Mental health expert highlights abortion's impact on men
by Jim Brown and Jody Brown
February 19, 2007
(OneNewsNow.com) - - A campus psychiatrist at UCLA is drawing attention to the only study she has found on young men's responses to abortion. Those men, she asserts, are part of a group of abortion victims who have been essentially "invisible" to those in her profession. Mental health professionals, she says, need to stop ignoring the reality that abortion leaves emotional scars.The study on men's responses to abortion was not conducted by a mental health professional, but rather a sociologist and academic by the name of Dr. Arthur Shostak. Shostak surveyed 1,000 men sitting in the waiting rooms of abortion facilities across the U.S. and found that 80 percent of those men indicated that that had been the longest and darkest day of their life.
Dr. Miriam Grossman, a psychiatrist at UCLA's student health service, says Shostak then followed those men for months, and even some for years.
"The numbers went up [over that time]," she observes. "The number of men who reported that day feeling some guilt and some ambivalence about what they were doing; the number of men who were asked 'Do you think that in the future you might have some troubling thoughts about this?' -- the percentages went up." Adds Grossman: "So a few years afterwards, they were reporting that it was worse than they had anticipated."
Grossman says men's reactions to abortion have been ignored by her colleagues in the mental health field. "There is a significant number of people who do have those scars and that painfulness," she says, "and if we are going to be open to victims of every sort, then we in mental health need to be acknowledging them even if they don't advance a particular ideology."
In fact, commenting on his research, Dr. Shostak has suggested the professional counseling community adopt what he calls a "pro-couple approach to the abortion challenge" that can help those who have abortions recover from "an experience from which they are never quite the same." According to Grossman, Shostak conducted the research because he went through an abortion as a grad student and has wondered ever since what would have happened had he and his partner decided differently.
Help for the 'invisible'
Grossman is author of the book Unprotected: A Campus Psychiatrist Reveals How Political Correctness in Her Field Endangers Every Student. During a December 2006 interview with National Review Online about the book, she explained that her purpose was to shed light on the existence of "an invisible group" -- specifically, both men and women who carry emotional scars from an abortion.
"They are out there in numbers; many must seek support from networks outside our mental-health system," she told NRO. "This is because although individual practitioners may be sensitive to the trauma of abortion, the mental-health establishment denies it exists."
Planned Parenthood, the largest abortion-provider in the world, claims that most women who have an abortion do not carry emotional scars afterward. While not denying that may be the case, Grossman contends that does not do away with the need for mental health professionals to identify and assist victims of abortion.
"[I]f only one percent of the one million-plus girls and women getting abortions each year suffer severe emotional consequences, that's still tens of thousands of people," she stated. And the author and psychiatrist confesses that before doing the research for her book, she was unaware of "how horrifying an abortion might be under some circumstances, and how there may be long-lasting consequences."
