Tracey Emin, 58, the noted English artist from Croydon, has said that she could not paint for years after an abortion. “I couldn’t stand the smell of oil paint… It made me feel really sick. I stopped painting.”

Ms. Emin is most famous for “My Bed”, a 1998 work shortlisted for the Turner Prize. The unmade bed was a commentary on a low point in her life after years of emotional turmoil that included two abortions.

 “I had such guilt”, Ms. Emin told BBC radio, recounting an abortion in the early 1990s when she had just completed college. “As a deranged punishment to myself, I stopped painting. I just couldn’t paint anymore.”

She also destroyed her paintings and threw them into a skip.  She did not paint for two years.

“It took me years and years and years to offload the guilt of the abortion. It was only when I was really successful and when I started to get to the age where I was far too old to have children that I started really painting again”, said Ms. Emin.

Much of Ms. Emin’s art has been, in her own words, “about memory… but memories of violence and pain”, including abortions in 1990 and 1994, which are reflected in such deeply personal and purposely explicit works as “Everyone I’ve Ever Slept With Before” and “Terribly Wrong”.

Abortion and women’s mental health

The evidence-based review Abortion and Women’s Health reveals the horrific impact that abortion can have on the mental health of women.

Key findings include:

• A woman who undergoes an abortion is six times more likely to commit suicide than a woman who gives birth.
• A woman is 30% more likely to suffer from depression compared to a woman who gives birth.
• A woman is 25% more likely to suffer from anxiety compared to a woman who gives birth.
• A woman who has had an abortion is at a higher risk of psychiatric admission compared to a woman who gives birth.

“We must take notice and act now”

SPUC’s Michael Robinson, Executive Director (Public Affairs and Legal Services), said: “Ms. Emin’s moving and frank account of the psychological cost of abortion shows just how devastating the killing of the unborn is for women, who are also victims of an abortion culture that inflicts irreparable harm on mothers as well as on the unborn.

“In this sense, Ms. Emin’s art, which is a reflection on her life and traumatic experiences, is just as much a product of the sordid culture of abortion that has clearly had a profound effect on the artist.

“And such trauma is all too common, as SPUC has demonstrated repeatedly – including the account of U.S. hurdler Brianna McNeal, who was recently 'traumatised' by an abortion that ‘left her medicated in bed’ and ‘suffering from depression’.