They said it.
“There’s no point here and now to reflect on those moments up until the abortion of our baby. Jad is not here, and that’s all that matters. I will never hold him. I will never see what he looked like. I will never tickle his feet. I will never hear his laugh. I will never be able to love him…”
A postabortion father, “Reclaiming Fatherhood” http://www.menandabortion.info/l1-testimony2.html
Share on Facebook6/12/09
Unfortunately the world is full of story like mine. I could write a book on the flow of emotions me and my girlfriend went and, above all, still go through. I will write only few lines on my life experience, and if only one person who would read me will change idea my life will have been worthier.
We lived and still live in two different cities (Paris and Luxembourg), seeing each other over the week end. We love each other, but this, as you will read below, doesn’t count for what happened. Two moderate salaries and in junior positions, but smart and ambitious. We both study besides work. Sometimes we where speaking about children, we both wanted in the “future”.
She got pregnant. Emotions in order: incredulity, surprise, light happiness for a little miracle of nature, thoughts on money/time/small house/study/work, rising preoccupations, discussion, waves of panic, proposal of abortion, silence, discussions, silence, cries, lack of sleep, decision to abort.
Decision founded on arguments like not enough money, impossibility to pursue our career and studies, living in 2 different cities, apparent simplicity in doing an abortion through a pill, and maybe we are always in time to do a baby in the future.
She goes to abort within 4 weeks, through the RSU pill. It goes smoothly, although with a lot of belly pain in some moments for her. We go back home. We don’t speak for hours, both silent. In the days after we avoid the subject. The nurse at the hospital told us that usually couples realize fully what happens only some time later. She was right.
For me it happened in a subway, when I looked to a mother holding a baby. I looked at the little hand of the child holding the mother’s one. I didn’t see them, but only the hands connection. The reality opened in my guts, cutting them alive. Through that abortion, I refuse to hold that hand, I turned my shoulders to someone having part of my blood in his veins, my skin, my eyes. My face. I didn’t let that face encounter mine.
It doesn’t matter I love my girlfriend, it could have been a one night stand, that was part of me. That little hand looking for mine is haunting each and every single night. Sine one year, and it doesn’t slow down.
I once had lunch with the CEO of my company. He had a son when it was still at university, without any money, he continued to study. He said that keep the baby was the best choice of his life and formed is character more than a MBA.
You can imagine how I felt. No, I think you cannot imagine, and I hope you’ll never feel that. Being aware of you biggest life mistake. Aware you will never do something worse in life, because you can’t.
If the satisfaction, privilege, miracle, of seeing yourself in another human being is not worthy a little sacrifice, what is it, a job like millions, a diploma like millions, a house like millions?!?!? I feel ashamed for the reasons on which we based our decision upon.
Besides, I found out I have varicocele, and my fertility is very low and we will probably struggle to have children in the future.
Just don’t do my mistake, save your sleep, your conscious, yourself into another human being. Think longterm, what is the value of a little hand looking for yours.
Stefano T
.
Share on FacebookHere is one quote by pro-choice feminist Kathleen McDonnell:
“We have to acknowledge…that there is a great inconsistency between our eagerness to involve men in all other aspects of reproduction and our unwillingness to allow them a similar role in abortion. This means we must acknowledge and validate man’s role in the act of procreation. It really does take two…This stance [to deny men a choice in their partners’ abortions] poses, of course, a veritable minefield of problems…”
Kathleen McDonnell. Not an Easy Choice: a Feminist Re-Examines Abortion. (Boston: South End Press, 1984
Share on FacebookOne 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
Share on Facebook“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)
Share on Facebook“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)
Share on Facebook“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)
Share on Facebook“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
Share on FacebookOne 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
Share on FacebookCBS 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]
Share on FacebookI 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?”