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Scurry on over to The Nation and read Prospect alum Sarah Blustain's excellent feature story on male "post abortion syndrome" -- a new religious right push to use junk science and medicine to portray not only fetuses, and not only women, but also men as the "victims" of abortion. The movement is convening conferences and support groups where men get together to talk through feelings of grief, depression, anxiety, and anger they felt after a partner's abortion. But as Sarah writes, the one feature all these narratives have in common is psychological trauma before the unexpected pregnancy and abortion ever took place. Indeed, doctors say the best indicator of how an individual will feel after an abortion is how she or he felt before it. Consider this anecdote from the "Reclaiming Fatherhood" conference, hosted by the archdiocese of San Francisco in July:
The first four speakers were all "post-abortive men," and they had all had a hard row to hoe. One of them was Jason Baier, now head of the Fatherhood Forever Foundation, who gave a heartfelt biography of his pre- and post-abortion life: his secular Catholic upbringing, his parents' divorce, his "very low self-esteem." He told of joining the Air Force, going wild, drinking a bottle of Jack Daniel's every night and having sex with anyone who would. When his girlfriend got pregnant, he said, "I did everything I could to plead with her not to have the abortion." He said he offered to raise the child himself, but she aborted anyway. A nervous breakdown followed, then violent fighting with and separation from his girlfriend, diagnosis of severe depression and psychosis, cocaine and marijuana use and, nearly, a suicide. All, he told the group, because of "what I had lost."Is it possible Baier's girlfriend chose abortion, at least in part, because her partner was a cheating alcoholic? What kind of father would Baier have made at that point in his life? It's positive, at least, that this movement helps some men own up to their own bad behavior. But by channeling feelings of guilt and sadness into a reductive opposition to reproductive freedom, the men ultimately fail to accept responsibility for their actions. Instead, they transfer the burden of sex wholly onto women, whose choices they seek to constrain.--Dana Goldstein
