Helping Men Reduce Abortion's Toll
Arthur B. Shostak, Ph.D.
Drexel University Philadelphia, PA 19104
1994
If I asked
you who might have written this sentence -I have not been the same since
having been involved in an abortion- you would probably guess a female.
Were I to press the matter you might imagine she was single and white
(as is true of 68 and 83 percent of abortion seekers).1
You would
probably not guess the thought might also be that of a male The words,
in fact, are mine... based on an abortion experience I shared nearly
20 years ago... and on a quarter-century since of research, interviews,
and reflection about the post-abortion lives of over 20,000,000 post-Roe
males like myself.
Understanding
here requires us to get beyond a very skewed perception of the matter:
Ordinary conversation and the media would have us continue to believe
abortion is exclusively of interest to women. It is discussed only as
a woman's problem. Men are invisible, or at most, bit players with minor
stock roles (medical providers, anti-abortion barricade zealots, forked-tongue
politicians, etc.)
The fact that
as sex partners they contribute half the chromosomes to a conception,
and may now be the sole confidant and supporter of a potential abortion
clinic client is dismissed as insignificant. After all, as the Roe decision
held in 1973, and as has recently been re-affirmed in the 1993 Casey
Decision, only the female, in consultation with her doctor, ultimately
decides the course of her pregnancy: Her male sex partner has only the
role she decides to grant him. Men essentially fall off the screen,
and society blithely assumes no harm has been done.
No harm? Over
half (56 percent) of the pregnancies in this modern country are unintended!
Forty percent of all pregnancies among married women are unintended!
How can we miss the connection between our dismissal of male responsibility
in conception and the fact that during the last decade, while 50 leading
nations lowered their birth record, the proportion of unintended pregnancies
in the United States actually increased?!2
Every year
the nation's 400 or so abortion clinics have about half of their 1,500,000
female clients accompanied by their sex partners. Those 70 percent or
so among the over 750,000 males who wish to offer love and comfort during
the 15-minute abortion procedure are commonly barred from doing so.
Those 90 percent or so who wish to offer comfort during the hour-long
post-procedure recovery period are commonly told no. Those who would
have profited from birth-control lessons (100 percent!) during their
three-hour wait are commonly left only to fret.3
Knowing nothing
more about how to prevent conception on leaving the clinic than they
did on entering, as many as 25 percent of waiting room males show up
there again, and again... as do over a third of the female clients.4
ncredibly, one of the most strategic opportunities imaginable to reach
males with birth control education, a three-hour captive audience of
self-recriminating and often remorseful males, goes entirely to waste.
Abortion clinics
are not alone in mistreating the male half of a sexually-active couple.
There is blame enough to share with several other components of our
sexually-repressed society; e.g., hardly any fathers help their sons
consider what manhood means in an abortion experience. School curricula
specialists generally turn away, as do uneasy social studies and even
-Bachelor Life- and Sex Education teachers. Most clergy and rabbis leave
the topic out of their youth education efforts. TV and the press shun,
sensationalize, or trivialize the matter. State lawmakers twist the
subject cruelly, as through passage of mean-spirited spousal consent
laws. Both the Men's movement and the Women's movement assign so low
a priority to this matter as to render it near invisible.
Constructive
responses will elude us until we recognize the indispensability of bringing
males in from the cold, of helping them take an equal share of responsibility
for contraception, and an honest, though tough decidedly deferential
part in resolving the fate of an ill-timed and unwanted pregnancy.
Talk of which
immediately sparks questions about power and dominance, about whether
the female or male will decide the course of a pregnancy If we are going
to encourage males to speak up, won't many insist on having the last
word? Isn't there a danger many females will be bullied or even terrorized
into agreeing with their male sex partner, at a great loss to the idea
of -my body, my choice-?
As harrowing
as is this Handmaid's Tale scenario, it should energize pro-active reforms
rather than provide excuses for the status quo. Male extortion can be
substantially reduced, if not eliminated all together, if we make a
concerted effort to help boys learn a new male script, one that emphasizes
the absolute right of every individual to control questions their own
body, health, and conscience. At the same time, this script should teach
a related responsibility intimate parties have to take chances with
one another, to earn trust and build confidence in each other.
Instead of
allowing males to fall off the screen, society must begin to expect
more of them. They will never really grow up if thought too problematic,
too immature, or worse yet, too volatile to participate fully in the
abortion experience (even as males were once kept from serving as labor
coaches in the birth experience). Boys will find it harder than necessary
to become the men they can if significant others continue to expect
far too little of them.
It is not
very difficult to imagine what reforms are overdue: For openers, more
could be done with TV after-school sociodramas to heighten consciousness
and provide role models. A concerted effort could be made to include
the subject in junior high and high school life preparation courses.
Clergy could be urged to explore the subject with teens, and even touch
on it in sermons, the better to help fathers and single mothers mull
over their part. Athletic coaches, scout leaders, and others with special
contact with impressionable males could offer counsel, as could youth
gang workers, social workers, and the like. Above all, abortion clinics
could offer birth control classes and an "abortion coach" role, a reform
that in a very few years might reduce by half the hundreds of thousands
of repeaters now marking time uselessly in clinic waiting rooms.
While I believe
my lover and I chose the least-worst of the options available to us
over two decades ago, I have lingering regrets about the situation.
Counseling was available for females; none for any of us waiting room
males. They were told about their contraceptive options; we were ignored.
They learned about the emotional roller-coaster they might experience;
we were left in the dark. We arrived as a couple, and were immediately
forced apart: We left as a couple, though none the better for that,
thanks to the refusal of the clinic to attach any value to our status
as a twosome.
Twenty or
so years ago clinics operated as if waiting-room males did not matter.
Our fathers were mute. As were our schools. And organized religion.
And the media. And the Woman's movement. Today, clinics still operate
as if males do not matter, and the ranks of the mute now include even
the new Men's Movement.
This is no
way to reduce the number and toll of abortions. As we struggle to decide
what kind of abortion scene America does or does not want, we owe it
to those in the procedure and waiting rooms alike to beckon anew to
males. It is time to adopt a pro-couple approach to the abortion challenge,
one that can help clinic users grow in insights , empathy, and responsibility
from an experience from which they are never quite the same.
Footnotes
-
The Alan Guttmacher Institute, as reported in -Number of Abortions Steady.- USA Today, April 17, 1992; 10-A.
-
Karen Heller, -Out of Control,- Philadelphia Inquirer Magazine, February 21, 1993; 18, 20.
-
Arthur B. Shostak, Gary McLouth, Lynn Seng, Men and Abortion: Lessons, Losses, and Love, N.Y.: Praeger, 1984.
-
Arthur B. Shostak, -The Future of Abortion: Ten Cautious Forecasts-, The Futurist, September-October 1991.
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