Diocesan Resources
The Hollow Men: Male Grief and Trauma Following Abortion by Dr. Vincent M. Rue (2008)
The Hollow Men: Male Grief and Trauma Following Abortion by Dr. Vincent M. Rue, co-director of the Institute for Pregnancy Loss, Jacksonville, Florida. He is a practicing psychotherapist, researcher, lecturer, and author of a book and numerous articles in professional journals on post-abortion trauma, for which he provided the first clinical evidence in 1981.
Abortion has become a personal and social eraser of choice for our unwanted, ill-timed, and “defective” offspring. With mainstream mental health professional associations encouraging this procedure by advising that it is psychologically safe, women and men have embraced abortion as a stress reliever. Yet the evidence is mounting that abortion carries serious and significant mental health risks for many women.
What about the impact of abortion on men? With some 45 million abortions in the U.S. since 1973, this is not a rhetorical question. The sheer numbers represent a potential mental health shockwave of personal and relational injury.
More than anything else, the U.S. Supreme Court has shaped the role of men in abortion. The Court has held that a woman’s right not to procreate trumps a man’s right to procreate, making his involvement in the abortion decision irrelevant. In Planned Parenthood of Missouri v. Danforth (1976), the Court dismissed the validity of a husband’s involvement in his wife’s decision. No state allows a husband to be informed of his wife’s impending abortion.
Abortion leaves indelible footprints in the texture of masculinity, in the recesses of a man’s heart, and in his reproductive history. A father is a father forever, even of a dead unborn child. In the aftermath of abortion, the real choice for men is whether to accept this biological reality, grieve the loss and seek forgiveness, or to continue denying what is inwardly known and swell the ranks of the hollowed men. Irrespective of the law, both man and woman co-created the pregnancy, and both will live with the aftermath, regardless of how some may try to celebrate “choice.”