The Effects of Abortion on Men: its Emotional, Psychological and Relational Impact

by Vincent M. Rue, Cynthia Tellefsen

While the evidence is mounting that induced abortion carries serious and
significant emotional harm for some women, how abortion affects men remains
largely a story unexamined and untold. In contemporary abortion practice, gender
discrimination is rampant — women may choose, fathers may not. By law, fathers are
excluded from participating in the abortion decision. Prior to a woman aborting
her child, typically there are six scenarios of male involvement:

1. he doesn't know she is pregnant and she aborts without his knowledge;
2. he knows about the pregnancy but hides his own feelings or beliefs from the
woman out of his attempt to "love" her and affirm her rights over her body;
3. he pressures her to abort;
4. he supports and encourages her decision to abort;
5. he opposes the abortion and says so openly; and
6. he abandons her physically and emotionally refusing responsibility for her
or any of her choices.

Forgotten Fathers

In my clinical practice over the past 23 years, I have treated men in each of
these categories. Some men never know that they have been fathers. Some come to
psychotherapy with vague complaints and generally feel puzzlement about their life
and why there is so little meaning in it. For others, their relationship with
their wife or girlfriend simply ends abruptly or in a slow death. For those that
manage to stay together, their relationship limps on with a conspiracy of silence.
The manifold negative consequences of secrecy become apparent in the losses of
intimacy, trust and mutual sharing. When the relationship ends, these men feel
hurt and confused, never understanding what they can never know. Their hurt is
likely to turn to feelings of anxiety and hostility which can manifest in
subsequent relationships in the form of communication impairment and over or
under-control. Still other men feel something is wrong and find out afterwards.
They may then feel tremendous resentment toward the woman and either camouflage it
or openly and negatively express it. Ironically, research now indicates that one
of the strongest predictors of post-abortion psychological adjustment is partner
support.

For men who know of their fatherhood and its demise, the feelings can burn
intensely. In the only book on abortion and men, Shostak describes male abortion
pain as the loss of fatherhood and a "wound you cannot see or feel, but it exists"
(A. Shostak, Abortion & Men: Lessons, Losses & Love, N.Y.: Praeger, 1984).
According to Shostak, a man gets an incredible message: at the first real evidence
of his virility, his partner announces she is pregnant and he is the father and
"we are going to have a $180 pregnancy termination." In interviewing 1000 men,
Shostak found:

1. abortion is a "death experience" and for most men more emotionally trying
than they expected
2. the most common post-abortion reaction was helplessness;
3. men who are not helped to mourn over an abortion are learning how to be even
less involved as nurturant parents in the future; and
4. the majority of relationships failed post-abortion.

One sad reality of abortion is that sensitive men who try not to hurt the women
they love in fact hurt them by saying nothing when the word "abortion" is first
uttered in the decision making process. These men most likely will be swept aside
post-abortion by an undercurrent of resentment stemming from their partner's
feelings of abandonment. Desperately wanting to please, these men are rejected
because they are judged deficient in their true love for their partners: "How
could you say nothing during this crisis and let me just go out and kill our
child? Is this all I mean to you?" According to one such father: "Things are
pretty screwed up when the way you show a woman you love her is by agreeing to
abort rather than having a child." These "forgotten fathers" must not only deal
with their grief and sadness over the irrevocable loss of their children and their
guilt about not protecting their offspring. They must also deal with the loss of
their relationships with their children's mothers.

For men who pressure or encourage the women they care about to have an abortion,
the test of true feelings emerges later on. Typically, having encouraged the
abortion for selfish reasons or out of fear, these men can pay a great emotional
price once the reality of what an abortion is sinks in. In Mulieris Dignitatem
John Paul II made it clear that "by leaving her alone to face the problems of
pregnancy, he indirectly encourages such a decision on her part (to abort)"
(14:80). He goes on to say in Evangelium Vitae that "in this way the family is
thus mortally wounded and profaned in its nature as a community of love and in its
vocation to be the 'sanctuary of life'" (no. 59). Some men are so wounded by their
abortion role that they abort their own lives. I have treated women whose partners
committed suicide because they couldn't escape hearing the relentless little
voices that kept saying: "Daddy, Daddy, please don't let me die." And for the man
who stands up and opposes an abortion, under the law he has no legal recourse and
cannot defend his child's right to life. His grief is punctuated with impotency
and feelings of helplessness. Words are just not enough to prevent his child's
death.

Grief, Guilt & Loss

According to recent research, men do grieve following abortion, but they are more
likely to deny their grief or internalize their feelings of loss rather than
openly express them. Then too, in our culture men are typically discouraged from
expressing their feelings. When men do express their grief, they tend to do so in
culturally prescribed "masculine" ways, i.e., anger, aggressiveness, control. Men
typically grieve in a private way following an abortion. Because of this, men's
requests for help may often go unrecognized and unheeded by those around them.
Research evidence now suggests that following the loss of their unborn child some
men may in fact grieve more than the mother. According to this same research, men
are more likely to feel despair after a pregnancy loss, including a pervasive
sense of hopelessness, one of the signs of chronic grief (Stinson, et al.,
"Parents' Grief Following Pregnancy Loss: A Comparison of Mothers and Fathers,"
Family Relations 41(1992): 218-223). Men's lives contain greater attachments and
are more profoundly affected by fatherhood than is usually assumed. One father
whose child died from abortion described his grief this way: "I wasn't in the
room; I wasn't even in the clinic that day. But in my mind, I've been there a
million times since. I've been there watching, breaking, wanting to rescue you. In
my mind I need to be a hero not a killer, the man who didn't flee. But I am not. I
am the man I fear I see."

The Death Imprint

When there is agreement to an innocent death, its imprint can surface

unexpectedly. Induced abortion reinforces defective problem solving on the part of
the male by encouraging detachment, desertion and irresponsibility. The death
imprint of abortion can be felt in role conflict and personality decompensation.
Whether or not the male was involved in the abortion decision, his inability to
function in a socially prescribed manner, i.e., to protect and provide, leaves him
wounded and confused. Abortion rewrites the rules of masculinity. While a male is
expected to be strong, abortion makes him feel weak. A male is expected to be
responsible, yet abortion encourages him to act without concern for the innocent
and to destroy any identifiable and undesirable outcomes of his sexual decision-
making and/or attachments. A male is expected to protect, but by law he is
encouraged to do otherwise.

All humans must grieve a loss or they will in some way be tormented. Typical male
grief responses include remaining silent and grieving alone. In the silence, a
male can harbor guilt and doubts about his ability to protect himself and those he
loves. These "silent sufferers" who feel they must not talk or cry may appear
tough, but inside they crumble under the crushing weight of their own conscience
and shame. Men who have experienced abortion death can become traumatized by this
significant loss. Some become depressed and/or anxious, others compulsive,
controlling, demanding and directing. Still others become enraged, and failure in
any relationship can trigger repressed hostility from their disenfranchised
abortion grief. To mask or substitute the need to grieve fosters denial and forces
a male to become a "fugitive" from life, loving and healing.

Relationships at Risk

A guilt-ridden, tormented male does not easily love or accept love. His
preoccupation with his partner, his denial of himself and his relentless feelings
of post-abortion emptiness can nullify even the best of intentions. His guilt may
prevent him from seeking compassion, support or affection. In turn, he "forgets"
how to reciprocate these feelings. When a couple experiences an abortion, it is
likely that the following occur: (1) a reduction in the amount of self-disclosure
by both partners which decreases the amount of intimacy necessary for relationship
survival; (2) increased use of defensive communication behaviors (e.g.,
interpersonal hostility); (3) the development of partner communication
apprehensiveness (fear translated into avoidance behaviors), the erosion of trust,
and the evolution into a closed (vs. open and dynamic) system of interaction; and
(4) a loss of spiritual connectedness to God and to one's partner with the advent
of guilt, shame and isolation.

The Challenge of Objective Truth

The lamentable reality of abortion is a fundamental index of our failure as a

society to read and follow our moral compass. John Paul II in Veritatis Splendor
points out that subjective assessments of crises must always be examined within
the context of one's own conscience and objective truths. Only now are we
beginning to see the extent of the harm abortion visits on women, men and the
surviving children. It is clear that in addition to the other victims of abortion,
men too suffer. They too pay a high price for reproductive "freedom." They too
lose in the high stakes world of reproductive "choice" guided only by the self and
expediency. Killing hurts the living too. It knows no gender bias.

© National Catholic Bioethics Center