Understanding Family Constellations: Abortion

Systemic Constellations examines the emotional and energetic effects of abortion on individuals and family systems. This discussion approaches the topic without blame or judgment, focusing on what happens when emotional responses to abortion remain suppressed in the body.

Personal Beliefs and Systemic Responsibility

Everyone has the right to hold their own beliefs about pregnancy and abortion, and to make whatever decisions they feel are right for them. However, maintaining long-term wellbeing requires taking responsibility for both beliefs and actions. Otherwise, someone in the family system may suffer until this responsibility is acknowledged.

Taking responsibility means not pushing emotional responses aside or pretending they don't exist. Systemic healing asks people to examine their belief systems and determine whether they serve their highest good and the greater good of their family system.

The Global Reality of Abortion as Family Planning

The frequency of abortion is immense and widespread across all cultures, religions, ethnicities, and economic levels. Throughout history and continuing today, women in many societies have relied on abortion to control family size when effective birth control wasn't available in their region.

In contemporary times, this pattern continues in several contexts:

Limited Contraceptive Access: In many developing regions, an estimated 214 million women of reproductive age who want to avoid pregnancy are not using modern contraceptive methods due to lack of access, cost barriers, or cultural restrictions.

Post-Soviet Countries: In some Eastern European nations, abortion rates remain high due to historical patterns where abortion was readily available but contraceptives were scarce. Some regions still experience abortion rates of around 181 per 1,000 women of reproductive age.

Rural and Post-Conflict Areas: Women in areas with disrupted healthcare systems, inadequate provider training, or frequent contraceptive supply shortages often rely more heavily on abortion when unplanned pregnancies occur.

Resource-Limited Settings: Women who know they cannot support children from multiple pregnancies may resort to abortion as their primary means of family planning when other options are unavailable or unreliable.

However, abortions that are not openly addressed emotionally can create issues for the partners involved, their other children, and future generations. This can lead to family members feeling stuck in life, unable to reach their full potential.

Every Child Deserves Recognition

Children missing from the family system may create energetic entanglements with parents, siblings, or descendants until they are acknowledged and emotionally processed. Every child deserves a place in the family system—including aborted children, miscarried children, stillborn children, children placed for adoption, and children who die young.

An emotionally unresolved abortion may create ongoing entanglements and become the beginning of a pattern that flows through generations until it's resolved. For example, a mother ends her pregnancy, and later her daughter experiences pregnancy loss. This may become a family pattern until the original abortion is acknowledged and processed.

Abortions frequently create exclusions in family systems. Living children who experience rejection or exclusion sometimes become energetically connected to the aborted child—the one who was excluded from the family system.

Taking Personal Responsibility

If you believe someone else is to blame for an abortion—that you were forced into it—this belief system may be harming you and future generations physically, emotionally, and spiritually. In systemic healing, we use direct language when communicating with the unconscious mind, which doesn't respond to gentle euphemisms.

Each woman and man needs to take responsibility for their role in ending a pregnancy. Energetically, abortion represents the termination of developing life and a rejection of both yourself and your partner. If you've never consciously acknowledged this reality, doing so may create profound shifts in your wellbeing.

Cultural and Systematic Patterns

Some cultures favor male children, resulting in millions of female babies being aborted or killed after birth. The systemic impact of policies like China's former one-child rule creates massive energetic imbalances affecting entire societies.

In large constellation work addressing this issue, different groups emerged: the unsettled souls of aborted children, women mourning their lost children, and men feeling helpless to respond. Healing occurred through acknowledging what happened and honoring those who died without the opportunity to live.

The Energetic Reality of Pregnancy

A pregnancy cannot be energetically reversed, even when terminated physically. Energetically and emotionally, continuation exists. There are four possible outcomes for pregnancy: live birth (full-term or premature), spontaneous abortion/miscarriage, stillbirth, or intentional abortion. In all these situations, the woman and man are energetically parents within their family systems.

Impact on Family Relationships

An abortion effectively changes the intimate partner relationship as it existed before. Since a child carries 50% of each parent's energy and cellular structure, abortion creates an energetic rejection of self and partner. The relationship may continue but will likely manifest differently, depending on how both people emotionally processed the abortion.

Both partners need to acknowledge they became parents from the moment of conception, whether the child lived or not. Even with multiple miscarriages or abortions, they are parents together. Each lost child is energetically a child of the family system.

If the abortion was emotionally suppressed, it may immediately impact the mother, father, or grandparents. Sometimes the father's family never learns about the child consciously, but energetic impact can still occur. Often, the father of an aborted child becomes missing from the mother's family system.

Parents may go on to other relationships or children but struggle with intimacy because they're emotionally unavailable—physically present but emotionally distant, drawn to the energy of their deceased child or children.

Physical and Emotional Symptoms

Unprocessed abortions may manifest as immune system issues, since immune problems involve the body rejecting aspects of self, just as abortion energetically represents self-rejection.

Family members who may struggle as a result of unresolved abortion include:

• The mother and father

• Grandparents

• Other children of either parent

• Grandchildren

Common patterns include:

• Women carrying fear they'll harm their children

• Daughters fearing motherhood or believing they'll be terrible mothers

• Sons having difficulty committing to relationships due to unconscious fear of harming others

• Fertility difficulties in the family line

• Children unable to take in life force energy or nourishment

• Eating disorders, digestive issues, unexplained tumors

• Children with depression or anxiety for no obvious reason

• Children living in incorrect birth order because lost siblings aren't acknowledged

What Aborted Children Want

In numerous family constellations, aborted children want acknowledgment, recognition, and to feel welcomed as family members. They often position themselves close to their mother's legs or lie on the floor with open eyes, unable to settle into death peacefully.

Everyone has the right to belong to the family system, whether alive or deceased. Aborted children want their fate and sacrifice acknowledged and honored so their spirits can find peace.

The Need for Mourning

Aborted, miscarried, and stillborn children want to be mourned, grieved, and remembered appropriately. Their sacrifice often needs acknowledgment, and they may carry energetic messages for the family system's balance. Children who weren't formally named tend to be missing from the family system energetically.

Think of this as an energetic debt. The aborted child sacrificed their life for the desires of the parents and family system. What will you do to honor or repay that debt? How can you open the flow of love where it's currently blocked?

The Healing Process

Healing this emotional trauma involves:

• Looking back honestly to acknowledge what happened

• Honoring the fate of the aborted child

• Sorting out and expressing feelings about the abortion

• Commemorating the child's life and welcoming them into the family system

• Shifting old inner images held in the body

Ritual and Ceremony

Whether you've experienced spontaneous or intentional abortion, certain healing actions can help:

• Sit quietly and light a candle representing the child's energy

• Consider the child's gender if unknown

• Picture what the child would look like today and their current age

• Speak to the aborted child or journal your thoughts

• Honor the sacrifice the child made for your life's direction

• For multiple losses, light a candle for each child to welcome them into the family system

• Set up a constellation ritual or ceremony to commemorate their lives

The physical and spiritual demonstration of commemoration will differ for each person, but energetically, old inner images held in the body need to shift for true healing to occur.

Sources and References

1. United Nations Population Division. "Contraceptive Use by Method 2019: Data Booklet." UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs, 2019.

2. Sedgh, G., et al. "Intended and unintended pregnancies worldwide in 2012 and recent trends." Studies in Family Planning, vol. 45, no. 3, 2014, pp. 301-314.

3. World Health Organization. "Preventing unsafe abortion." Fact sheet, 2020.

4. Guttmacher Institute. "Adding It Up: Investing in Contraception and Maternal and Newborn Health, 2017." New York: Guttmacher Institute, 2017.

5. Bearak, J., et al. "Unintended pregnancy and abortion by income, region, and the legal status of abortion: estimates from a comprehensive model for 1990–2019." The Lancet Global Health, vol. 8, no. 9, 2020, pp. e1152-e1161.