Around 73 million induced abortions occur worldwide each year, according to WHO estimates. That figure exceeds the roughly 61–64 million total deaths of people who have already been born. In most places where abortion is legal, the decision rests with the pregnant woman; men have no equivalent unilateral right. The proposition examined here is that the guilt and shame some women carry from these experiences—particularly among those who are more politically active—can be compensated for by unusually strong empathy and policy support for the relatively uncontrolled entry and presence of illegal or irregular migrants. This is offered as one possible root of what has been called “suicidal empathy”: a willingness to prioritize the interests of outsiders even when the scale of inflows creates clear costs for the receiving society. The claim is that holding strong pro-abortion views and strong support for largely open illegal migration can appear coherent within progressive ideology yet may also reflect an emotional compensation that is rarely examined directly.
Existing evidence supplies several relevant pieces but does not establish the causal mechanism. Large longitudinal studies, including the Turnaway Study, find that relief is the most common emotion years after an abortion for the majority of women, and most report that the decision was the right one. Negative emotions such as guilt, sadness, or regret are reported by a minority, decline over time for most, and are more common among those with pre-existing mental-health difficulties or decision conflict. Other samples and clinical reports document persistent distress, grief, or shame in subsets of women, and post-abortion healing programs exist for those who seek them. Separately, political-psychology research shows that support for legal abortion and relatively open immigration attitudes cluster strongly together among people who identify as left-leaning or progressive, lower in religiosity, and higher in certain personality traits. Women who have had abortions tend, on average, to be more supportive of abortion access itself. General psychological work confirms that guilt can motivate compensatory altruism in laboratory settings, and liberals on average extend concern more broadly to out-groups than conservatives do. What is missing is any direct quantitative or qualitative test of whether personal abortion history or measured post-abortion guilt/shame predicts stronger empathy or policy preferences specifically for illegal or irregular migrants, above and beyond ideology. No studies isolate that pathway; the compensatory-guilt explanation remains an untested hypothesis. Shared ideological priors remain the better-documented account of why the two positions often travel together.
A professor seeking funding for a proper study of this hypothesis would design a pre-registered project capable of distinguishing abortion-specific guilt from general ideology. It would measure abortion history and current or retrospective guilt, shame, and regret with validated scales, while also assessing trait guilt-proneness. Outcomes would focus on empathy toward people who entered or remain illegally and on concrete policy preferences regarding the scale and control of irregular migration—border enforcement intensity, asylum thresholds, interior removals, and tolerance for large uncontrolled inflows. A large survey of women of reproductive age (with oversampling of those reporting abortions), plus a male comparison group, would include extensive controls for ideology, religiosity, personality, education, contact with migrants, and media exposure. Longitudinal waves or survey experiments that vary the framing or volume of irregular migration would help establish temporal order and test moderation. Power would be set for small-to-moderate effects after controls, with plans for robustness checks against under-reporting and social-desirability bias. The goal would be to determine whether abortion-related guilt adds any incremental predictive power once ideology is accounted for.
In a few sentences: Roughly 73 million abortions occur each year—more than all other human deaths combined—and some women experience lasting guilt or shame. The hypothesis is that this emotional residue can drive excess empathy and support for relatively uncontrolled illegal migration as a form of compensation. Existing data confirm mixed emotional outcomes after abortion and strong ideological clustering of pro-choice and open-migration views, but no research has directly tested the proposed guilt-to-empathy pathway. A rigorous study would measure abortion-specific guilt against carefully controlled immigration-policy attitudes to see whether any unique link remains.