Abortion and the MEN haunted by regret...
We all know women can be left traumatised for years after a termination. But there’s another side to the story no one’s talked about – until now
THIS Father’s Day, Tony Perry was the proud recipient of two lovingly homemade cards. Inside one, depicting hands in the shape of a heart, his dinosaur-obsessed four-year-old son had painstakingly scrawled: ‘I love my dad because he takes me to the museum.’
Meanwhile, his two-year-old daughter produced a card bearing her handprints, with the message: ‘You are the best dad hands down.’ As a doting father, Tony will always treasure these mementoes from his young children.
At the back of his mind, however, is a nagging thought that continues to ache like an old wound.
He could — should — have received three cards on Sunday, one from a much older child. For when he was in his 20s, Tony’s then-girlfriend had an abortion. While he respected her decision, it was not the outcome he’d hoped for. It’s an event he still lives with today.
‘It left deep scars,’ he admits. ‘There’s always a shadow in the background. The other way to put it is that it’s like wearing a backpack — most days, you’re simply aware it’s there, but on other days, it feels like an extra weight pulling you down.’
This year marks the 50th anniversary of the 1967 Abortion Act that legalised abortion in Great Britain (but not Northern Ireland).
It’s thought there are now around 200,000 legal abortions in Britain every year, and it’s estimated that as many as one in three women will have a termination
at some point in their lives. Understandably, debate over abortion is usually focused on the woman and what’s happening in her body.
It’s well documented that many experience guilt and trauma for the rest of their lives.
What’s often overlooked, however, is the impact on the men involved.
While many are kept in the dark, it’s thought around half of women actually have a long-term partner at the time of termination.
Legally, these men have no say in the decision and their feelings are rarely acknowledged.
Yet it seems that many, like Tony, are left yearning for what might have been.
CHARLIE Conner is one of the organisers of rachel’s Vineyard, an organisation that runs weekend retreats in the UK and abroad to help men and women come to terms with post-abortion trauma.
‘For every aborted child, there’s a father — and you don’t have to be a mathematician to see that we have a huge hidden problem here,’ says Charlie.
Margaret Cuthill, former national co-ordinator for the abortion recovery Care and helpline, an organisation that supports people post-abortion, says 10 per cent of its calls are from men.
often, they’re questioning why they didn’t protect their child or give their partner more support when the choice to terminate the pregnancy was being made.
‘This is particularly evident as men reach their mid-40s and look back on their lives, questioning what they did or didn’t do, especially if they never had children,’ says Margaret.
‘If their only child was aborted, it can be heart-breaking.’
That certainly chimes with Tony, a 39-year-old programme manager for the nhS who lives in Berkshire.
While not completely against abortion, he says he ‘leans towards life’, and it was something he discussed with his girlfriend soon after they met through an online dating site.
‘She said that if she’d got pregnant when she was 16, then she would have had an abortion, but now she was older, she would keep the baby,’ he recalls.
‘I agreed I would want to keep any baby.’
a month later, Jenny, who had been taking the Pill, revealed she was feeling dizzy and nauseous. a pregnancy test confirmed that she was indeed expecting.
But instead of making plans to bring a baby into the world, Jenny told Tony she was going to have a termination.
‘My mind was all over the place,’ he recalls. ‘You are experiencing such conflicting thoughts and emotions.
‘on one hand, you’re trying to get your head round the fact you’re going to be a dad when you didn’t plan to be and preparing to be emotionally connected to this child.
‘on the other, you’ve got to disconnect, because there might never be a baby.’
Tony attempted to persuade Jenny to change her mind, but she remained resolute and eventually admitted that she did not love him enough to go ahead with the pregnancy.
although devastated, Tony showed his support and accompanied Jenny to her GP and then to her first appointment at the abortion clinic, where, like most men, he sat in a waiting room while the discussions went on behind closed doors.
On The day of the abortion, Jenny took her mother for moral support. ‘I went to see her afterwards at home to check she was all right, but our relationship never recovered,’ says Tony.
Tony saw a counsellor soon after to help him deal with his grief and anger, but many men either never seek help or only do so years later.
‘It’s natural that there is guilt and shame — a mourning process is meant to happen,’ says Charlie Conner. ‘But because there isn’t a grave or funeral service, grief may not express itself until years later.’
he adds: ‘Guilt will be greater if the man was the driving force in the abortion.
‘even if they are not religious, they can feel punished when there are other difficulties in their lives.
‘If they have other children, there can be the fear something will happen to them as a result of what they did.’ according to therapists, men may experience a number of mental health issues that can be traced back to a termination and, sometimes, these don’t present for years.
They can range from a decreased libido to anger and depression, and even alcohol and drug abuse.
Psychosexual therapist Denise Knowles says: ‘They can become depressed, very angry and extraordinarily upset. There’s a whole range of emotions and, sometimes, a little bit of shame and disgust can get mixed in there, too.’
Carl Miller, 50, admits the guilt that he feels over his former girlfriend’s abortion when he was a young man has never left him.
‘If something bad happens, then I feel I’m being punished for coercing my girlfriend to abort the baby she wanted,’ he admits.
‘But I was just very young at
the time — I didn’t realise it would be my only child.’
Carl, from Wales, adds: ‘I was a virgin when we met. But we had a passionate love life and, as Jayne was on the Pill, I naively thought birth control was all taken care of.’
Then, after they had been together a number of months, Jayne suddenly announced that she was pregnant.
‘I told her: “I’m too young for this!” My career was taking off and I wanted to do things that having a baby would make difficult,’ says Carl.
He also had a niggling feeling she’d tricked him into her getting pregnant. When he confronted Jayne, she admitted she’d stopped taking the Pill.
A furious Carl insisted that she had an abortion.
‘This was the last thing Jayne wanted, and there were tears from both of us as we wrestled with the decision,’ he recalls.
‘Eventually, she agreed I was too young to be a father and apologised for deceiving me. We arranged an abortion together and I went with her to a private clinic for the termination at around 11 weeks.
‘As I waited for her, I thought: “Am I forcing her to do this? Will I regret it?” ’
Not long after, the couple split up. Carl came out as gay some years afterwards and realised he had missed out on his only chance of fatherhood.
‘I’m in a civil partnership and I find myself a proud grandad to the three offspring of my partner’s two grown-up children,’ he says.
‘I absolutely adore them, and this heightens my guilt over the abortion, as I wonder what my child would have been like. I’ve always felt I would have had a daughter, which I’d have loved now, and becoming a father would have been life-changing. ‘But it’s only as time has passed that I appreciate the enormity of what happened and what I lost.’ Paul O’Callaghan, 47, can identify with this. It’s only since watching his brothers and best friend become fathers, and seeing the joy children have brought them, that he’s wondered what might have been. Some 15 years after he says he pressured a casual girlfriend into having an abortion, he remains single and childless.
HE WAS busy packing up his flat, preparing to move to a new job, when he received a text from Charlotte, a woman he’d enjoyed a brief romantic relationship with, informing him she was pregnant.
Though Paul admits that he and Charlotte were not always meticulous about using contraception, he was still shocked to hear of the pregnancy.
‘We’d only dated for seven weeks and Charlotte knew that I was not looking for a serious relationship,’ says Paul, a social club manager from North London.
‘I felt so stupid to be in this situation. I was furious with myself for being so careless. I was a grown man — not a feckless teenager. But I knew straight away that I did not want the pregnancy to continue, despite the fact Charlotte was in her late 30s and had never had a child.
‘Maybe it would have been different if I’d known her longer, but I wasn’t ready to have a baby with her.’ Paul says that Charlotte loved children, and he knew her chances of becoming a mother were starting to decline.
Still, when they met to discuss the baby, he told her it was impossible for him to have a child.
‘She agreed to go along with whatever I thought was best, but I could see the sorrow on her face and I felt terrible,’ he recalls.
‘I knew she hoped I’d tell her to keep the baby and we’d make a go of it. But for me, abortion felt like the only choice.’
Paul accompanied Charlotte to a private clinic a week later to arrange a termination.
While they were there, she was ushered into a room for a scan and emerged in floods of tears, announcing that she’d seen the baby.
‘I put my arms around her, but my reasons for not wanting a child were still the same,’ says Paul. ‘Charlotte had the abortion a week later, at nine weeks. I wasn’t proud of it, but I was relieved that I could move on.’
Paul never saw Charlotte again and, while he didn’t dwell on the abortion in the immediate aftermath, after around five years his attitude towards having a family began to change as he saw those around him start to have children.
‘There are bittersweet moments when I see men with their children and think: “That could have been me”,’ he says. ‘I do feel guilty about what happened.
‘I do wonder if she ever became a mum later in life, and I hope she did. Otherwise, it means her only child was aborted and, while I may never have a child, either, I’d hate to think that I deprived her of motherhood and caused her lasting pain.’
Professor Arthur Shostak, emeritus professor of sociology at Drexel University in Philadelphia in the U.S., has extensively interviewed men whose partners have had an abortion, and estimates that around 90 per cent of the men find it one of the most stressful experiences of their life, while around 9 per cent never get over it.
He says that men want — need — the opportunity to discuss their experience at the time and an outlet for any emotional turmoil.
Some remain acutely aware of the lost child, and the age they would have been had the pregnancy progressed to full term — sometimes to the extent that they continue to mark the day of the abortion. Tony says that while he tries not to dwell too deeply on what his child would have been doing now, every year he feels a sadness in November, when the abortion took place. ‘There are still parts of the city I avoid, for example, near the abortion clinic, because I get flashbacks,’ he says. ‘The only good to have come from it was that when I met my now wife, I was very open about the abortion and my determination not to go through the experience again.
‘Talking about it helped us to clarify what we both wanted and forge a strong relationship based on honesty.’
Society may be acutely aware how deeply abortion affects women, but it seems there are many men who would benefit from having their feelings recognised, too. Some names have been changed. For post-abortion help and support, visit archtrust.org.uk and rachelsvineyard.org.uk A Father’s Choice by Tony Perry (£4.99, amazon.co.uk). It’s my Baby Too — a BBC radio 4 show about how men are affected by abortion — is now available on iPlayer.