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NRL News
Counselor
Explains Powerful Impact of “Lost Fatherhood” “Lost Fatherhood.” Reading that workshop title, what might be the first thing that crosses the mind of the average NRLC 2007 attendee? If the title were “Lost Motherhood,” the answer would be obvious. Even in the absence of the specific word, they’d know this is about a woman who had aborted her unborn child. Greg Hasek is a marriage and family therapist who has worked with men suffering from various emotionally painful addictions. In a workshop conducted with lawyer David Wemhoff, Hasek outlined his own story of trying to get established women-helping groups to find a place for men like himself and Wemhoff, who both had been involved in the abortion of their unborn child. Hasek was not blaming these organizations, which do indispensable work, but used them to illustrate how even many pro-lifers overlook (as he put it) that “With every woman’s abortion, there’s a man who has lost a child due to abortion.” Finally, three or four years ago, Hasek started calling around the country. With 48 million abortions having been performed since 1973, the question was, “Where are these men?” Another way of asking the same question is, why haven’t these post-abortive men been identified? Hasek went through all the reasons why men, by their makeup and by the way our culture discourages men from expressing their emotions, almost invariably bottle up their pain and anger and depression and, especially, shame. Thus, men would rarely say something direct, such as, “I’m post-abortive, and I’m hurting,” Hasek said. Instead, they internalize the pain that comes out in symptoms they do not connect to the abortion. Consequently, approaches to post-abortive men must be different than to post-abortive women. For example, men don’t respond to the word “abortion,” something they associate exclusively with women, Hasek said. Hasek began to take a different tact. He started to ask these men if they had “ever lost a child to abortion?” When the answer was yes, he asked them to think about what it was like not to be a father and to imagine what it would be like to have gone to a football game with their child. Hasek found that often these men were struggling with almost unbearable losses — not only estrangement from their own fathers (what Hasek calls the “father loss”) but also the “fatherhood loss” as well. Hasek has found in his work that men tend to “medicate” both the pain of their “father loss” and their “fatherhood loss” through pornography or sexual addiction. His research also shows that because men tend to already be grieving over the father loss, it helps explain why many of them don’t initially come across as suffering from an identified problem related to the loss of a child due to abortion. Of all the powerful emotions involved, perhaps none shapes men’s response more than shame. As one illustration, Hasek talked about the time he was allowed to have a table at an all-men’s conference. Men would approach the table then circle away. This went on for sometime until one burly guy, decked out in tattoos, finally came up and told Hasek that he had forced his wife to have an abortion 30 years ago. He started bawling, relaying how he’d been to AA for 30 years and never had they talked about abortion. “I’ve repressed it for 30 years,” he told Hasek, “until I saw your table.” |