Reclaiming Our Children: A Blog About Healing After Abortion

Thanks to Gerard Nadal at "Coming Home" http://gerardnadal.com/ for this article

Abortion Pain is Gender-Blind

by Vicki Thorn 

Men quietly sit in abortion clinic waiting rooms, or they pace around mulling over their decision. Or they don’t go at all. They wait.

More and more people are becoming aware that men are not stoically unaffected by a woman’s choice to keep or abort a child. In fact, these men, who are often in the background as a women chooses to have an abortion or not, experience a sort of collateral damage.

Weeks ago this issue again made its way into the media. The St. Louis River Front Times published an article September 8 that interwove the stories of several fathers who were clearly changed by an abortion. The article, however, also implied that pro-life activists somehow invented the problem that men suffer after abortions.

The article mentioned a sociologist at Drexel University, Arthur Shostak, Ph.D., who wrote the book “Men and Abortion: Lessons, Losses, and Love” in 1984. Shostak’s book was the first of its kind to  describe the experience of men in the abortion clinic. Unfortunately, no one knew what to do with what he shared. Had we listened, perhaps this abortion issue would have unfolded differently.

Dr. Shostak continued this research, and in 1994 wrote an essay that examined the fact that men were made invisible in the process of an abortion. He wrote, “Counseling was available for females; none for any of us waiting room males. They were told about their contraceptive options; we were ignored. They learned about the emotional rollercoaster they might experience; we were left in the dark. We arrived as a couple, and were immediately forced apart: We left as a couple, though none the better for that, thanks to the refusal of the clinic to attach any value to our status as a twosome.”

In 1999, Catherine Coyle, Ph.D. wrote a second book titled Men and Abortion: A Path to Healing that called attention to this issue, and addressed the healing that men need after an abortion.

read the rest here:

http://www.headlinebistro.com/hb/en/columnists/thorn/092410.html