Abortion

 

Basic dos-and-don’ts men should know when helping women face an unplanned pregnancy

By Dave Andrusko
In our culture, equipped with a gazillion cell phone cameras and a multiplicity of recording devices, every once in a while when an unhinged pro-abortionist goes off on a pro-lifer, it’s get captured and makes its way onto the internet.
An opinion piece appearing in an Alabama newspaper over the weekend reminded me of this truism. However what made J. Pepper Bryars’ argument particularly helpful is that he used one of those harangues as a way of addressing the question of men and abortion.
We all know that being the good liberals that pro-abortion feminists are, they insist that the voices of men should be censored. (They are not big on diversity of opinion to begin with.)
And it’s not just that abortion is “a woman’s issue” (as we are told incessantly) and therefore men have no voice. It’s that men have nothing to contribute to the conversation (other than perhaps to affirm that they will go along with whatever her decision is). They are the equivalent of potted plants.
Bryars’ opinion piece reminds us that many, if not nearly all men, who are a party to a crisis pregnancy, have bought this lie. Consequently they say (or imply) that whichever direction she is headed, they will follow.

Which, of course, misses the crucial other reason the Abortion Establishment is so loathe to allow men to utter a peep. Women in the midst of a crisis pregnancy understandably see passivity as a sign either of indifference or (worse) a signal that everyone would be “better off” if she eliminated the “problem.”

But if the man speaks up on behalf of his baby and the mother of their child, it can make all the difference in the world.
“The man has a huge influence in the woman’s decision to choose life,” Susan Baldwin, executive director of the Women’s Resource Center, which operates crisis pregnancy centers in Mobile and Saraland, told Bryars. “If he is 100-percent for the baby and offers to support their child, then we almost never see the woman choose abortion.”

Bryars asked her what if the father resorts to the “I’ll-support-her-decision” line?
“If he says that he doesn’t care what she does, or it’s her decision and he doesn’t want to interfere, she takes that as quite a negative and then the chances are 50-percent,” Baldwin said. “If he wants nothing to do with her or ‘her’ baby…then the woman is extremely vulnerable.”
Bryars then brought up something I’m embarrassed to admit I’d never considered. Let’s say the father wants to do the right thing, not the convenient thing.
What exactly does he say?

“Baldwin said that her counselors and medical staff have observed that men don’t know how to talk to women about pregnancy, birth, their needs as mothers and alternatives such as adoption,” Bryars writes. “Her center’s website shares a list of basic dos-and-don’ts men should know when facing an unplanned pregnancy.”

Kathy Hall is executive director of Choose Life of North Alabama, a crisis pregnancy center in Huntsville, Alabama. They run a program called “MENistry.”
Its target audience is men who are faced with an unplanned pregnancy. A dozen trained men serve as counselors and mentors “to show fathers how important they are in the decision-making process and how they can grow to become the strong men that their situation requires,” Bryars writes. “They also offer post-abortion healing to men who have had a child aborted in their past – an untold yet painful part of the overall abortion tragedy.”
While men are still largely on the outside looking in, an author of a book about men and abortion sees hope.
“Today, many fathers facing an unplanned pregnancy are still shrugging their shoulders,” Kirk Walden wrote. “But…at pregnancy help centers everywhere, dads are making a comeback.”

Source: NRLC News