Ever wonder how to best provide after abortion healing support for clients whose worldviews are different from yours so they can feel seen, valued, and empowered? Support After Abortion Executive Director Kylee Heap welcomed Monica Snyder, Executive Director of Secular Pro-Life, for this powerful conversation. Drawing from her personal experience and insights gathered from interviews with experts, Monica offered abortion healing providers practical, research-backed guidance for creating safe, inclusive, and effective healing spaces—particularly for those who need accessible non-religious support after abortion.
Why After Abortion Healing Support for Non-Religious People Matters: Stories and Statistics
Monica began by identifying a central challenge for abortion healing providers: how to support people who may not connect with religious healing programs. She clarified that “non-religious” is a broad umbrella term that can include atheists, agnostics, people who are spiritual but not religious, or those who claim a faith identity but reject religious labels. “I’m not the spokesperson for all atheists, much less all non-religious people…I’m not pretending that [my perspective] will represent everybody,” she emphasized. She said she would be speaking from her own experiences and from what others have told her.
She began by clarifying that “non-religious” is a broad category that includes atheists, agnostics, and also people who “say they are spiritual but not religious” and people who believe in a faith tradition, but don’t call themselves religious.
She then shared real testimonials from the pro-choice storytelling platform Shout Your Abortion (SYA), where individuals are encouraged to speak candidly about their abortion experiences—regardless of how they feel. While many expect such spaces to showcase only abortion as empowerment, Monica showed multiple examples of women expressing sadness, loneliness, and disenfranchised grief. One woman wrote, “I really miss my baby…I don’t regret it, but I feel really sad.” Another described “mourning heavily for the first seven years.” Although she didn’t regret the abortion, she said, ”I did have to grieve the loss of my baby. Some days I don’t know how I will carry on.”
Monica used this to underscore an important point: people from all political ideologies and viewpoints about religion can and do struggle emotionally after abortion.
She also pointed to data from a 2023 study on The Effects of Abortion Decision Rightness and Decision Type on Women’s Satisfaction and Mental Health:
- 33% of women described their abortion as “wanted”
- 43% said it was “accepted but inconsistent with their values”
- 14% said “unwanted”
- 10% said “coerced”
That means, Monica said, that 24% of the one million abortions in the U.S. each year—”240,000 women saying their abortions were unwanted or coerced.”
Further data from Support After Abortion’s own research with women who have experienced abortion revealed that:
- 49% of women who experienced abortion were atheist, agnostic, or non-religious
- Only 16% want a religious approach to healing
- 100% said they would not go to clergy for help
Monica also shared that among all American women, “21% are not affiliated with religion—so roughly one in five American women” are non-religious. But, non-religious women account for 38% of all abortions in the U.S. She pointed out that means “a lot of women seeking abortion do associate with a faith tradition.” She emphasized the need to “be able to meet all different kinds of people from all different kinds of paths.”
Why Non-Religious Women May Want After-Abortion Support More Than Religious Women
Monica acknowledged, “I don’t know for sure why non-religious women would be more likely to say they feel they need support after abortion, but I have two theories.”
First, Monica said that secular women may be more likely to say they need support because they lack a built-in community like churches often provide. “Some church communities are just very good at logistically and emotionally supporting their people,” she explained. “I’m guessing, if a woman’s part of a church, and feels comfortable seeking help, she knows where to go for help.”
Second, many secular women are surrounded by pro-choice friends and family that can make it harder to talk about emotional pain after abortion. They are more likely to have people who “will push back” or actively want her to stop talking about it,” Monica said, “[because] they will feel like it’s a political threat to the narratives they need to protect abortion access.
She reflected on the question, “If they need help that badly, why don’t they go ahead and use the programming…that has religious elements to it?” She explained that some will go to programs even if they disagree with religious elements. But for many “that will feel like a barrier to entry.”
When Religious Healing Feels Like a Barrier
Monica described five distinct groups of people for whom faith-based abortion healing could be an obstacle:
- Those who were never religious and don’t relate to spiritual content
- Those who had negative religious experiences and left
- Those who had positive religious experiences and negative experiences with their loss of faith
- Those who didn’t have any bad experiences, but left for other reasons
- Religious people currently in a faith crisis triggered by the abortion(s)
“Any one of these groups could still benefit from religious programming,” Monica acknowledged. “But for some, it will be a barrier—at least right now.”
To illustrate, she shared how her own miscarriage grief led her to join online support groups. One was implicitly Christian and filled with phrases about God’s plan and the afterlife. While others found comfort in these beliefs, Monica said, “For me, it actually just made it so much more painful because it sounds like saying the way through this is something you can’t do. So good luck.”
She also joined a secular miscarriage group, but it required members to be pro-choice—an uncomfortable ask for her as a pro-life atheist. “So while mourning the death of my child,” she said, “I could either join a group that made it worse or one that required me to say it’s fine if you did this on purpose.”
How Can Abortion Healing Providers Meet People Where They Are to Support Non-Religious Clients?
Monica encouraged providers to rethink what success looks like. “Is it mental wellness? Faith revival? Admission of responsibility? An ongoing friendship?” she asked. “Whatever it is, imagine that outcome doesn’t happen. How do you absorb that discomfort to make space for where they’re at?”
She emphasized the power of patience, long-term relationship building, and open-ended listening. She encouraged compassionate care. “You want her to know you care about her wellbeing,” Monica said, “regardless of if she agrees with you or not on whatever you still want her to be.”
Monica encouraged providers to diversify support options and referrals. She mentioned types of support people may want: group, one-on-one, in-person, online, secular, religious. She affirmed that you don’t have to meet every need. But asked, If they need something you can’t offer, do you know somebody who can? Do you have referrals ready for stuff that they need?
She reiterated that these “are all ways you could build connection with basically anybody”—not just secular people or those who have experienced abortion.
Five Key Healing Strategies
Drawing from her interview with Laura Aguilar of the Center for Reproductive Loss, Monica highlighted five universal themes for supporting clients who have experienced abortion and are struggling.
Acknowledge Their Experience
Especially in pro-choice spaces, women often feel invalidated or gaslit for their pain. One woman wrote, “I felt like my feminist pro-choice honor badge was going to be revoked for my severe overreaction.” Another, who was struggling after seeing the embryo during her medication abortion, reached out on a forum but was told it wasn’t a baby. She replied, “It doesn’t feel that way.” Simply affirming that something real happened—and that it matters—can open the door to healing.
Normalize Their Feelings
“Different people grieve different ways.,” Monica said. “Different people feel different things.” Grief isn’t rational, Monica explained, and feelings aren’t wrong. She shared that when a miscarriage led her to question whether or not grieving was rational for her, “My younger sister told me, ‘Your feelings are your feelings.’” Whether it’s relief, anger, sorrow, or confusion, clients should be encouraged to feel what they feel without shame.
“ Your feelings are just signs pointing to what you’re going through and what you think,” she said. “You’re using them as clues on how to go through this journey. You don’t need to worry about if they’re the right clues. They exist.”
She described feelings after abortion like a roller coaster. And told providers “telling them ‘Whatever you feel, those are just your feelings’ can be very liberating, especially for people where other sources are telling them it’s no big deal.”
Encourage Storytelling
Storytelling doesn’t need to be public. It can be journaling, one-on-one conversations with a trusted friend or someone else, or group sharing. She explained that externalizing the experience helps people make sense of what happened, “untangle the mess that’s in our heads and in our hearts.” Talking or writing about what happened, what circumstances led to this, why did they happen, how did I get here? “can help people get a better idea,” she said.
Encourage Them to Consider How They Grieve
Monica described a tool called the Loss History Graph from The Grief Recovery Handbook by John James and Russell Freeman that helps people identify how they’ve handled past losses. It leads the reader to “make a timeline of your life and think about times when you’ve lost something”—death, relationship, moving, anything. And it guides them through questions like How did you react? What did you do? What are the behaviors that you default to that you may have not even noticed about how you process grief?
Explore Rituals
“Rituals help people signify that something is important,” Monica shared. “I wanted rituals so bad and I didn’t know what to do.”
Some rituals she suggested that “people can do regardless of your religious background” include:
Processing Rituals—letter writing, garden stones, memory boxes, journaling, nature walking
Atonement Rituals—volunteering, donating, mentoring others, acts of kindness
Letting Go Rituals—like releasing a balloon, blowing out a candle, tossing a stone in water, burning a piece of paper—any “action you can do to try to take everything you’re feeling and thinking and channel it.”
She also discussed rituals that others can use to help the person who is struggling—like sending cards or gifts, making meals—”any action you can take beyond talking…that say, ‘This is important and we’re gonna do something to show that it’s important—is very helpful,” Monica said.
Challenges in Navigating Forgiveness for Non-Religious People
Monica closed with a candid reflection on the complexity of forgiveness for non-religious individuals, who “don’t believe in God and ultimate forgiveness.” She noted that it can be especially complicated “for people who used to be religious and aren’t anymore, that leaves a hole…If you feel like you need forgiveness, who are you going to get it from?”
She mentioned people who find comfort in praying to their children to forgive them. “For people who don’t believe in an afterlife, that’s not an option,” she said. “It’s not a thing.” She shared that others who don’t believe in God or a deity may pray to a child, to nature or ancestors—but for many, forgiveness is “less direct and more nebulous.”
Better Understanding Non-Religious People
She stressed that for “a lot of people who are non-believers, they don’t see it as a choice not to believe.” Rather “it’s just not accessible to them.” She offered this analogy:
Imagine someone told her, “If you decide to believe that the sky is purple, then you’ll get to see your miscarried children in heaven someday.” She’d say, “That’s great, but the sky isn’t purple…We look really hard and it’s still blue.”
She continued by saying that she believes others believe that and it doesn’t upset her that they do, but it doesn’t work for her. She emphasized that for many secular people it’s not about not wanting God to tell them what to do or that they’ve never thought about it. “They just can’t access it.”
So, it’s essential to meet them where they are with support that they can access.
Wrap-Up: Supporting Non-Religious People
- Try to absorb discomfort in interpersonal interactions
- Humanize them
- Involve community and other resources to support them where you can’t
- Acknowledge their experience
- Validate and normalize their feelings
- Encourage them to process and tell their story—to trusted others or themselves
- Encourage them to consider how they grieve
- Explore rituals that might help them process
Q&A Highlights
What makes a support space feel safe for secular people?
- “Give signals that you are aware that they have a different view than you, and you are totally cool with that, and it’s fine.”
- Consider your actual space —physical if in-person [and background if virtual]—”try to look at it from their eyes.” If your space has a lot of religious images or messages, “that might put them off”—and Monica discussed different reasons that might be.
- Be upfront about religious content so they know what it will be and can choose beforehand whether or not to participate.
- Ask open-ended questions and be welcoming, reassuring, and not pushing a particular view on them. Ask their view and show you’re listening.
You can say things like, Listen, we know that this works for some people and not others, and it’s okay. I wanna know where you’re coming from. How do you feel about this? What, where does faith play into this for you? Or does it?
- Demonstrate unconditional support. “People may not tell you what they really think if they’re afraid you’ll reject them,” she noted. “The way you handle your differences matters.”
View from a Clinical Therapist
Kylee shared a comment in the chat from a provider: I appreciate this discussion and find it refreshing as a clinical therapist working with women from all walks of life. I have volunteered with faith-based groups, yet I saw a need and started our metro area’s first clinical secular abortion recovery group for the reasons that you are speaking to. Thank you.
Monica responded: “There’s so many people that really need help and they just don’t have any idea that that’s even an option, much less an option that would fit for them. So, big deal. I appreciate that you’re doing that.”
Closing
Monica shared how her organization for a long time was frustrated when they would receive inquiries about where to refer someone struggling after abortion who wasn’t Christian. “Then we found Support After Abortion who is actively trying to develop secular-based resources. And I was so relieved that I scheduled a post every Sunday for all of 2024 that highlighted someone suffering after abortion and said, ‘if you’re struggling, go to Support After Abortion’ ’cause I could refer to them.
Kylee closed the webinar by reflecting on the importance of curiosity and bias awareness. She shared how Monica has helped her navigate language choices that resonate across beliefs and recommended providers build a network of people with differing views and beliefs who can be a sounding board and help with language to meet people where they are.
“I hope that this colored in something for you that has made you wonder what if,” Kylee said. “What if I do something a little bit differently and meet people who think differently than I do where they’re at in their pain so they can also feel the freedom that comes with healing.”
Continuing the Conversation
We continue this conversation of supporting non-religious people in our next webinar: Being a Person of Faith in a Secular Healing Space. We shared solid insights and practical tools for caring well without compromising your faith when clients want a secular path to healing. You’ll hear real stories, explore language that builds trust, and come away with strategies that honor both your calling and your client’s needs.
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