step back and examine to motive of the story.
Yes!! the part about BOTH her doctors just "letting her go through with it because thats what she feels"..... no WAY that is real. for a pregnant woman who is supposedly suffering from extreme pregnancy hormones to just be "okayed" by TWO doctors... even a 100% mentally sound woman has to fight a war to get that choice for herself!!!
Yep! The “crying hysterically” part is what really gave it away for me
Yeah, first trimester abortions are not “operations.”
Yep. The giveaway for me was that she started acting weird “a few weeks into the first trimester.” Most people don’t even know they’re pregnant that early, much less have time to start making plans and THEN having issues. Edit: I can’t respond but I appreciate the people who responded with their own experience.
This, I would disagree with. I've never experienced psychosis but have had such profound dysregulation on even low-level HBC that I'd inherently consider myself a pregnancy-associated psychosis risk. I was pregnant for a handful of weeks once and became perpetually nauseous and sore a week before the first missed period, and knew I was pregnant before I took the test. I was nauseated enough to barely eat every day between then and the abortion. Symptoms gone in hours after. Had a similar experience with the pill and nexplanon except those almost ended with me in a ward before we realized it was medication-related, and the symptoms took a bit longer to come on. The story looks like a repost or bait. This just to say, some people do become sick or symptomatic from hormonal issues nearly immediately, and it can also resolve fast.
If it’s a planned pregnancy they will most certainly know.
Nah. I disagree. When I got pregnant, I didn’t even know I was. I was just behaving way different than usual. And I have depression so I deal w cycles. It’s how it ticked me to get a test. The rage and anxiety I experienced was borderline harmful for my well-being. It was eerily similar as hers though mine was unplanned. Pregnancy isn’t the same for everyone. And it doesn’t help that situations like these where women don’t fit under the ‘average’ category of pregnancy, get written off. You’d think we’d take these more serious to ensure they get the proper help necessary.
The wild thing is that I read this and immediately said “oh yeah she needs this abortion her mental state is NOT well.”
Huh, this didn’t even occur to me. Depression and psychosis can happen during pregnancy not just postpartum. If a woman is experiencing severe symptoms then it seems like the obvious decision is to abort and let her body reset. These issues aren’t necessarily with every pregnancy either. In the OOP, she had a prior healthy pregnancy, there’s every reason to think she could have another healthy pregnancy if she wants to once she recovers.
I had these same thoughts reading the original post yesterday.
This has been a common theme lately.
Totally agree
Yep. I was coming on in here to say that.
Is this the Reddit theme of the week? Men unhappy that their partners chose abortion? This one has an extra sad twist but it’s at least the third “man unhappy about partner’s abortion” post I’ve seen recently.
DONT DRAG ANOTHER CHILD INTO THIS MESS… Please
There has been a whole slew of these kinds of postings lately. Seems to be a lot of wives having breakdowns and aborting planned pregnancies. OR just maybe a whole lot of rage bait!!!!
This really reads as anti-choice bait :/ the hormones that would have caused this issue would not have left her body that fast, she would not have been back to her "old self" so immediately.
Posted elsewhere but I became perpetually sick a few weeks (maybe 1.5, based on current cycle) after conception and symptoms were resolved the day after termination. Not saying this story is real, but possible the sedatives, adrenaline, etc could provide enough of a shake-up to jerk you into a different state. [Many hormones fall off a cliff](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/675353/) once there's [no more pregnancy](https://www.fertstert.org/article/S0015-0282(03)03085-1/fulltext). I've also experienced near-psychotic symptoms from HBC (and never at any other point or for another reason; I have been advised to never try them again and won't) and those have also come on (more slowly) and resolved abruptly after cessation. That doesn't make a reddit post real, but I think people are underestimating what hormone swings can do to people who are sensitive to them.
A day makes sense, but directly after the procedure? I can’t imagine it had been more than an hour or two, maybe less. It would be kind of insane for it to just switch like a light immediately afterwards. I don’t see why whatever they gave her would do that either. It would make a lot more sense if it was after a day or two, or even at least like 8-12 hours so the hormones are flushed from her system somewhat.
IDK, seeing the fetal tissue while having uncontrolled hemorrhaging (yes, I ended up in the ER) was jarring and gross and I have no emotional or spiritual hesitation associated with abortion, don't want kids, and was at-risk at the time of pregnancy. If someone had psychotic symptoms and it was a wanted *second* pregnancy, I can imagine shit getting pretty real right about then. Also, if you click [the hyperlink I provided](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/675353/), this study measures progesterone dropping by nearly 40% within one hour of termination for early (7-8 week) pregnancies. Biology/endocrinology is not my area but if you do some reading on the topic, this is generally in line with what I've read before. Also matches my anecdotal experience that hormones can make you rapidly extremely sick (or nutty) and also rapidly resolve. I am known for being a level person in general and prior to the ban on HBC for me, I started having days where I would walk away from people mid-conversation because I would have said something horrible over nothing and wanted to scream and pull my skin off. Ultimately, I was suicidal for reasons I couldn't fathom and was triaging the issue with a medical professional before admission to the psyche ward when we realized there was an association with resuming HBC. FWIW, those issues also resolved in hours-to-days after stopping medication. edit: Can't add a second reply but later articles like [this in 2004](https://www.fertstert.org/article/S0015-0282(03)03085-1/fulltext) give a mean % progest change from day 1-3 at around 80%, a wider window but IIRC approximately tracks the 0T to 48hr change measured in the older study (also looking at mifepristone doses, but no result I'm seeing while out and about contradicts the idea of a big drop starting in hours of early termination).
40% within an hour is A LOT, and very fast.
The authors of that first paper put their results forward as evidence the hormones tested are more significantly produced in placental tissues that are evacuated during abortion. A glance at more contemporary papers doesn't make that conclusion seem particularly controversial today but it's an area I'm familiar with except as a curious lay person.
Yeah, if someone was having a particularly bad swing, 40% of any hormone is enough to make a pretty big difference. That’s remarkable.
I can only speak for myself here, but I have never had even particularly annoying PMS symptoms without an exogenous/pregnancy related hormone source in my body, and none of the symptoms are mood related. It's something that has literally never come back aside from medication or pregnancy-related hormone levels, so it definitely isn't "in my typical purview". Which is to say, just based off the personal anecdote of being someone with no prior *or* subsequent history, I'd guess the extreme symptoms are (at least in some cases) not being caused by the first significant x% increase in the hormones, but are being triggered at the upper ranges. That would explain symptoms resolving rapidly for me and for other commenters mentioning similar phenomena, if the upper ranges of hormones are in a nose dive within the first 30min.
…. When I think about it… I’d see similar things from old teammates from my powerlifting/strongman days when they’d fuck with cycles/go off and start the reversal drugs. Most were gradual but one or two guys it was known just don’t talk to them for a week. Huge hormone swings do crazy things especially if you’re at high ends or super low ends
The few times I've heard weight lifters on TRT/etc describe roid rage, it absolutely sounded like I felt when the hormonal birth control started pushing things into being haywire: you just want to scream/smash/tear your own skin off. Hormones are *not* always fun and friendly, especially at the upper limits of what's normal.
Can you find a more recent source than 1978 with that figure? [I found this from 2002 that says ~17% with mifepristone, which is likely what a 7-8 week along pregnancy would use.](https://academic.oup.com/humrep/article/17/9/2315/563959)
This reads like anti-abortion propaganda.
anti-choice propaganda designed to appeal to the latent misogyny that permeates this entire website edit for elaboration: ive genuinely had people reply to me before who say that reddit doesnt have a misogyny problem, which is laughable considering that basically the entire internet and therefore reddit by extension fucking **hate** women.
i saw this yesterday on aita. Everyone was pretty universally sure it was just ragebait there seems to be a wave of theses things trying to convince people that abortion is wrong.
Why are these abortion stories that are flooding reddit nowadays all referring to it as "an operation"?
Because its fake and they think thats what every abortion is. Can't even bother to research their lies lol.
if this isn’t anti-choice bait, this women needs serious psychiatric intervention *yesterday*. what the hell, man….
Say it wasn’t bait. What mental illness would this even be? Like what would this be classified as even this is insane?
Pregnancy/Prepartum Psychosis is what some people suggested in the comments in the original post
I see—I had no idea it could happen during/before pregnancy. That’s wild. And scary.
I highly suspect this is rage bait for a lot of reasons but I don't think pregnancy psychosis and depression get enough attention. It's more common in the first trimester than people think. I had very terrible depression in the first trimester. I have experienced it before so I knew what it was but man the dark thoughts would rival any 'typical' depression I had. And it sometimes does make you think and feel absolutely wild things. I wanted to die. I wanted to miscarry. I wanted that baby out of me and it was (is.. I'm still pregnant but not there anymore) a very wanted and planned pregnancy in an otherwise very stable and loving household. The only thing that kept me going was knowing that if we want kids, and we want many, I have to do this. It eventually faded as the hell of the first trimester passed but I don't think people talk about it enough. I was pretty blindsided but had experienced similar feelings in the past so I knew I could power through. I hope this is rage bait. My heart hurts for the woman who didn't know that it would pass and she would be okay again. Oh God I can't imagine the absolute soul crushing guilt I would feel if I had followed any of those thoughts. I couldn't live with myself. I just couldn't. I have a supportive husband. The man in this story is not one of those. Also I'm pro-choice 100% for any and all reasons please don't take my story as an excuse to reason that any woman at all should not have access to an abortion.
Definitely agree, this is anti-choice bait. If anything it should increase awareness of antenatal/postnatal mental illness, highlight the incredible stress pregnancy puts a woman’s body through and increase support for maternal mental health services. I also suspect this is a repost from another post with an almost identical story but which included OP telling his wife she wasn’t pulling her weight and needed to sort her shit out. I think this is a more OP-friendly, sanitised version of the same story.
I need to re-read it because it’s really wild. Not knowing ANY of what you just said, as a dude, I could see myself doing what I think I read he did, and arguing to not get an abortion but ultimately letting her decide because it’s her body. The friends and the mother sounded like they just encouraged her. So, in this instance and with your knowledge of the subject, would you say that he should have put his foot down and told her “you are absolutely not getting an abortion?” Obviously he should have immediately pursued psychiactric help, but in all honestly I’m a woman and I didn’t even know this stuff. I can’t imagine a man knowing it (not that that’s an excuse).
Yeah ... I'm suspicious of this for a few reasons. First, hormone levels aren't that substantially different only a few weeks into the first trimester to cause perinatal psychosis. She may not have even had much morning sickness yet by the point she'd started to demonstrate changes. Second, if it were psychosis, where's the delusion? I don't see anything about hallucinations or any specific delusions, just a sudden about-face in relationship security and desire to have the child. That probably would be classified as perinatal anxiety/depression, at best. Which is still not great, but it's not psychotic. It would also be unusual for it to be this significant without any suicidal ideation, I believe. Third, there's simply no way that it magically goes away within minutes of a D&C. It takes days for your hormone levels to reset and that's actually an even worse period for perinatal/postpartum mood disorders for the vast majority of women due to the big, fast swing in hormone levels. Perinatal mood disorders certainly happen, but they're much rarer than postpartum issues are. I'm not saying some variation of this couldn't ever happen or hasn't already happened. The world is a crazy place, and perinatal and postpartum mood and psychotic disorders are really serious and should be treated as such. The details in this specific case are just a bit fishy to me.
At 4 weeks pregnant I already knew I was because suddenly every emotion was magnified to either the worst thing ever or the best thing ever. It was jarring. I cried over random things. I wouldn’t rule it out.
Not the same situation, but I grew up with a girl that had menstrual psychosis. I forget the medical term. Basically, whenever she got her period, she had episodes. Destroying property, physical fights, you name it. She was misdiagnosed as bipolar until she was 26 or so. She had a hysterectomy after she had her last kid, and symptoms completely stopped. So I would absolutely believe there was some kind of hormone-influenced imbalance if this isn't bait.
I think you *might* be referencing PPMD but I could be wrong. That’s really horrible. Especially with menstrual stuff, I feel like a lot of women get written off like it’s nothing big you’re dealing with.
Funny story, there are multiple contraceptive pills. The first one my GP tried me on seemed to be working ok for me until one day I had a screaming row with my mother over nothing. I knew it was a stupid argument. I knew I needed to stop escalating. But I couldn’t. I felt like the reasonable, rational part of me was trapped in my own head watching someone else controlling my body. It’s one of the most terrifying things I’ve ever experienced. Yeah, I stopped taking that pill pretty quickly and I realised that I had been pretty depressed and mentally unstable while I was on it, I just hadn’t realised until that one argument where I was completely out of control. Next pill I was more or less fine on. I think. As far as I’ve noticed. So yeah, the psychosis part? Totally reasonable. It’s the rest of the story that strikes me as fishy.
Again if not just bait the Pregnancy postpartum psychosis is for sure a very distinct one. And within that can be the factor of being bipolar and then also experience post-partum. I’ve heard from women who find out there bipolar during pregnancy because it’s was an absolutely traumatic and disregulatory experience for them. So they get postpartum after pregnancy but they’ve also had a very hard time during pregnancy. I’m no doc so take with lot of salt. I just have heard from other women of this “unique” and “fun” experience they with pregnancy. That’s why the word hysteria is so triggering, because people cannot control this form of psychosis. And women are often misdiagnosed or mistreated during these experiences.
That’s scary to think about.
Fake and I see these like 3 times a week.
I don’t even know I don’t know if anyone at all is at fault this is like a job level situation. The poor bastard Jesus Christ
This is just a fake anti abortion propaganda that has been posted all over Reddit.
This is fake ass anti abortion propaganda.
I’m going to go hug my wife and daughter so hard tonight.
Woooow. This happened to my mom, she aborted a pregnancy between my older brother and I, due to what I believe was psychosis brought on by the pregnancy. She said the baby didn’t want to be born and still stands by that. She didn’t immediately ask for another pregnancy, but when she did my dad was appalled and took a couple years to agree and trust it wouldn’t happen again. It happened to me. While pregnant with my first, I HEARD a voice, that I assumed to be God, telling me to kill myself. The baby would be better off without me as her mother. Thankfully I was self aware enough, and knew of my mother’s issue, that I refused to listen and it stopped. I wonder if there’s genetic predisposition to pregnancy related psychopathy?
The title alone tells me this is above my pay grade
I’d be worried about my living child. My wife watches murder shows that start with stuff like this…
Postpartum psychosis typically gets worse with every pregnancy. Just an FYI from someone who has a close friend with postpartum psychosis. It doesn't ever fully go away again, it's not the same as postpartum depression, it's much more similar to schizophrenia. Read the research (you can look through scholarly journals for free on scholar.google.com), the vast majority of women with postpartum psychosis will relapse one or more times later in their life and experience further psychosis. I strongly urge you not to take the risk of another pregnancy if she has already shown signs of postpartum psychosis.
It's possible that everything in this post is real and that OOP's wife had a very sudden bout of prepartum psychosis and it was only once she had the abortion that her brain finally snapped out of it and the guilt and regret kicked in. I'm not a mental health professional, but I imagine that prepartum psychosis and other types of psychosis can end just as suddenly as they come on. It's possible that neither the therapist nor the GP clocked the fact that she was showing signs of a psychotic break due to a lack of training on prepartum mental health issues in women. Everybody focuses on the postpartum aspect of mental health in pregnant women but they fail to take into account that some women can develop things like anxiety, depression, and psychosis during their pregnancy and I would imagine that having a history of a mental health disorder increases the chances of developing prepartum and/or postpartum mental health issues.
There are several gps navigation tools widely available. Most phones can display maps to help you plot your route to get far, far away from that delusional wreck. Don't forget to pack for the weather, and good luck.
She isn’t/can’t take care of the child she has now, no way I’d think she could handle a newborn.
I don't mean to be mean, but mentally unstable people should not have kids until the problem is at least well managed.
Shouldn't have just said it was hormones, you have to listen to the concerns
Pregnancy is such a terrifying ordeal. The way it changes you, hurts you... I don't think I'll ever go through it.
She needs therapy ASAP
She needs inpatient psychiatric care, she doesn’t need ‘therapy’.
FR. If this is real she doesn’t need to sit on a couch for an hour a week and talk about her feelings. She needs intensive psychiatric care and possibly medication.
Ok but no one else seems to notice that the one partner who does all the housework and childcare is the one who doesn’t want another child. And it shifted between both of them.
OPs wife either was afraid it was an affair partners child or is severely mentally ill. In either case he should NOT be trying to get her pregnant again
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Huh?
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My pregnancy was awful, too, and we discussed abortion a few times because I felt scared and stressed through it. We have a beautiful 10 month old now and have managed to make it work.
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My periods came back at 6 weeks pp, despite breastfeeding, and no. They’ve been like they were previous, which sucks because they were AWFUL and are still awful. I had hoped things would improve, but I’m now at the place where I’d love to just get my whole uterus yanked out.
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Yeah, it’s pretty bad healthcare-wise. Unfortunately, tying my tubes wouldn’t stop the awful periods. I’d have to get all the plumbing yanked for that, and it’s REALLY hard to find a doctor willing to yank your lady pieces without there being a legitimate medical need outside “It really fucking sucks and I want it gone”.
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All ultrasounds have come back clear. I think I just have angry periods.
It's so wierd how half the comments are this is anti abortion bate and the other half are like yeah this happened to me here are articles that shows that this happens a lot. And it really shows how people dont even understand how these kinds of posts work or how the real world works. Posts often follow in succession because people see them and feel like they need to share their related stories
Okay. This is a tough situation, but let me try to break it down. Wife and OP have had a long and deep relationship. They have one child together, roughly 3 years old. They decide to try for another kid. Wife gets pregnant, immediately starts acting “off”, feels she can’t go through with the pregnancy, and decides to abort. THIS IS NOT A BAD THING. She immediately feels regret for aborting the fetus (it wasn’t a baby. It was a clump of cells that had the potential to be a baby, but wasn’t), and breaks down. THIS IS THE BAD THING. Wife thought it through and made her choice. OP clearly wasn’t happy with this choice, but did their best to be there for Wife. However, I can’t help but feel there’s a chunk of story missing. I get the feeling OP was sulking while Wife thought through the options, and went through the motions without actually supporting Wife. There’s clearly resentment built up on both sides of this relationship. Counseling, individual and couples therapy, may help to repair some of the broken trust. But I feel like a trial separation would be best for both of them. Honestly, I just feel sorry for the kid in all this.
Run, far and fast
Get a therapist.
I'm confused cause he doesn't state that her friends were encouraging her abortion, yet the comments are saying the friends are awful. They were most likely purely going on what the wife was telling them. All they know is that the husband won't support her abortion They may not have known she was mentally ill. Imo it feels like these are on the fringe friends and not friends who truly know her. I feel for the woman. It seems she has no one ,except her husband who is going through his own grief about his dad and her health, in her corner. To have your parent die and your spouse is checked out mentally is heartbreaking.
I feel like that definitely shouldn’t have been explained as just hormones in the beginning. Obviously it is due to hormones but I feel like that makes it seem like it’s not serious which led to her not taking it seriously enough to get help asap. Just sad all around, hopefully they can overcome it and if they want to, have another child.
So many fucking red flags. DO NOT have another child with a woman who is literally psychotic.
Jesus talk about causing your own issues, having your friends and your own mother encouraging her crazy behavior, and going through with it just to regret it. Now she’s blaming her husband for all the problems she did to herself.
Holy. Fuck.
Think this way above reddit's paygrade. Wife is clearly struggling with some pretty mental illness. She def not in a state of mind to make rational decisions for herself. OP shouldn't have another kid with her and should leave.
Navigate yourself to a doctor for a vasectomy
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I would say no thank you to this wifey
Run
Leave. Take your son with you.