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| Cope with the Symptoms |  In order to be most effective, ideally a man should receive counsel from another man when dealing with the grief and shame caused by an abortion decision. The point is that a man may better help another man struggling with the loss of his child and fatherhood. Nevertheless, women have been very successful counseling men.
Generally, men are more successful than women at hiding their feelings and emotions after an abortion. If a man fails to face the emotional consequences of losing his baby to abortion within the first couple of months, he will often restrain it for many years, making it more difficult to face. Many men recognize different problems in their life without connecting them to a previous abortion decision.
Community makes it doubly tough for men to deal with the consequences of abortion. Firstly, most in the secular realm don’t even recognize the existence of Post-Abortion Stress (PAS) in women. Secondly, men are often taught as children that it is less than manly to show weakness or cry. As a result, men have no societal stimulus to realistically deal with their abortion decision.
When talking about post-traumatic stress in men, it is not effective to approach it from the angle of PAS. Men tend to be compartmental thinkers. Great number of them have bought into the false rhetoric that abortion is solely a woman’s decision. Talking to them about PAS will enforce their opinion that this is something that only affects women.
Instead of PAS, a man may be more open to talking about and dealing with the loss of his baby in the general context of abortion. That loss has affected him greatly. Nevertheless, he may not yet know that it is the reason of his problems. It may be useful to talk about the symptoms commonly experienced by other men after an abortion decision. When he understands that he shares many of those symptoms, he is more apt to look at the cause for his problems in a new light.
Many counselors recommend a gentle but direct approach. You have to understand that there is no time for finesse. It is important to tell him it’s OK to grieve for the baby he will never see. Let him possibility to cry for his serious loss. Let him cry as much and as often as he needs to.
Almost every woman who has stood on the road of recovery after her abortion has given credit to the fact that she returned to, or discovered, her religious faith. That has proven to also be true with men. You have to allow him to experience the joy of knowing he has complete, divine forgiveness. This will give him the possibility to move on to the next crucial stage of obtaining that God-given peace within himself. This is the hardest step to complete. Because of his deep fear and distrust, he may feel unworthy of a relationship with God.
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