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Extensive research has been focused on abortion and women, while
men have been legally, psychologically, and medically bypassed. For men, the abortion issue is a gnawing paradox. At a time when men are changing roles and becoming increasingly involved with raising their children, they are systematically denied the right to be involved in life-or-death decisions affecting their children.
This powerlessness takes it's toll not only on the male self image, but canbring on role conflict, excessive guilt, depression, and often, the end of the relationship with his partner.
Abortion has been advocated as a simple surgical procedure for women which produces litle or no psychlogical impact for both sexual partners. In fact, most men, as well as women, deny any negative emotional consequences from abortion.
Men who choose to accept their feelings, rather then deny them, often describe the abortion experience as bewildering anf painful beyond their coping abilities.
Sociologist Arthur Shostak observed in an article for the Family Coordinator that 3 out of 4 male respondents studied said they had a difficult time with the abortion experience and that a sizable minority reported presistent day and night dreams about the child that never was, and considerable guilt, remorse, and sadness.
For men and women alike, the feelings of emptiness may last a lifetime, for parents are parents forever, even of a dead child. Emotional resolution is nearly impossible because there is no visible conclusion- just a memory. Because the unborn child was denied a humanity, he or she is denied a grave or marker. The grieving process is left unfinished.
Beyond its emotional effects on men, abortion affects relationships as well. Researcher Emily Milling found that of more than 400 couples who went through the abortion experience (70%) had failed withone 1 month after the abortion.
Because of the basic inequity between the partners in the abortion decision, the capacity to develop trust, communication, and problem-solving skills, intimacy, honesty, and companionship is severely restricted. This same inequity has the potential to breed displaced male agression via child abuse, spousal abuse, or self abuse.
Clinical experience shows that men become hostile when they have become excluded from decision making and when they discover they have been deceived and manipulated.
Men, like women, are human and imperfect. They may undergo equivalent feelings of shock, denial, and anger. It is not a simple process, bu a natural one requiring frank, open, sensitive and caring communication. It may be difficult, but communication ultimately breeds caring, maturity, and intimacy.
In the abortion decision. all too frequently the male's role is marginal and passive. He may be bypassed by his sexual partner, ignored at the abortion clinic, and helpless in the act and aftermath of the abortion itself. This role conflict may well be responsible for some of the increase in male dysfunction.
A recent national poll found that 87% of the population thought that the ideal male should stand up for his ideas. And yet, in the abortion decision, the male's input is insignificant because of the absolute autonomy provided his sexual partner under the law.
One young man's experience is recounted in Arden Rothstein's 'Men's Reactions to their Partner's Elective Abortion.' "I thought I was a much more liberated man. I'd be able to walk in here and sit down and say, 'Here's an abortion' and that would be it. But now that I'm here, I'm a wreck...I don't think anyone could depend on me in this situation...I'm shaken...I really want to know what they will do for her...how about me?
Do they have something for me to lay on while I die?"
Nowhere is the abortion experience more painfully felt than in the area of a man's role expectation to be responsible and to protect his family. Yet, how can one protect, when one is not allowed by law to be involved in a life or death decision?
On the other hand, abandoning responsiblities fits nicely into the mainstream of abortion thinking. For men who don't care about the woman they impregnate, abortion is a neat disposal system of the evidence of their sexuality and a conclusive adbication of any responsiblities.
Becoming a father is, of course, far more complex than intercourse and conception. It is an ongoing process begun long before the actual entrance to fatherhood signaled by childbirth. This process includes the development of certain personal qualities, goals, attitudes, expectations, roles, conflicts, and defense mechanisms.
For men as well as women, abortion abruptly arrests this process and creates a role vacuum in which confusion, ambivalence, guilt and hostility abound.
In a real sense, the double standard has been revisited and revised with abortion. While the right to abdicate future motherhood is guaranteed, the right to insist on future fatherhood is not. If women choose motherhood, men are obligated in paternity action. While women may choose an abortion over the male's objections, men typically shoulder the bulk of the financial costs.
When men promote abortion for their partners it is typified as coercion, lack of caring, insensitivity, and selfishness. When women choose abortion it is the eclamation of women's rights, an affirmation of the right to health and freedom from male oppression, and a confirmation of sovereign territoriality over the female body and reproductive functions.
Once the abortion has taken place, males may require as much emotional support as female. For either sex, the loss of a child is a loss like none other. Guilt and grief can be tenacious, and they cannot be willed away.
One of the best remedies for guilt is the bright lights of dis-clousure. Talking about old unfinished business helps clear up guilt and has been known to generate small miracles.
Another aid to resolving guilt is to simply acknowledge that there is a huge storehouse of unfinished emotional business. This act of acknowledgment itself lightens up the individual considerably because it lets him stop pretending. He can then also acknowledge the pain felt at the time.
Resistance to feelings themselves, is often the major portion of the problem. When feelings are opened up and allowed to be felt deeply, they can bring knowledge. The full expression of these feelings may last only minutes, but a freer, more self accepting individual results.
Reconcilation of the death of one's unborn child ultimately involves the act of forgiveness willing to know the truth and tell the truth. To grow is to forgive oneself no matter the degree or nature of the mistake.
Unfortunately, people often get stuck in trying to forgive before they accept forgivness, prevents them from actually experiencing it.
But to forgive one's self is not the same as to forget the abortion. The child can never be returned. Memories will remain, but the negative feelings toward one's self can be reconciled.
Abortion is a far greater dilemma for men than researchers, counselors and women have even begun to realize. Many men are victims of abortion along with women and unborn children. For now , they are silent sufferers, bewildered and frustrated by their responses to abortion. With time, perhaps a truly equality of the sexes will provide for more democratic decisions, more love and less pain and the realization that abortion is no solution at all.
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