Let’s Talk About Male Abortion Trauma And Pro-Choice Policies
Let’s Talk About Male Abortion Trauma And Pro-Choice Policies
“I felt like my future got ripped out with that fetus.”
Lately, I’ve started to notice a pattern about men who are anti-choice in my circles. For the most part, the vast majority of the men I speak to are pro-choice, either because they are childfree or because they realize it’s ultimately the birthing person’s body choice.
But, I’d be lying if I said that I didn’t know at least a handful of men who were anti-choice. I don’t talk to them much, but I do overhear what they said. Such was the case with Biffo*.
Biffo was a guy in the rock industry who was fairly popular. I was surprised to hear it, but he’s actually a conservative voter. Moreover, he was not as pro-choice as one would think he’d be for a guy who’s hit it with over a hundred women.
I found out why Biffo was anti-choice, and it wasn’t Christianity.
Biffo had a girlfriend at one point. She got pregnant, he was elated, he prepared to marry her, but she was in school and decided to abort. She wanted to focus on becoming a doctor, which she later accomplished.
This actually traumatized him. From what I heard, he wasn’t okay for a good six months. As I heard him tell my friend, “I felt like my future got ripped out with that fetus.”
He used to be pro-choice up until then. He broke up with her, then became pretty vehemently anti-choice. He never quite was the same after that breakup.
I was shocked to hear this until my husband clued me in: this kind of reaction is a lot more common than we as a society want to admit.
This brings me to an important point.
Most of the time, the fight for a woman’s right to choose is focused on women — as it should be. However, there’s something to be said about talking about how abortion affects men.
A lot of men really do want to become fathers for one reason or another. Sometimes, those reasons are altruistic. They want a kid to take care of, and they want that loving family unit.
Other times, it’s because they want to baby-trap a woman. (Sorry, guys, women are very well aware that men can do reproductive coercion as well. For the sake of this article, I won’t bother with talking about them.)
Men tend to get attached to the idea of having an unborn child. It’s not unusual to hear dads gushing about having a kid, fantasizing about playing catch with their sons, or working on a new nursery for their kids.
I know it’s weird to hear, especially if you’re a woman who had a guy ditch them post-pregnancy announcement. However, it’s a legit thing. Guys get very emotional when they find out their significant other is pregnant.
Those first couple of months with a pregnant woman get a lot of men’s hopes up in a way that’s hard to explain. They see this white picket fence, life on easy street, and a future that reminds them of a past that never existed.
Men often forget what a huge toll pregnancy takes on a woman and her future.
For men, particularly men who don’t really think about their partner’s needs or desires, it’s easy to get caught up in the whirlwind of the fantasy of having a kid. They tend to forget that:
Women’s bodies permanently change during pregnancy.
Women can die during childbirth.
Taking care of a kid is not easy, nor is it always going to be doable for the woman.
Having a kid might make the woman in question miserable and force her to give up on her dreams.
Forcing a woman to carry your child will likely doom your relationship, leaving you to be a single parent.
An unwanted, regretted, or uncared-for child is not going to make your life better.
You don’t get to control what your child turns out like — and there’s a decent chance you might not like what your kid turns out to be.
The average cost of having a kid has ballooned to over $500,000 over the course of 18 years, and it’s expected to continue to grow.
Simply put, you and your partner might not be in the right place or time to have a kid. It’s foolish to assume that “God will provide,” and even more foolish to think that pushing for a child your partner doesn’t want will save a relationship.
Though I can remind men that it’s a woman’s choice and that having a baby doesn’t always turn out well, that doesn’t remove the sting of hearing that you lost that future you thought you were going to have.
Going anti-choice can be a trauma reaction, and maybe it’s time to address it as such.
When you feel like you’ve had something taken from you, it’s normal to want that to never happen to someone else again. That’s likely why a lot of men who experienced their partners getting abortions become anti-choice.
They’re still hurting from a future that never came to be. And unfortunately, we live in a society that tells men to just “suck it up” because it’s the woman’s choice — never giving them an opportunity to grieve and feel validated.
I mean, it’s not a future that would have been tenable in most cases. In most cases, the woman is right to choose to terminate a pregnancy, especially if the relationship is going bad or if she doesn’t want a kid. Even so, it still can hurt, you know?
There should be pro-choice groups offering counseling for men and women who had abortion-related trauma.
It can be extremely hard to make a decision that benefits society when you have your emotions screaming at you. That’s why it might be time to talk about the trauma that men can have when their wives have an abortion.
I mean, we can’t really expect men to want to side with women when they’re hurting, and no one pays attention to them. They feel hurt, and their feelings are valid.
So far, most of the therapy groups that discuss abortion-related trauma are pro-life. I’d go so far as to say that these groups have been a major driving for in the indoctrination of hurt men at risk of radicalization.
Anti-choice “support” groups like this validate men’s feelings, but they also encourage men to invalidate women’s feelings. They work by weaponizing trauma they claim to help men heal from.
The men never heal. They’re just taught to lean into the hurt and anger they feel, channeling it into slut-shaming, controlling behavior, and toxic spirituality.
The pro-choice movement has patently ignored their trauma. Is it any shock, then, that so many men end up turning anti-choice after their partners have an abortion?
If the pro-choice movement is ever going to take men by storm, we have to actually help them feel supported as well. Maybe it’s time pro-choice support groups start stepping up their support of men.
A lot of therapy can help overcome this type of anti-choice reactionary trauma. It can help guys realize that they may have a right to feel upset, but that doesn’t give them the right to demand women hand over rights to their bodies.
The modern anti-feminist movement gains followers when hurt men want control.
The solution to this might be more simple than we’ve been thinking. We’ve been witnessing an extreme rise in male radicalization, often caused by men who feel like they’re being pushed out or replaced in society.
Maybe it’s time we actually take a cue from the groups trying to radicalize them and give them a way to direct their anger into something. Just, you know, make it a healing force rather than a destructive one.
It’s a thought.
Men should have the right to their trauma. And women should have the right to abortion. Seems simple to me.
In the story about the man whose girlfriend had an abortion. I wonder, did the man agree that when his child was born he would take the child into his custody and take care of the child for the rest of his life and not bother the birth mother with caring for the child??? I remember a situation where a man actually did this and his girlfriend who was going to get an abortion decided not to and gave the man his child when she was born. The mother never had anything else to do with the child. The problem is that the father usually wants nothing to do with the child that He MADE (It takes two people to make a child), he wants the mother to take full care of the child and the father is just going to live his life as he pleases. If a father wants to take full responsibilty for a child he helped create then the the mother will gladly have the child and give him or her the father. I ONLY KNOW OF ONE CASE WHERE THE FATHER TOOK RESPONSIBLITY FOR THE CHILD AND THERE WAS NO ABORTION. There did not need to be, but again this NEVER happens. Men want women to take all the responsibility and share none of it even though every child by nature has to have a father.