Abortion exerts its effects on psychological wellbeing of a great number of women all over the world. Numerous psychological research deals with describing normative responses to the intervention and determining possible psychopathological outcomes.

Our aim was to justify whether women differ from one another already at the time of the intervention in terms of their level of anxiety and the degree of depression, which might correlate primarily to the difficulties regarding the process of making the decision for abortion and to the nature of their fears.

In our research at the Obstetrics and Gynaecology Clinics at University of Pécs, 112 women (average age: 29.67, ranging 18–44) having had abortion were studied using structured interviews and Hospital Anxiety and Depression Scale (Zigmond & Snaith, 1983).

With respect to whether they have reported fear, the research sample could be divided in two groups: 18% have not reported any fear, whereas regarding the remaining 82% some sort of fear was identified by contents analysis, such as fear of later complications (26%), fear of the invasive intervention (22%), fear of both above (15%) and fear of death (19%). The level of anxiety was significantly higher in the group reporting fears at the time of the intervention. The highest anxiety and depression levels were measured in the groups reporting fears of both invasive intervention and later complications, and in the group experiencing fears of death.

Our results draw attention to the significance of the psychological preparation prior to termination.