Hearing From Post-Abortive Men

26May15

It’s not often we hear from men after an abortion and that’s tragic,  because it perpetuates the notion that abortion is a “woman’s issue” and therefore men are not entitled to an opinion or most importantly to influence whether their child lives or dies!

Men have no legal right to prevent a woman going through with an abortion and their voices are not heard in the wider abortion debate which is so wrong.  A child’s life has been equally conceived by both the mother and father, therefore the decision should be a shared one.  Society needs to allow men to be fathers and “man up” to this responsibility and support for the mother and child, then perhaps we can move towards women rejecting abortion as a solution.  Here’s some food for thought from a man’s point of view.

This extract is taken from an article in Esquire magazine in March 1990, written by Mark Baker titled “Men on Abortion”.

 

He says: “I’ve had a hell of a time dealing with it, actually. To this day I still think about it. I’ll go to bed, and I’ll think about it and say to myself, ‘Man, what a terrible thing to do. What a copout. You don’t trade human life for material niceties.’ Which is what I was doing, because I was hoping for a better future, more goods I could buy.”

Despite trying, he was unable to deny his baby’s humanity:

“I don’t have a good rationalization for that either. I’m not one of those people who believes that it’s only potential life. I’ve come to believe more and more that the baby in the womb is just that – a human life. I wish I didn’t. I wish I could make myself believe differently, but I can’t. It would make it easier to deal with mentally. When you have the opposite view and you go through with the abortion anyway, well that’s worse than anything.”

His grief is compounded by the fact that he was the one who convinced his partner to abort. Therefore, he feels mostly responsible:

“So, you see, I’m kind of stuck. She did it for me. I feel that I murdered somebody. I wish I could do it over again. If I could just go back in time and relive those years. If she’d had a child, even if we got married and everything, it wouldn’t have been that bad. I’ve seen other people do it. Reality is such a bitch sometimes, you know?”

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