[Pflienews] PharmFacts E-News Update: Changing abortion's pronoun

[PFLI PharmAid Center]

*PharmFacts E-News Update -- 10 Jan 2008 AD #2

*
 http://www.latimes.com/features/health/women/la-na_menabort7jan07,1,7097740.story_

 From the Los Angeles Times
 

 *Changing abortion's pronoun

* 'We had abortions,' say men whose lovers ended pregnancies. It isn't just
 a women's trauma, they insist. But critics see a political calculation.
 
By Stephanie Simon
Los Angeles Times Staff Writer

 January 7, 2008

 SAN FRANCISCO - Jason Baier talks often to the little boy he calls Jamie.
 He imagines this boy -- his son -- with blond hair and green eyes, chubby
 cheeks, a sweet smile.

 But he'll never know for sure.

 His fiancee's sister told him about the abortion after it was over. Baier
 remembers that he cried. The next weeks and months go black. He knows he
 drank far too much. He and his fiancee fought until they broke up. "I
 hated the world," he said.

 Baier, 36, still longs for the child who might have been, with an
 intensity that bewilders him: "How can I miss something I never even
 held?"

 These days, he channels the grief into activism in a burgeoning movement
 of "post-abortive men." Abortion is usually portrayed as a woman's issue:
 her body, her choice, her relief or her regret. This new movement -- both
 political and deeply personal in nature -- contends that the pronoun is
 all wrong.

 "We had abortions," said Mark B. Morrow, a Christian counselor. "I've had
 abortions."

 Morrow spoke to more than 150 antiabortion activists gathered recently in
 San Francisco for what was billed as the first national conference on men
 and abortion. Participants -- mostly counselors and clergy -- heard two
 days of lectures on topics such as "Medicating the Pain of Lost
 Fatherhood" and "Forgiveness Therapy With Post-Abortion Men."

 The most striking session featured the halting testimony of men whose
 partners aborted. Baier, who now lives in Phoenix, told the crowd he
 suffered years of depression and addiction. "I couldn't get the thought
 out of my head about what I had lost."

 Since the concept of post-abortion syndrome first emerged in the early
 1980s, some women have recounted similar stories -- and learned to
 leverage them into political power. They speak at legislative hearings
 and rallies organized by the Silent No More Awareness Campaign. They
 write affidavits detailing their years of emotional turmoil, which the
 Justice Foundation, a conservative advocacy group, submits to lawmakers
 and courts nationwide.

 Last spring, the Supreme Court cited these accounts as one reason to ban
 the late-term procedure that opponents call "partial-birth" abortion. The
 majority opinion suggested that the ban would protect women from a
 decision they might later regret.

 Women's testimony was also used to justify a sweeping abortion ban passed
 in 2006 in South Dakota. (Voters overturned the ban before it could take
 effect.)

 "It's a rule of thumb that if you want to get a law passed, you have to
 tell anecdotes that grab people," said Dr. Nada Stotland, president-elect
 of the American Psychiatric Assn. Antiabortion activists have done that
 well, she said. "They've succeeded in convincing a lot of the American
 public" that abortion leaves women wounded.

 Now, those activists see an opportunity to dramatically expand the
 message.

 The Justice Foundation recently began soliciting affidavits from men; one
 online link promises, "Your story will help legal efforts to end
 abortion." Silent No More encourages men to testify at rallies.

 Therapist Vincent M. Rue, who helped develop the concept of post-abortion
 trauma, runs an online study that asks men to check off symptoms (such as
 irritability, insomnia and impotence) that they feel they have suffered
 as a result of an abortion. When men are widely recognized as victims,
 Rue said, "that will change society."

 Abortion rights supporters watch this latest mobilization warily: If
 anecdotes from grieving women can move the Supreme Court, what will
 testimony about men's pain accomplish?

 "They can potentially shift the entire debate," said Marjorie Signer of
 the Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice, an interfaith group that
 supports abortion rights.

 The concept of post-abortion trauma is hotly disputed. Several studies
 published in peer-reviewed medical journals suggest that women who have
 had abortions are more prone to depression or drug abuse. But the
 research does not prove cause and effect, Stotland said.

 It may be, she said, that women who have abortions are more emotionally
 unstable in the first place. Abortion is one of the most common surgeries
 in the country, with more than 1 million performed a year; while some who
 chose the procedure surely come to regret it, doctors say they see no
 epidemic of trauma in either men or women.

 But the activists leading the men's movement make clear they're not
 relying on statistics to make their case. They're counting on the power
 of men's tears.

 "The lived truth of peoples' experience is very hard to dismiss," said
 Vicki Thorn, who runs post-abortion counseling programs for the Catholic
 Church. "It's time we . . . affirm the pain that fathers feel."

 Morrow, the counselor, described his regret as sneaking up on him in
 midlife -- more than a decade after he impregnated three girlfriends (one
 of them twice) in quick succession in the late 1980s. All four
 pregnancies ended in abortion.

 Years later, when his wife told him she was pregnant, "I suddenly
 realized that I had four dead children," said Morrow, 47, who lives near
 Erie, Pa. "I hadn't given it a thought. Now it all came crashing down on
 me -- look what you've done."

 A few months ago, Morrow reached out to the ex-girlfriend who aborted
 twice. They met and prayed together, seeking peace. After they parted,
 she spilled her anger in a letter: "That long day we sat in that
 God-forsaken clinic, I hoped every moment that you would stand up and
 say, 'We can't do this'. . . but you didn't."

 Even abortion rights supporters acknowledge that men may benefit from
 counseling when they and their partners face an unwanted pregnancy.
 Sociologist Arthur Shostak has interviewed thousands of men waiting in
 abortion clinics; though they tried to project strength to help their
 lovers through the ordeal, many told him that they felt powerless,
 anxious and alone. Some dreamed about the children they would never know.

 Shostak encourages clinics to reach out to these men. But he views the
 activist movement with alarm.

 Recruits often cycle through church-based retreats, support groups and
 Bible studies that aim to heal post-abortion trauma. The men are urged to
 think of themselves as fathers, to name -- and ask forgiveness from --
 the children they might have raised, had their partners not aborted.

 At one retreat, the men are told to picture their sons and daughters
 dancing in a sunny meadow at the feet of Jesus Christ.

 "They draw in men who may have a little ambivalence, possibly a little
 guilt, and they exacerbate those feelings," Shostak said.

 Chris Aubert, a Houston lawyer, felt only indifference in 1985 when a
 girlfriend told him she was pregnant and planned on an abortion. When she
 asked if he wanted to come to the clinic, he said he couldn't; he played
 softball on Saturdays. He stuck a check for $200 in her door and never
 talked to her again.

 Aubert, 50, was equally untroubled when another girlfriend had an
 abortion in 1991. "It was a complete irrelevancy," he said. But years
 later, Aubert felt a rising sense of unease. He and his wife were cooing
 at an ultrasound of their first baby when it struck him -- "from the
 depths of my belly," he said -- that abortion was wrong.

 Aubert has since converted to Catholicism. He and his wife have five
 children, and they sometimes protest in front of abortion clinics. Every
 now and then, though, Aubert wonders: What if his first girlfriend had
 not aborted? How would his life look different?

 He might have endured a loveless marriage and, perhaps, a sad divorce. He
 might have been saddled with child support as he tried to build his legal
 practice. He might never have met his wife. Their children -- Christine,
 Kyle, Roch, Paul, Vance -- might not exist.

 "I wouldn't have the blessings I have now," Aubert said. So in a way, he
 said, the two abortions may have cleared his path to future happiness.

 "That's an intellectual debate I have with myself," he said. "I struggle
 with it."

 In the end, Aubert says his moral objection to abortion always wins. If
 he could go back in time, he would try to save the babies.

 But would his long-ago girlfriends agree? Or might they also consider the
 abortions a choice that set them on a better path?

 Aubert looks startled. "I never really thought about it for the woman,"
 he says slowly.

 "On one level, yes, maybe she got an education, married a great guy, has
 six kids and everything's wonderful now," he said. But he can't believe
 it could really be that uncomplicated. "It might bother her once every 20
 years or once every five years, or every day, but there's a scar."

 He has not talked with either of the ex-girlfriends, but he says he can
 imagine what they feel because he knows how the abortions affected him.
 He never had the nightmares that other men describe, or the crying jags,
 the drug abuse, the self-loathing. Yet he knows he has been tarnished.

 "I have this stain on my soul," Aubert said, "and it will always be
 there."

 He hopes to organize a father's section at this month's march in
 Washington protesting the 35th anniversary of Roe vs. Wade, the Supreme
 Court ruling that legalized abortion.

 Aubert pictures men by the hundreds praying, chanting -- and waving
 signs: "I regret my abortion."

 stephanie.simon at latimes.com


------------------------------------------------------------------------

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