8mm
Posted on 01/21/2008 4:07:46 PM PST by wagglebee
Washington, DC (LifeNews.com) -- As Americans mourn 35 years of legalized abortion, some of the men and women involved in abortion decisions say the pain and regret from the abortion has prompted them to become strongly pro-life. These post-abortive men and women are the face of not only the pro-life movement but of the problems abortion causes.
Matt Barber, the director of policy and cultural issues for Concerned Women of America told LifeNews.com about his personal account of how abortion affects men.
"Abortion doesn't only hurt women and kill children; it can also deeply wound the men it touches," he says. "I'm sad to say that I know this from personal experience."
"Along with the realization that a woman has chosen to end the life you helped to create, comes a profound sense of loss and guilt," he explains.
Barber talks about the kinds of daydreams he has about the baby who could have been -- and recounts experiences similar to women who terribly regret their abortions.
"I can't know for sure, but I sometimes imagine my first child was a girl," he said. Today she would have been about 22 years-old, finishing college, and, I suspect, ready to take on the world."
"Perhaps I'd be walking her down the aisle soon. I can't know. I'll never know. Only God knows. My child was torn from this world before anyone could know," he concludes.
Max Baker, 44, also talked about the pain after an abortion in which he was involved in the decision.
"The shame and the guilt, I guess is the way that I dealt with it," Baker told CBN News. "Don't talk about it. We don't talk about it. We don't bring it up, but the shame was always there."
Baker and his wife Judy had an abortion before they got married. They say it's the worst decision they ever made.
"When I laid down on that table, I knew it was wrong," Judy told CBN.
"I knew that I was making the wrong decision. I felt horrendous pain after the procedure. It was very painful," she said. "Then they put you in a room in a recliner and you sit there by yourself and you contemplate what you've just done for the next hour and a half until they allow you to go home."
Today, post-abortion groups across the nation hold retreats, Bible studies and group and individual counseling sessions to help men, women and couples like the Bakers.
Such sessions didn't exist in the same numbers or receive as much attention even a decade ago and people like the Bakers and Matt Barber have emerged as top pro-life spokespeople and are helping the next generation of Americans avoid abortions.
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The advice I got to create a MySpace page for a song called “A Dream A Lot Like Mine” allows me to post a simple link where people can just click and hear it
http://myspace.com/emmettgrayson It deals only with the matters of the heart. It may be helpful. I hope so.
Friend quit her nurse practitioner job at the local after the abortion clinic because she could no longer handle the psychological effects of abortions that teenagers and women suffered. It’s post traumatic stress syndrome to the max for the teens, women and their caregivers.
This is the cornerstone issue of the Democrat party, and they’ll be the first people to tell you they do everything “for the children”. They are disgusting.
How can you do ANYTHING “for the children” when you’ve stood by and cheered while over 50 MILLION children are murdered?
Interesting to hear about this from the male perspective. It’s unfortunate that more time and effort is not spent in dealing with the male-as-facilitator side of infanticide. Frankly, I think they have a lot more say in what goes on then those who frame the debate would suggest.
Yes, there are circumstances where the sperm donor doesn’t know what happened until after the fact. But I wonder how many infanticides would be prevented if there was more of a shunning process toward younger men who “allow” their children to be terminated. Peer pressure isn’t always a bad thing.
God bless you. That takes courage.
Thank you so much for listening. I plug the song at every opportunity because I believe in it. And I believes it represents what a lot of folks feel but don’t know how to say. If you have friends who might like it, I hope you’ll share it with them. I’ve been told that it will be included in the “multi-media” links of another website which deal with this grief issue. I don’t want to name the site just yet because it hasn’t happened quite yet.
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