Vicki Thorn of NOPARH and the Knights of Columbus hosted a conference on men and abortion in San Francisco this week..have not gotten all the details but I hear did was great and it was even covered in the news!
We have been doing a mens ministry in "Entering Canaan" for 3 years now. It has been awesome and such a great grace to see men stepping forward to reclaim their fatherhood. The messages they have been given over the years are so confusing, but the time has come for them to speak out…and they are…praise God!
Local
SAN FRANCISCO –
Experts
and therapists attending a conference in The City this week,
co-sponsored by the Archdiocese of San Francisco, say men who have been
traumatized by abortion have few places to turn to be healed.
Titled “Reclaiming Fatherhood,” the two-day event has been touted by organizers as the first of its kind in the country.
Little research has been conducted exploring the effect of abortions on men, conference organizers say.
“We
have been concerned with many aspects of the abortion issue,” said
Supreme Knight Carl Anderson of the Knights of Columbus, a Catholic
men’s association that co-sponsored the conference. “Men have been
overlooked for a very long time.”
Anderson said he hopes the
conference will help men who have been hurt by abortion, and that it
will give people “a greater insight into the reality of abortion.”
Vicki
Thorn said she has counseled women traumatized by abortion since the
1980s, when she founded the Milwaukee-based Office of Post-Abortion
Reconciliation, a Christian group that helped organize the event.
Men
can be traumatized, sometimes years later, if they pressure a woman to
have an abortion, according to Thorn, or if they discover or suspect
that their partner had an abortion.
“They can be angry; they can be mad; they can have a sense of male impotence,” Thorn said.
Family
psychologist Dr. Vincent Rue, who serves as an expert witness and
consultant in legal cases that involve abortion, will speak during the
conference.
Rue said he has treated men who suffered “debilitating” grief, avoidance, denial and hyperarousal because of abortions.
A
Planned Parenthood Golden Gate spokeswoman said abortion alone doesn’t
cause long-term grief. “If there is any long-term emotional impact,
then there are other emotional issues at play,” Amy Moy said.
Conference
organizers say they want to keep the event apolitical. “If there’s pain
out there, there’s no reason that it shouldn’t be discussed,” Knights
of Columbus spokesman Andrew Walther said. “There’s no reason that it
shouldn’t be healed.”
The two-day conference starts this morning
at St. Mary’s Cathedral in San Francisco. Around 120 people from 26
states and a handful of countries have registered to attend the
conference, according to Walther.
Around 1.3 million American
women had an abortion in 2003, according to data compiled last year by
researchers at the Guttmacher Institute, a nonprofit sexual health
group.
Examiner
Reclaiming Our Children: A Blog About Healing After Abortion 
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