By Tim Puet
Catholic Times
Had Murray Weber and his former wife given birth to the child they conceived in 1987, they might have been celebrating a college graduation or perhaps been welcoming a grandchild this year. And, Weber says, they still may have been married.
But at Weber’s request, the child was aborted and, within two years, the couple divorced.
“At the time, the gravity of what we’d done didn’t sink in,” he said. “We didn’t get married until a month after the abortion, but I know now it deeply affected our relationship. I believe she resented having to give up the child, and the affection and love drained from the marriage pretty quickly.”
Weber, 39, an apartment maintenance contractor and graduate student at The Ohio State University, is a counselor for the Bethesda Healing Ministry, which meets twice a month, has a 24-hour hotline and has about 2,000 contacts a year with people affected by abortion.
He has counseled several other fathers and mothers of aborted children and said that if he became aware that a man or woman was considering abortion, “I would say to that person this one sentence, ‘You will regret it for the rest of your life.’”
Abortion became legalized in the United States in 1973 by the Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade decision. Since then, “abortion for the most part has been framed as a women’s rights issue,” Weber said. “But for every woman who’s had an abortion, there is a man who is equally responsible, and his salvation is in great jeopardy unless he reconciles himself with the Lord.”
Numerous studies and meetings in the last 35 years have talked about the often-devastating impact abortion can have on the mother of an unborn child, but it took 34 years for the first national conference on men and abortion to take place. This year, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops has made male reaction to abortion one of the featured topics of its Respect Life Month activities.
Dr. Vincent Rue, co-director of the Jacksonville, Fla.-based Institute for Pregnancy Loss, since 1981 has written a book and several professional articles about post-abortion reaction.
This year, he wrote a pamphlet and a longer article, both titled “‘The Hollow Men’: Male Grief and Trauma Following Abortion,” for the bishops. In both publications, he said post-abortion reactions such as Weber’s are not unusual.
“Psychological injury in men following abortion is likely underestimated due to men’s propensity to avoid self-disclosure,” Rue wrote. He said preliminary findings in a 2007 study he coauthored found 40 percent of men in such cases experienced symptoms of chronic post-traumatic stress disorder after the abortion. These occurred, on average, 15 years after the abortion.
“Certain factors predict whether men are more likely to experience abortion as traumatic: where the pregnancy was desired by them or their partner, where someone else pressured their partner into abortion, where the abortion occurred against his wishes or he didn’t know about it until afterwards,” he said.
“Most of the limited amount of counseling I’ve done and the studies I’ve read seem to indicate that financial circumstances are the biggest factor in the decision to have an abortion,” said Weber. “People don’t realize there are plenty of resources available to provide assistance for those who choose to keep a baby, and that a tremendous number of couples would feel blessed to adopt a child, if it’s felt that’s the best solution.”
Weber said he considered men’s frequent silence on the subject of abortion to be a major mistake. “It’s not a sign of strength,” he said. “It’s a failure to take responsibility, an act of weakness which I think stems from a lack of faith and a lack of strength in bearing yourself before God.”
He said that after the abortion and his divorce, “I started seeking the purpose of life -- why I was here, who put me here – and studied various religions” before deciding to become Catholic. Weber said he was particularly influenced by reported Marian apparitions at Medjugorje in what is now Bosnia, and in Arizona.
“I know I suffered from what’s been called post-abortion syndrome; for instance, I couldn’t bear looking at pictures of pregnant people on TV,” he said. “I felt there was a great wall between God and me because of the abortion.
“I prayed very hard, spent many hours in tears, and begged God to forgive me. Eventually, I felt and accepted this forgiveness, and it was as though a great weight had been taken off me. This was in 1994 or ’95, several years before I joined Bethesda.”
He joined that organization in 2001 and, two years later, began training to be a companion minister with the group. “Bethesda has taught me that God forgives you, but forgiveness isn’t as complicated to achieve as healing, the forgiving of yourself and reconciling with God,” he said. “That’s why the long-term support it provides to all those affected by abortion, not just the parents of aborted children, is so important.”
At about the same time he joined Bethesda, he decided he wanted to reach a state of healing with his former wife. “I knew what city she had moved to in California and flew out there,” Weber said. “I wasn’t sure what I’d do from there, but it turned out she worked at the hotel I’d checked into. I believe the Holy Spirit directed me there.
“We were able to share our feelings of grief and, before I left, she told me she had prayed for the first time in her life. That was significant, since she came from a non-religious background.”
Weber said the reunion was enough to bring a sense of closure to that part of his life and the two did not stay in touch thereafter. “I would very much like to marry again and have children, but that’s in God’s hands,” he said.
“I feel as though before and after the abortion, there were two different Murrays. I committed that act and, at the time, I also was doing drugs and had a lot of other problems. God delivered me from that lifestyle. Now I want to spend the rest of my life helping others be blessed as I have been,” Weber said.
“A father is a father forever, even of a dead unborn child,” Rue’s pamphlet concludes. “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. …
“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.’”