By Dave Andrusko
Editor’s note. Father’s Day is this Sunday. As we do each year we are running stories all the week before about one of the most neglected subject areas in the entire abortion debate: a father’s role and responsibility in the death of his child.
Except to the most ideologically-driven pro-abortionist, it shouldn’t be at all surprising that abortion, an act which takes the life of one individual and forever alters the lives of many others, would be anything but simple. Endlessly complicated, the real question is which aspect will command attention next.
Some surface briefly, then “disappear,” only to reappear. A classic example is the capacity of the unborn child to experience pain at 20 weeks, a truth demonstrated over and over again, which was brought back to national attention when Nebraska became the first state to pass the historic “Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act.”
Another is inevitably Men and Abortion. How could it be otherwise? A friend once emailed me a link to story in a St. Louis weekly which, while very hard on pro-life outreach to men, included that phase so it could also discuss “pro-choice” outreach to men.
In an overly cutesy way, the writer said, “Men have long taken the back seat in the national conversation about abortion, but now, even if they’re not driving it, they’ve at least graduated to passenger-seat status.” That’s a stretch. Men are still, at best, in the back seat. But at least they are being allowed in the car.
Pro-abortionists, of course, see outreach to men, such as Project Joseph, as little more than recruitment tools for the pro-life Movement. They see their job as reassuring the men that the decision to end the child’s existence was best for all–especially them.
Pro-lifers see abortion in a fundamentally different way. They understand that both men and women have layers of unresolved quilt and remorse that it can’t just be bottled up forever. There is a reason that research continues to show an aftermath of post-abortion physical and emotional complications.
An unintentionally revealing comment came early in a piece first published several years ago (“Abortion Activists have a new target: men”): “Where pro-choicers see 50 million men relieved of the burden of caring for a child they hadn’t planned for, pro-lifers see the 50 million Father’s Day cards those children will never send.”
“Relieved of the burden”: what an immensely revealing observation. The whole point of so many post-abortion stories told by men is that they would give anything to not have the “burden” of caring for the child they once abandoned but the privilege.
We are four days away from Father’s Day. As we do every year, on Friday we will repost the most poignant, searingly painful post-abortion father’s story ever written: “Remembering Thomas: Responsibility, Guilt and a Child Who Never Was,” by Phil McCombs, which appeared in the Washington Post in 1995.