On the Impact of Abortion on The Parents

Fascinating--I'm not sure all of the science points in quite the directions she indicates, but it all still merits thinking about:

...Early in the pro-life movement, no one knew much about the aftermath of abortion in women. It took me seven years to find enough knowledgeable people to sponsor the first Project Rachel training.

No one even considered the impact on men, with the exception of a sociologist who wrote a book on men and abortion the same year that Project Rachel began. No one paid much attention. Now we are aware that for every woman who has an abortion, there is a man involved who may also be suffering. The terminology of Post-Abortion Syndrome is everywhere. Two conferences on men dealing with abortion have begun new discussions, and they received national media attention.

Science has advanced, and now we know that there are medical consequences and psychological issues that follow abortion. We know that women carry cells from every child they conceive (microchimerism), and so an abortion is not comparable to an appendectomy. Motherhood is incurable, if you will. Now we know that these cells are passed on to subsequent children during pregnancy, and that explains why some people know in what seems an intuitive fashion that there are people missing in their families. Their biology tells them so.

We assumed that men were bystanders in pregnancy, solely there to impregnate. Now we know that as many as 60 to 80 percent of men will have symptoms of pregnancy with the mother of their child, if they are present. (Primitive cultures have recognized this for a very long time. The phenomena is called couvade.) And now we know that men undergo hormonal changes during the last weeks of pregnancy that permanently hardwire them for fatherhood. A father’s testosterone, which drops a great deal during this time, never returns to its pre-pregnancy heights. Abortion is never a “non-event”!

It is critical for us to recognize that in these years the abortion toll in this country has approached or exceeded 50 million – 50 million dead, and multitudes more wounded. We all know someone who has had an abortion, whether we know it or not...