What I desperately want post-abortive fathers to know

I first experienced lost fatherhood to abortion at the age of 18, and I hid my pain in shame for 21 years.

The impact of abortion on men wasn’t spoken of directly in the public square or in the church. The prevailing cultural message was, and is, centered around women. Men were to be either silent or supportive of her.

And the church? The message was either silence or condemnation. Both are damaging. Neither are biblical. 

At 18, I urged my girlfriend at the time not to go through with the abortion, but I was told it was going to happen, so I downshifted into the role that was the only possibility, and I went to the clinic with her to be supportive. I was in the waiting room for a few seconds before I was asked to wait outside, and so I sat on the steps on a chilly April morning in Central Indiana and waited. 

Across the parking lot, I saw poster boards on the ground, leftovers from a protest. Those placards read: “Baby Killer” and “Burn in Hell”. Another one had a picture of a mangled fetus. I wasn’t a Christian at the time, but I witnessed what Christ’s self-proclaimed representatives of God thought. 

The next four years were spent living out what I would later learn to be a collection of symptoms, acting out behaviors collectively referred to as post-abortion stress. I was living with depression and anxiety, though I didn’t have a name for it. I moved all over the country, worked countless jobs, had very short relationships, and trusted almost no one. 

At 22, I was responsible for another abortion. If the first abortion hurt me, the second one hardened me.

For the next decade, I searched for a god that would make sense. I read every major work of every major world religion, diving deep into philosophy, especially French existentialism, longing for truth and for meaning. Every Christian message I’d heard suggested abortion was so unforgivable, the God of the Bible wasn’t an option, though I desperately wanted Him to be. 

But by God’s grace, I found my way into a church shortly after getting married at the age of 30. We were both baptized soon thereafter, but I wasn’t restored from the pain I’d carried around from the two abortions until I was 39. During a men’s book study at church, I first shared publicly about my abortion loss and regret. To my surprise, I wasn’t the only man there who had experienced it. As the years passed, I began to see and understand how Jesus met the broken with compassion and healing and was able to receive His forgiveness. 

Ever since, I have desperately wanted other men who were suffering in silence to experience the same. I started sharing my story publicly anywhere I was invited. Each time I shared, I healed a bit more. Without fail, every time I shared, at least one man approached me after and said some version of “I’ve never told anyone this but…” followed by his personal story. 

And every time, someone else would approach me and say, “I never thought about the man.”

In 2020, I published Almost Daddy: The Forgotten Story, a novel written from the man’s perspective of lost fatherhood to abortion, detailing the pain that follows, and pointing to the path of hope, healing, and a restored relationship with God. 

I thought there would be pushback from abortion rights supporters, but imagine my surprise when waves of hate came from those purporting to be pro-life. For them, forgiveness wasn’t an option, and punishment was the only way. I’d read their social media posts, listen to them on podcasts rant about justice and murder, and it was an all-too-familiar accusatory voice, reminiscent of those poster boards I saw in the abortion clinic parking lot all those years ago.

But this time, it had no power over me. 

But what of the millions of men still alone in their pain? 

They need to be ministered to as Zacchaeus was in Luke 19:1-10. Jesus saw that broken man, and did He condemn him? Order him to accept his punishment? No, He called him by name and went to dine at his house. That encounter with the Lord yielded a tax collector promising to repay anyone he had wronged four times over.

Abortion is sin, and it is murder. We shouldn’t soften that reality. But often the behaviors that led to an unplanned pregnancy were sins that were an outcropping of brokenness. And our Savior healed that brokenness. And we must too. 

The pro-life movement will never see the end of abortion unless we end the demand for abortion. And the way we end the demand for abortion is by helping the millions of broken men already impacted by abortion find hope, healing, and a restored relationship with God.