In yesterday’s article, I mentioned the concept of “buyer’s remorse,” also sometimes called “buyer’s regret.”
This occurs when the buyer of a product or service eventually realizes that they made a mistake – that the product they bought did not measurably improve their lives, and instead, likely diminished their lives in a specific way.
Buyer’s remorse can happen immediately after making a purchase, or sometimes, many years after the fact.
Remorse As a Gauge for Evaluating Which Product Is Best
From a product marketing perspective, pro-life pregnancy centers have an enormous competitive advantage over Planned Parenthood from the perspective of “buyer’s remorse.”
Why?
In my 5+ years of working full-time helping pro-life pregnancy centers with “demand generation” marketing, not once have I heard of a woman who changed her mind about abortion, chose life, had her baby, and then experienced remorse for her decision, wishing she could go back in time and have an abortion.
Not once.
What can we say about buyer’s remorse when it comes to women, and men, who chose to abort their preborn babies?
Let’s just say the evidence is overwhelming that a significant percentage of women, and men, who choose abortion will eventually experience buyer’s remorse, either immediately after an abortion, or often many years later.
In this regard, I can personally say that I experienced this remorse, but not for over 20 years after I agreed to the abortion of my own child.
Eventually, it catches up with you.
The End of The Story Brings Clarity
The emotional impact of buyer’s remorse on the buyer depends on the significance of the buying decision one is making.
At a restaurant, trying a new dish that you end up not liking very much will cause a relatively small degree of angst – you will likely have forgotten about your “regretful” choice by tomorrow.
An abortion decision, on the other hand, is the highest degree of significance possible.
Women, and men, know that the decision to abort means the forced ending of a human life, and even at a level deeper, that the human life being forcefully ended is their own flesh and blood.
In the academic study of sales, it is well-documented that consumers don’t want to admit that they made a purchase mistake because doing so would cause a perceived loss of status, whether real or imagined.
Again, this is especially true the greater the significance of the purchase decision made.
This explains why it can sometimes take the most extreme circumstance, such as one’s own impending death, before the remorse of an abortion decision can make its way to the surface of one’s psyche.
I learned this in 2014 when I interviewed Dr. Theresa Burke, the founder of Rachel’s Vineyard.
Dr. Burke shared with me that “buyer’s remorse” (my words, not her’s) does not manifest for many people until they are on their death beds.
Dr. Burke said,
“When I teach in hospitals I’m always surprised to hear the people who work in hospice come to me and say that they have a whole floor of people who are struggling with post-abortion trauma who cannot go into death peacefully. And we actually have teams from Rachel’s Vineyard who go bedside to hospitals to cancer patients, people who are terminal, sometimes old people, because this is something that they might have been able to run from for their whole lives, but then they fear spiritual issues. They fear judgment by God, and they have all this anxiety, and it’s not a pleasant time at all.”
You can read my full interview with Dr. Burke at this link: Post Abortion Healing at Rachel’s Vineyard
It seems clear to me that a very strong case can be made that the “choose life” services offered by pro-life pregnancy centers are an objectively better product than abortion services simply by measuring “buyer’s remorse” statistics between the two competing services.
After all, I am not aware of any healing retreats for women who chose life for their babies, and experienced so much psychological trauma for making that choice that they need to go to a “I chose life” healing retreat.
To learn more about the psychological effects of abortion on women, men and families, I recommend you study the articles posted by Dr. David Reardon on his website here: Elliot Institute
Regards,
Brett
Bridget VanMeans
Wow. This article is powerful. What deep rich thought provoking information. The hospice testimony is life changing. Wow again.
The Real Person!
The Real Person!
Thank you for your comment Bridget.
I agree with you.
Nothing brings clarity to the rightness, or wrongness, of the choices one made in life than one’s own impending death.
It’s interesting how many bad choices we humans make based on our belief that we have so much time left on the earth.
Why does that even matter when it comes to making good or bad life choices?
Easy to think about in the abstract rather that to put into actual practice, but think how much wiser our decisions would be if we acted as if our lives would end this evening.
That brings extreme clarity to the moral value of our decisions.
It seems to me in that case that we would would no longer care, at all, about self-serving decisions, and would only focus on making decisions that served others – in other words, we would become radically other-oriented, thinking only of laying down our lives for our friends.
Bridget VanMeans
Wow. This article is powerful. What deep rich thought provoking information. The hospice testimony is life changing. Wow again.
The Real Person!
The Real Person!
Thank you for your comment Bridget.
I agree with you.
Nothing brings clarity to the rightness, or wrongness, of the choices one made in life than one’s own impending death.
It’s interesting how many bad choices we humans make based on our belief that we have so much time left on the earth.
Why does that even matter when it comes to making good or bad life choices?
Easy to think about in the abstract rather that to put into actual practice, but think how much wiser our decisions would be if we acted as if our lives would end this evening.
That brings extreme clarity to the moral value of our decisions.
It seems to me in that case that we would would no longer care, at all, about self-serving decisions, and would only focus on making decisions that served others – in other words, we would become radically other-oriented, thinking only of laying down our lives for our friends.