“Abortion regret” has been a linchpin of the anti-choice strategy for decades. Before they had the power to ban abortion, conservative legislators tried to guilt and shame women out of seeking termination. They spread bogus narratives and required doctors to read scripts full of misinformation that abortion causes depression. They even floated the idea of allowing women to sue their doctors, even years later, if they changed their minds and decided getting an abortion wasn’t the right decision.
More recently, the religious right has adopted the same strategy with transgender people. Conservative pundits say that a small number of people who transition regret the choice and try to undo it. They consider this an adequate reason to ban or severely restrict surgery and hormones for everyone.
Now, it should be said: if conservatives really stand for “freedom”, then whether or not people regret these things should be irrelevant. Real freedom means having the right to make our own choices and then live with the consequences. It doesn’t mean paternalistically restricting people’s choices in the belief that we know better than they do.
However, there’s a better argument to prove that this is a bad-faith strategy. Namely, they aren’t trying to discourage people from making other decisions that millions regret, because those choices line up with the conservative vision of the world.
Let’s look at some examples:
Getting married. Although Christian conservatives treat marriage as the ideal state of human existence, actual humans seem to disagree. In 2021, the U.S. had 1,985,000 marriages and 689,000 divorces, or slightly more than one divorce for every three marriages.
Clearly, a large fraction of people regret getting married. Does that mean we should ban marriage, or make it harder for people to marry? Should we have legally required premarital counseling, or mandated waiting periods?
By Republican logic, the answer would be yes. However, conservatives aren’t pushing for this, but the opposite. The next step in their culture war is seeking to repeal no-fault divorce laws. In other words, they want to make divorce harder. Instead of making it easy for people to undo a choice that they regret, conservatives want to force them to live with it. They want to keep people stuck in marriages that they don’t want to be in.
A fact that probably has a lot to do with this is that 70% of divorces are initiated by women. The Republican opposition to abortion and LGBTQ rights are just prongs of their overarching goal, which is the restoration of patriarchy. They want to bring back a world where straight white men ruled over everyone else, and getting rid of anything that allows women to be independent brings that goal closer.
Getting a tattoo. In most states, you can get tattooed the day you turn 18. But while a tattoo is permanently etched into the skin, most of us grow, mature and change over the course of our lives. A tattoo that feels deeply meaningful to a person when they’re young may seem dated or downright embarrassing to them ten or twenty years later.
According to one survey, about one in four people with tattoos regret getting them. Should we consider outlawing or restricting tattoos to stop this regret?
Cosmetic surgery. Although conservatives are fixated on transgender people getting hormones and sex-change operations, millions of cisgender people also get surgery that alters their bodies. They get liposuction, breast implants, tummy tucks, calf implants, facelifts, chin implants, nose jobs, lip fillers, hair plugs, Botox injections, and more. We might also call these “gender-affirming” procedures, insofar as they bring people closer to what they consider the ideal appearance for their gender.
Some cosmetic surgeries are done to fix serious defects or disfiguring injuries, but others are merely for vanity. Even teenagers are getting these operations. (One hair-raising example that I’d never heard of before and that I came across while researching this article: doctors giving estrogen to girls to keep them from growing too tall.)
By some figures, the regret rate for plastic surgery is almost two-thirds. There’s no shortage of stories about celebrities who get addicted to surgery and regret the results.
If protecting kids is the goal, shouldn’t Republicans be slapping harsh restrictions on these procedures? Putting onerous regulations on plastic surgery clinics? Calling for prosecution of parents who allow their kids to get it?
Getting knee surgery. Research suggests that as many as 20% of knee-replacement patients are dissatisfied with the results. That’s a shockingly high percentage for major surgery, far higher than reported regret rates for abortion or gender transition.
As with plastic surgery, you’d think that conservatives would be against this. Should we force elderly patients to go through counseling and a waiting period? Requiring orthopedic doctors to read scripts about how these operations are dangerous and unlikely to go well?
Playing football. What parent would choose to inflict brain damage on their children? But that, like it or not, is the consequence of playing tackle football and other violent sports.
The brain is soft and squishy as a bowl of Jello. Whenever a person takes a hard hit to the head, their brain slams against the inside of their skull, bruising and tearing the delicate connections. Even hits that don’t cause concussions, when they’re repeated thousands of times, cause cumulative damage.
CTE—chronic traumatic encelopathy—is the result. The symptoms aren’t pretty: dementia, mood swings, impulsive and violent behavior, and suicidal tendencies. Athletes with CTE, and their families and loved ones, undoubtedly rue their choice to play these sports. To save people from this suffering and regret, we should give serious thought to banning football and any other sport that entails frequent blows to the head.
Buying a home. According to a 2022 survey by Zillow, 75% of recent homebuyers have regrets. Some people regret buying a house that was too expensive or needed too much maintenance, others that they didn’t look longer or search harder before buying.
What is the government doing to protect people from these regrets? Should homebuyers be able to sue sellers if they regret their decision? If this isn’t something the state should intervene in, why does it have an interest in other, equally consequential decisions?
Joining a religion. In the last few decades, there’s been a spiritual exodus in America. Millions of people are leaving the religions they grew up in. Some are switching to other faiths, while others are giving up on organized religion entirely. Of these ex-believers, many speak eloquently about the trauma they suffered from abusive, controlling, high-demand belief systems.
If you join a church and later decide it didn’t meet your needs, or even that it inflicted psychological or physical harm on you, should you be able to sue that church to compensate you for your regret? If not, why not?
Having children. In a society that holds family as a sacred ideal, it’s intensely taboo to admit this, or even to talk about it. Nevertheless, surveys consistently find that a minority of parents regret having children:
When American parents older than 45 were asked in a 2013 Gallup poll how many kids they would have if they could “do it over,” approximately 7 percent said zero. In Germany, 8 percent of mothers and fathers in a 2016 survey “fully” agreed with a statement that they wouldn’t have children if they could choose again (11 percent “rather” agreed). In a survey published in June, 8 percent of British parents said that they regret having kids. And in two recent studies, an assistant psychology professor at SWPS University, Konrad Piotrowski, placed rates of parental regret in Poland at about 11 to 14 percent, with no significant difference between men and women. Combined, these figures suggest that many millions of people regret having kids.
“The Two Reasons Parents Regret Having Kids.” Gail Cornwall, The Atlantic, 31 August 2021.
Regretful parents cite all manner of concerns: from a lack of free time and money, to exhaustion and burnout, to the especially grueling challenges of raising special-needs children. Some people regret having kids with an absent or abusive partner, while others never wanted kids but had them to appease a partner who did.
Having children is the most personal decision a person can make. No other choice has such immense and intimate consequences, whether for better or for worse. That’s why it’s so abhorrent for any outside force to interfere in it, one way or the other. It shows the extreme hypocrisy of political parties that cite “regret” as a reason to ban abortion, but feel no concern about forcing people to have children whether they want to or not.