Author: Tech

One researcher who interviewed couples who had been involved in an abortion decision said this of the men that she interviewed:

“Men are confused when their partners are okay with having had an abortion, but they themselves are depressed, guilty, grieving or shame filled.”

Torre-Bueno A. Peace after Abortion (San Diego, California: Pimpernel Press, 1997) 119-120

“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.

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.

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?”

Mark Baker, “Men on Abortion” Esquire, March 1990, 114 to 125. Quoted in Randy Alcorn “Pro-life Answers to Pro-Choice Arguments” (Sisters, Oregon: Multnomah Publishers, 2000)

“I’ve got to think of the pain and the damage it did to her, because I know about the pain that it does to me, and it wasn’t my decision. I was part of the cause and I certainly didn’t resist in any way. I can’t help but think, am I guilty of being an accomplice in the taking of a life, or at least in not bring it to fruition? There is guilt, but more than anything there’s just sadness.”

Mark Baker, “Men on Abortion” Esquire, March 1990, 114 to 125. Quoted in Randy Alcorn “Pro-life Answers to Pro-Choice Arguments” (Sisters, Oregon: Multnomah Publishers, 2000)

“It’s her body, but I had her brainwashed. I made all the decisions. Once it was over, we never talked about it again. We kept our mouths shut. She did have some real prophetic words, though. She said, “Wagner, you’re going to regret this all your life.” I told her, “no, no.” But inside me something would spark and cling to that. She was right. I’ll never forget it. I’ll never forgive myself.”

Mark Baker, “Men on Abortion” Esquire, March 1990, 114 to 125. Quoted in Randy Alcorn “Pro-life Answers to Pro-Choice Arguments” (Sisters, Oregon: Multnomah Publishers, 2000)

“Ten years ago my then-girlfriend had an abortion. We were in our mid-20s, poor and directionless, and it seemed at the time the only thing to do. My ex loves her husband more than the world. I love my wife. The ex and I are simply attempting to understand how to deal with the fact that we, two people who loved each other, created a life and then destroyed it. This past August our child would have been 10 years old. She feels so terrible about this that it is almost destroying her. I feel the same way, but of course for a woman it is much worse. Instead of getting better, the pain worsens year by year.”

Emotionally Drained in Chicago (Writing for advice) Salon.com: “We’re haunted by an abortion from 10 years ago” Oct 14,2005

One man’s testimony:

“I was a participant in two abortions with my ex-wife…It has been six years since the last abortion, nine since the decision for the first one. Every time I see children of the approximate age of the two lost ones, I cry, no matter where…church, the mall, the park, and the library….[the borted children’s] legacy is gone. Their beauty unfinished, nullified by a decision to which I agreed…I have gone from pro-choice to pro-child.”

E-mail message from a Father to Human Life Alliance, St. Croix Valley Life Care Center Website

Quoted by Life Dynamics

CBS network correspondent Bill Stout told the following story in the Los Angeles Times on February 16, 1976:

He discusses driving in traffic one day.

“Since there was plenty of time, it seemed logical to skip the freeway mess and loaf across the city on the side streets. Easy enough, until even that oozing pace of traffic squeezed to a dead stop because of an accident at the corner of Beverly and Vermont. There my eye caught the window of a second floor office, and it hit me like a knee to the groin.

That office, in a building I hadn’t even noticed in many years, was where I had taken my new bride for an abortion one blistering summer day in 1952. Suddenly I remembered….and I relived every detail….

[he describes learning that she was pregnant]

I had adopted her young son by a previous marriage, but this would be our first baby together, and I was delighted. Minutes later I was appalled, then infuriated, by her insistence that she would not go through with it. Even more hurtful, I suppose, in the callowness of that encounter so long ago, was that she had talked with several women friends before telling me anything. She already had the name of the doctor and was ready to make an appointment when I would be off from work to drive her to and from….She made the point hammered home today by the women’s pro-abortion groups; it was, after all HER body, and the DECISION should be hers and hers alone.

That was the most painful week of our marriage, until the final anguish (of divorce) many years later. Of course, she got her way. I dropped her at the curb of outside the doctor’s office….I remember his name. I can see the sign in his office as clearly as if were there now, just a few feet away….I never saw the man but I hated him then, and I do to this moment, even though he died long ago….

again and again, I have found myself wondering what that first one would have been like. A boy or a girl? Blonde or brunette? A problem or a delight? Whatever kind of person the lost one might have been, I feel even now that we had no right to take its life. Religion has nothing to do with that feeling. It was a “gut” response that overwhelmed me while stalled in the traffic that afternoon at Beverly and Vermont….

A few minutes later I was at my meeting in the Civic Center, in the office of an old friend, luckily, because by then I was in tears and they wouldn’t stop. It wasn’t easy but I finally told him how that glance at an office window had simply been too much for me, sweeping away a dam that had held for more than 20 years. If I am still wondering about that first one that never was, what about other men? How many of them share my haunted feelings about children who might have been?”

Researcher Arthur Shostak surveyed 1000 men waiting at abortion clinics while their girlfriends or wives were being aborted. He discovered that:

42% of the boyfriends had offered to marry the woman

25% of those who did not offer to marry the woman offered child support

39% of the men believed that life began at conception or when the nervous system began to function

26% believe that the abortion was the “killing of a child.”

The study found a range of emotions among the men. They feared for the woman’s health, felt guilty about the abortion or the pregnancy, felt self-doubt, and also anguish and pain of the loss of their children and over the entire abortion experience.

Arthur B. Shostak. “Abortion as Fatherhood Glimpsed: Clinic Waiting Room Males as [Former] Expectant Fathers.” Presented to the Eastern Sociological Society Meeting in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania in March of 1985, page 4. Quoted in The Abortion Encyclopedia by American Life League