Abortion: One Big Psycho Social Experiment?

Stanley Milgram was a social psychologist who is known for doing a famous controversial experiment on obedience during the 1960's. The reason he performed this experiment was the result of his fascination with why during the holocaust did people follow Hitler and torture and kill 11 million people.  He wanted to know why normal every day people would go against their moral and ethical beliefs to the extent of killing innocent people. As many of you know, during this experiment volunteers were asked to administer shocks to a man that was sitting in another room. He was to receive the shock if he answered the questions wrong. What the volunteers didn't know was the man was playing a part of the experiment and he was not really getting shocked. The man would just play a series of recorded reactions to being shocked. In the experiment, 26 out of the 40 participants administered the full range of shocks up to 450 volts. He not only found that they went against their moral and ethical code to follow authority but they tended to shift responsibility to the test taker and not themselves. They rationalized their behavior as just fulfilling a role.

So what does this experiment have to do with working with those who have abortion related trauma in their past? Often times one of the questions client's struggle with the most is , "How could they have got to the point where abortion would be a possibility for them?" People choose abortion for various reasons. Those reasons may include: not having a supportive partner, economics, not being ready, already having children, previous trauma and the impact on the choice, fear of others finding out etc. What people often don't consider is how one's decision may have been impacted by reasons learned from social psychology. In the experiment mentioned above, Milgram learned that people will violate their moral and ethical code for reasons such as obeying authority or fulfilling a role.

What is it about people who will violate their moral and ethical code to choose abortion? Is it that we are influenced by authority such as a government that sanctions it as legal? Is it possible that we are conditioned and desensitized to the reality of what is actually happening? We know that soldiers can be conditioned to not "feel" the impact of killing through video games  etc. We know now that many of the soldiers who come back from serving in war zones come back to the same reality, that those who choose abortion do. That reality is the same. The reality of the question, "How could I have got to a place where I thought what I did was ok?" Often after both groups comes to this realization, is when defense mechanisms break down and the realization of the trauma of what they did hits.

As therapists working with abortion related trauma, it can be powerful in the healing process of clients, to talk with them about all that may have impacted their choice. This may include some of the things we have learned from social psychology. When a client is ready to look at the stage of forgiveness, they then can look at all the contributing factors with grace filled eyes. When a client looks back at their decision with better understanding and grace , they then can begin to answer the often painful and confusing question, "How can I have got to this place where I made such a decision?"

Perhaps Milgram could have taught us all some things...