It's hard to describe yourself as affluent without sounding like a jerk. My sympathies.
However, I couldn't agree more that this 'movement' borders on bowel movement. A big pile of self-pity, self-entitlement and horseshit all poured steaming hot out of the Holy Grail. But like the 'push diamond' comments a few months ago, hopefully just a blip that got printed due to a slow news day?

I'm convinced there's a little more to this than you're interested in looking into. I’m going to go ahead and speak from experience here, my girlfriend became pregnant and had an abortion, and it has been very traumatic for both of us. We were very much in love, but we were from very different worlds and we couldn't agree on the kind of life we were going to make for ourselves together. She just knew right away, she knew she couldn't deal with the major compromises we were going to have to make to stay together, the pressure of dealing with her family, the issues of money, and she decided as soon as she knew that she was pregnant that she wouldn't keep the baby. And I, halfway hiding behind the social norm that it is exclusively the woman's decision, partly afraid to speak up and make the decision myself since I had the opportunity to avoid it, partly relieved that she had decided to take the easy way out and my life could go on conveniently as planned, said I would support her in that. I knew we would regret it though, and sometimes I tried to talk her out of it. I told her we could do it somehow, we could get married and get the money and everything would be alright, but still I was always scared, and even when I was trying to convince her I wasn’t convinced myself, so I know I wasn’t very convincing at all. We just told ourselves it was too early, we could have another baby together later when we were ready. We held on together for a while after the abortion, but as much as we loved each other as people, our social realities and the things we wanted out of life gradually pulled us apart. Within the week of the day the baby had been expected to be born she basically stopped seeing me, maybe an hour or two a week for dinner, until eventually it was time for me to leave her little town anyway and that was that.

There’s a lot about what happened that I regret, or wonder how it would have been. I still love her very much and I still wish we could work things out, but she talks about the love she felt for me as something that’s dead inside now, that she misses terribly and doesn’t think she’ll ever feel again the way she felt for me, but also doesn’t feel anymore and could never feel now, without our baby. I see babies on the street, kids playing and laughing and chasing after each other and crying and I wonder just what ours would have been like, what kind of person she would have turned out to be and made of herself (her mother knew somehow that the baby was a girl.) I come home alone after work and sigh and dream about what it would be like to come home to a loving wife and a year-old daughter. I wonder if the little issues of our futures that were bound to tear us apart the way things were would have still been enough to do it if we had a child together and that only would have made the consequences of it so much worse, or whether that would have forced us into the compromises we would have needed to make and whether we wouldn’t all have been so much happier for it.

I can personally guarantee you that the grief and the regret these men are feeling is very real. No one would just act that out, no one would simply make that up for political gain because obviously if the grief wasn’t real they wouldn’t have any political beliefs to advance anyway. Baier’s situation at the beginning of the article, a fiancée, clearly not a one-night stand, and not even being told until after it was over, why show no sympathy at all for a painful, depressed reaction to that, only pointing out his own inability to explain it as though that somehow explained it all away as a political sham? And even in the cases where it seems so out-of-place and such a sudden change of heart, is this something humans are incapable of, something only possible for political ends? If these were actual politicians with something to gain I would say of course, politicians aren’t human, they’re only capable of acting for political gain, but somehow I doubt that the people here had this change of heart for any other reason and with any other benefit than that it allowed them now to grieve for something they felt that they needed to grieve for and simply hadn’t acknowledged or let themselves acknowledge as it happened. Morrow and Aubert describe the same epiphany, in light of the joy of a wanted and planned child with their wives, making the connection that all those abortions in their pasts that hadn’t seemed like anything at the time were potentials for that same kind of joy, and thus symbols of that same amount of implicit loss.

The thing with abortion’s effect on the already born people who choose to undergo it is that it has everything to do with what you individually associate it with, which is of course going to be affected by your cultural upbringing. The parental instinct and love and desire to protect your baby are as strong as anything you can feel in the world, I don’t think anyone would debate that, and if you think of the little fetus as your future son or daughter whom you love and want to protect, their absence becomes a painful death. Even if you haven’t ever seen or held your own baby in your own arms, the instincts are real regardless and kick in before a child is actually born. If you don’t want a baby and don’t think of a little fetus as anything worth giving a second thought about, or even think of it as a threat to you or as something you actively hate, an abortion is just a continuation of the status-quo, continuing to not be pregnant and everything being just like it was before. There’s of course an entirely separate question, which tends to become the religious/secular element of it although there’s no need at all for the two possible answers to be drawn along those lines, as to whether the fetus itself is a living thing with its’ own feelings and its’ own rights. But without even delving into the issue of the fetus and the morality of it all, abortion can either be awful for the mother and father going through it or it can be nothing, or somewhere in between, and the difference between it being one or the other is such a razor-thin judgment that of course someone could years later develop sudden regrets where there were none just as someone in deep regret will hopefully someday recover.

Okay, Aubert, who wouldn’t come support the girl at the clinic because he was playing softball and just shoved a check under the door like late rent was a selfish prick, and based on his quote that even up to that point he had never really thought about the woman’s life, he probably still is to a large degree. Then again, did Baier’s fiancée ever think about the man’s life when she didn’t ask his opinion beforehand or even tell him herself afterwards? The genders don’t necessarily have anything to do with the level of insensitivity involved here. But once the issue is brought up, Aubert does start trying to think about it a little bit from her perspective at least, he thinks that even if she has a wonderful life now like he does, she probably has very real pangs of regret herself like he does. And whether or not that’s honestly what’s true for her, he hasn’t talked to her and has no real idea where she is or what she’s feeling, that just means all the more that it’s absolutely what’s true for him, that although those abortions cleared the way for him to have the life and the marriage and the family he wanted, he regrets them. Even selfish pricks have feelings themselves, they just don’t understand that other people have them too or might have different ones, and I’m sure that on his own part his regret is very genuine and heartfelt. For her part, it sounds like she knew what decision to make, and even if she does regret it from time to time, still I imagine she consoles herself readily with the knowledge that having this man’s child would have been insufferable.

I agree with this much, the very real stories here are being manipulated politically by an organization with an agenda to change laws, and the people telling these stories are doing so because they obviously believe that the law should be changed. I think we all are aware that this is a pretty contentious subject and a pretty large debate in our country today, one I would even say is taken advantage of and heightened by political parties and leaders of churches and business interests who see it as a way to help energize support for politicians who are really far more interested in oil money and dismantling civil liberties and really only pretend to care much one way or the other about petty reproductive squabbles. But still, it’s only a major issue because it’s one that people do sincerely care about, because it does motivate people and move them to act. Really what these people want to do, even if it’s taken some of them a damn long time to come around to the idea, is what’s good in their heart, they want to prevent someone from feeling that same sense of loss that they now have, and if the best way they see to do that is to campaign against Roe Vs. Wade, of course that’s what they’re going to do. And whether that, at some higher level of organization, is pandering to a Republican base in order to keep support for the leaders who will continue corrupt policies that help the powerful, doesn’t play into the thoughts going through one of these men’s heads as they do it, because it’s legitimately something that they feel in their hearts.

But I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that there is likewise a political interest in downplaying the idea that abortion can be anything more emotional than getting your nails done or difficult to deal with than a sprained ankle in a football game, because these stories are being used as fodder to attack the legality and morality of abortion, which is something you know beforehand that you support. I guess it can be a perfectly unemotional and harmless and easy experience for the men and women who don’t develop any strong feelings about it, like it was for Aubert when he didn’t care enough to miss his softball game. But it’s definitely very callous to criticize the people who have those feelings for having them, not only the men here who eventually developed them, but the women who “want us to help them feel sorry for their abortions” and everyone who should “Be a woman. Be a man. Make your choices and live with the consequences.”

I would say, without attacking or debating the legality of abortion one way or the other, the only real step that can be made toward really preventing abortions and unwanted pregnancies is sex education and knowledge about birth control. And I think these are the kind of stories that should make up a good 50 percent or so of a birth control and sex education unit in high schools, something like the presentations M.A.D.D. puts on in high school auditorium assemblies where various people whose lives have been torn apart by drunk driving accidents tell their own personal horror stories in an attempt to get the message across with a real human face. If someone can seriously get through to kids with the suffering and pain that an unwanted pregnancy and an abortion really and honestly might cause them, maybe that will have a lot stronger effect on people than memorizing a chart of statistics showing 98.5% effectiveness vs. 92% effectiveness for the quiz on Friday. I’m going to go ahead and say here that my ex-girlfriend (not myself, the man, as you would imply is the standard case) who received no sex education as a high school student because of prevailing moral values in her place of birth, played “no, little, or an antagonistic role in birth control,” refusing to so much as discuss going on the pill, nearly throwing me out of the car when I suggested we both get HIV tests, and generally just whining about condoms. Eventually in the heat of passion she won the argument and we both lost more than we could have ever imagined for it, and now that she knows better from our own mistake she wishes so strongly that she had known all these things before it was too late. Understanding real consequences and seeing real alternatives might really make kids think a lot harder both about unprotected sex and even about premarital sex in general when they’re not ready for what might happen, decrease pregnancies out of wedlock and abortions, and aren’t these really the problems that the majorities of both the pro-life and pro-choice camps (again, the actual human people involved, not manipulative politicians and leaders) are trying to solve?

I can’t imagine doing that myself, not now, I wouldn’t be ready for that. In fact years later I’ve still only been able to bring myself to tell one other real person about this face to face, and I’m not planning on signing this letter as if somehow that would make it more sincere. But I feel like I should take the opportunity to say what I can say in print now as it comes along. So please, show this to your kids, and tell them that although she tries not to go overboard, this is why Mommy tells them to be really, really careful about sex and birth control, because she loves them and never wants them to have to go through something like this reader, and even men like Baier and Morrow and Aubert, strange cases though they might seem, went through.

P.S. That thing about infants playing at Jesus’ feet sounds a little hokey for sure, maybe even slightly offensive and Christian-propaganda-esque to us Godless Liberals. But religion is good for something, there’s a long standing human tradition of wanting to believe that our dead loved ones are in a better place that isn’t going to stop being a human impulse just because we can’t find Heaven in an astronomy textbook. My old girlfriend says our baby has become a star, if that imagery is somehow any prettier and less difficult to swallow, and actually I know my cousin who had a spontaneous miscarriage and her husband feel the same way about theirs.

Why the hate Debra?

Trouble I've Seen, I see that this was a very powerful experience for you - but at some point don't we all have to put regrets into a logical perspective? Your longing attitude about this aborted fetus is a little upsetting because it makes me feel as creeped out as people who reject the idea of adoption. What they have in common is this lionized perspective of their own sperm and seed - that somehow this unborn would have been the golden one. Life is random, feckless and messy. Unless you can't produce another child [or are too closed to adopt one] you don't have to live out this sad sack 'what coulda been' scenario. Now that you're older and hopefully wiser, start anew. Maybe the child you haven't raised yet is the best thing - instead of this abortion in your past you pull out of your trunk of angst to massage when you want to wax on your own contemplativeness and sensitivity.

I am tired of seeing Debra put down the Black man. Enough is enough. This is why Black men go out with white women. We have had it.

Trouble I've Seen, thank you so much for sharing. It was enlightening. I agree that the best thing that all of us can do, pro-choicers and pro-lifers, is to insist on accurate and meaningful sex education. I believe that my younger siblings have been wise enough to avoid many dangers because I talked honestly about my experiences with them.
Far better to prevent an unwanted pregnacy than to terminate one or have a child before you're ready. Better for both the women and men involved.

Carrie and Trouble I've Seen get it, Mr. Miller. Why don't you? Are you so caught up in politics that you can't admit that pro-life or pro-choice, the reality of abortion, pregnancy, marriage, STDs should be made available? I remember that display coming to campus one year of aborted fetuses. There was such an uproar in State College, Pennsylvania. However, I think the uproar was being forced to see what a liberal abortion policy has wrought...people using abortion for birth control instead of the very powerful tool of personal accountability. Whether one is pro-abortion or pro-life, there is one thing plainly evident...American children have become more tolerant to blaming others and taking the easiest way out of situations than facing the warmest, hardest and coldest of realities - birth and death. How did they get there? Welcome Mr. Miller who wants to set aside emotions as though they are no longer part of reality or rational existence. Rationality from a more holistic perspective takes emotion into account and realizes its own irrationality. As one philosopher stated, no human can be completely ration as no human possesses all knowledge. This includes knowledge of experience and emotion as well as facts. Only God holds all of that. Thus, only the God you reject is perfectly rational, philosophically speaking.

Back to topic, as I stray so easily from the main point: children behave this way in large part because they were raised that way. They've been told about condoms and birth control and abortion, but the reality is that not everyone has access...whether religion or cultural tradition or simply income. The truth is that most people aren't exposed to the awful reality of STDs until after they acquire one (or typically more than one as they tend to be delivered in packages). The truth is that few women will ever know and see the fingers, toes, or eye of that abortion or late-term or the viable fetus from induced labor. The truth is that young men will never be told that condoms break about 1/20th of the time. That's significant! More importantly that condoms break that much when used properly! How many of us really know how to use them properly? A banana is hardly a penis and isn't scurrying to get anywhere with decreased bloodflow to the brain. Finally, how many women know how many men their man might have played with or realize that even if he wears a condom, genital herpes is still about 50% likely to spread if untreated from him to her. These are realities and while they should not frighten someone, it should illuminate the beauties and safety of abstinence, lifelong marriage and faithfulness, knowledge and sexual technique, and the amazing rationale and wisdom in the Bible and how it actually protects humans from themselves.