Editor’s note. This Sunday is Father’s Day. For many men who have been a party to an abortion, this will be a grim reminder of obligations shirked and lives lost. This editorial appeared in the June digital edition of National Right to Life News. You can read this edit plus the dozens of stories, commentaries, and analyses at www.nrlc.org/uploads/NRLNews/NRLNewsJune2016.pdf.
June 19 is Father’s Day, where children (occasionally with assistance from their moms) will splurge on their dads. Personally, if each of my kids gave me the same exact tie, I would treasure each one of them just because I love being a dad.
But there will be many men who are not fathers because of their role in an abortion. They will not experience the joy of fatherhood, only the guilt, remorse, and pain that so often accompanies a decision they either acceded to, did not oppose, or, worst of all, coerced the woman in their life into making.
You would not expect pro-abortion feminists to fathom how much pain a man might feel after the death of his child, even if he had done everything he could to persuade the mother not to end the child’s life. Especially if he had moved heaven and earth in a futile attempt to save the child’s life. If he had, it’s harder to treat him like a sleaze ball which is their customary response.
Asking for a role for men reminds me of those card games where you take every trick but one-and then lose the game when a trump card from another suit is laid down. You can offer every reasonable justification why a father should have a voice in a life-or-death decision made about their child only to be trumped by “Autonomy,” the “right to control her own body,” and all the other buzzwords and catch phrases which are unfairly given a higher status.
The last thing the abortion industry wants is more players in the decision-making process. Expanding the range of what is possible is our goal, not theirs. They are one-trick ponies-they want women (and girls) to be placed on a conveyor belt which moves without interruption until she reaches the destination that will “solve” her “problem.” They want their finely tuned propaganda engine running smoothly. A father’s involvement risks throwing sand in the gears.
There are so many bitter ironies. The abortion industry’s campfire story version is that women and girls come to the clinic firm in their conviction, having carefully considered the pros and cons. Is this true in some cases? Of course.
But there is a reason the Planned Parenthoods are so desperate to besmirch and belittle peer-reviewed research revealing a whole panoply of emotional and psychological and physical aftershocks. These offer proof positive that abortion is far more damaging than PPFA wants you to know. It also suggests that many women made a decision they didn’t want to make, indeed took an action that was at odds with their fundamental principles and values.
Roe v. Wade stuffed an undemocratic decision down our gullets which is why abortion is the bone in the throat of contemporary culture. We are all choking on it, and that assuredly includes all those men who failed the woman in their lives at a crucial juncture and whose lives have never been the same since.
A couple of years ago I wrote two posts (and a follow up) about a cover story that appeared in New York Magazine. In writing “My Abortion,” Meaghan Winter talked to 26 women who opened up about what they’d experienced.
Pro-abortionists insist by “telling my story” women will contribute to the “destigmatization” of abortion. Pro-lifers look not just at the particular accounts in New York Magazine, but also at so many just like them, and conclude that nothing could possibly be further from the truth.
At one or many levels, most of the women suffered egregiously. The ugly face of abortion—which included many stories of subtle and overt pressure to abort—was everywhere.
For me the most telling observation was
“When I had the ultrasound, I asked for the picture and a nurse said, ‘Seriously?’ A month later, he [the boyfriend] said he regretted it too. When I cry about it, I cry alone. He thinks it would make me sad to talk about, but I don’t want our baby to think we forgot. I’ve never heard of anybody else having an abortion here.”
But if the abortion industry is determined to hide what so many women go through, they are positively apoplectic at the prospect that the public may realize the grief extends outward likes ripples on a pond.
My thoughts and prayers go out to all those men who have lost unborn children out of weakness (or worse) or in spite of every effort they made to dissuade the mother of their child.