{"id":210239,"date":"2019-09-10T16:15:33","date_gmt":"2019-09-10T21:15:33","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.liveaction.org\/news\/?p=210239"},"modified":"2019-09-10T15:55:28","modified_gmt":"2019-09-10T20:55:28","slug":"bbc-mens-abortion-regret-day-32-years","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archive.liveaction.org\/news\/bbc-mens-abortion-regret-day-32-years\/","title":{"rendered":"BBC shines light on men’s abortion regret: ‘I’ve thought about it every day for 32 years’"},"content":{"rendered":"
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For most people, abortion<\/a> is seen strictly as a women’s issue. But while women can suffer grief and trauma from abortion, men can as well — yet their voices are often left out of the conversation. How does abortion affect fathers? A BBC article sought to examine just that.<\/p>\n

Calling it “The men who feel left out of US abortion debate,”<\/a> the BBC interviewed several men whose children died in abortion. For them, it was a horrible experience that changed them forever. “I was in my 30s living the good single life in Dallas,” Karl Locker recounted. When he found out a girlfriend of his was pregnant, he said he felt like “one of those wolves with its leg caught in a trap.” Still, he said he tried to do the right thing. “I tried everything, I offered to marry her, to take the baby myself, or to offer it up for adoption,” he said. “She said she could never give her child up for adoption – it didn’t make cognitive sense.”<\/p>\n

Though Locker gave her his support, driving her to the abortion facility, the knowledge of what he had done haunted him. “I didn’t know how I was going to survive; I wasn’t going to jump off a bridge, but I probably would have drank myself to death,” he said. “I’ve thought about what happened every day for the last 32 years.”<\/p>\n

READ:\u00a0Fathers explain their abortion regret: \u2018I have never been the same since\u2019<\/a><\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

Chuck Raymond said his girlfriend had an abortion in the 1970s when she was 18. “Men are meant to be protectors, so there is a sense of failure – failing to protect the mother and the unborn child, failing to be responsible,” he said. “There is incredible guilt and shame about having not done that.” Originally, he had felt a pregnancy would interfere with his plans to attend West Point military academy, which does not allow cadets who are married or raising children. But the trauma eventually resurfaced. “Once I was involved in training, I got caught up in everything and suppressed the event, keeping it out of my consciousness. Years later though, I realised that a tragedy had occurred, and we had made a tragic choice,” he explained, comparing it to post-traumatic stress disorder.<\/p>\n