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As a Baptist church youth leader, Jerry Little had long preached about the evils of abortion. He and his wife, Debbie, repeatedly opened their home to young, unwed mothers-to-be.

But in 1993, his daughter, Candy, 18, revealed her own pregnancy. Shocked, Little convinced himself that his daughter's case was different and that only an abortion could resolve the issue.

Candy, however, didn't want an abortion.

Little drove his daughter 120 miles from their Amarillo, Texas, home to Lubbock for a clandestine abortion. Once inside the facility, Candy became so distraught that the abortionist refused to do the procedure.

But Little persisted, talking her into the procedure. Two days later, Little and his daughter returned. Although Candy continued to cry uncontrollably, this time the abortionist took Little's money.

When Candy returned to the waiting room, she gazed vacantly in her father's direction and said, "Let's go." He immediately knew their relationship would never be the same, but he tried to push that knowledge aside. For the next two years, the Little family nearly disintegrated while keeping the abortion a secret. The guilt and blame nearly overwhelmed Little, who felt he had nowhere to turn.

Although pregnancy care centers began providing post-abortion syndrome counseling for women soon after Roe v. Wade became law, spiritual and psychological healing for men remains rare. Warren L. Williams has counseled 250 post-abortive men in the past 25 years as founder of Fathers & Brothers Ministries International in Boulder, Colorado. Williams estimates that only 4,000 American men in the past decade have gone through any kind of study about how abortion has affected them.

"Culturally, it has been swept under the rug," Williams said.

In the 30 years since abortion on demand became the law of the land, little attention has been paid to the effects on men. Books, ministries, and recovery groups to help men overcome abortion grief are slowly making a dent, but most organizations devoted to the problem operate on shoestring budgets.

With more than a million abortions occurring annually, the walking wounded are plentiful. When a baby's father refuses responsibility, the woman's father, brother, uncle, or friend sometimes steps in to pay for an abortion. Drexel University sociologist Arthur B. Shostak conducted interviews with 1,000 men in abortion waiting rooms in 18 states in 1984. Shostak reported that 75 percent had a difficult time with the experience.

While a first-year Baylor University student, Stephen Arterburn conceived a child with a classmate. Then Arterburn badgered her into believing she had only one option. "I helped pay for the abortion because it was the convenient thing," Arterburn said. "Only afterwards did I realize that I had essentially paid to have my own child murdered."

Arterburn, founder of the Laguna Beach, California-based New Life Clinics, described his subsequent struggles, including 83 life-threatening ulcers, in The God of Second Chances (Thomas Nelson, 2002). Arterburn, now 50, said he didn't fully come to terms with what he had done until 18 years later, after he and his wife, Sandy, adopted a baby.

Sometimes a woman will abort a child without her partner's sanction or knowledge. In 1982, Dave Wemhoff found out two weeks after the procedure that his girlfriend had aborted their son. It took him another 17 years to forgive her—and himself.

Research about abortion's fallout among men is largely anecdotal because of the dearth of major studies. Williams says the repressed angst that men have manifests itself in an array of societal woes.

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November 2003, Vol. 47, No. 11