Abortion: Not Just a Woman's Issue

By Ken Concannon
Herald Columnist
(From the issue of 9/23/04)

New Jersey Governor Jim McGreevey recently announced he was being forced to resign because he had been caught in an extra-marital affair with another man. With his second wife standing at his side, McGreevey announced that he was gay and had been struggling with his sexual identity for some time.

McGreevey, in addition to being an embarrassment to his family and his state, is pro-choice on the issue of abortion. As such, he joins an ever-widening group of unfortunate politicians who, while valiantly championing women's right to choose, lead personal lives that suggest that they are very poor role models as husbands, fathers and men. The list of pro-abortion politicians whose personal relations with the women in their lives leave much to be desired extends from the late Nelson Rockefeller to Ted Kennedy, Gary Condit and many more.

And it leads one to realize that abortion, contrary to what these same politicians say, is not just a woman's issue — it's also a man's issue, very much a man's issue. Consider the role men have played in the abortion movement that changed our Constitution and permitted the slaughter of millions of unborn innocents.

Even before Supreme Court Justice Harry Blackmun in the Roe decision lamented the "distress, for all concerned, associated with the unwanted child" and six of his male colleagues voted with him to find a Constitutional right to abortion, men had been major players in the abortion movement. And many of these men had problems with women.

The first American organization formed specifically for the purpose of legalizing abortion was founded in New York City in the late 1960s as the National Association for the Repeal of Abortion Laws (NARAL). According to Dr. Bernard Nathanson, one of the cofounders of that organization, it was the brainchild of Lawrence Lader, a well-to-do liberal and a disciple of Margaret Sanger. Lader believed that the Catholic Church was the "biggest single obstacle to peace and decency throughout all of history." When Nathanson met him in the 1960s, Lader was, like McGreevey, working on his second wife.

Perhaps the most prominent pro-abortion politician in the early years of the abortion movement (late '60s, early '70s) was the republican governor of New York, Nelson Rockefeller. Rockefeller was the man who first signed into law in 1970 a liberalized abortion statute for that state that looked an awful lot like what would eventually become the Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision.

In response to the new statute, concerned citizens in New York formed the New York State Right to Life Committee, a huge grass-roots organization which succeeded, in 1972, in repealing the liberal abortion statute in the state legislature, only to have it vetoed by Governor Rockefeller.

Like McGreevey, Lader, Bill Clinton and so many other male advocates for legalized abortion, Rockefeller's marital commitment was considerably less than exemplary. In the early '60s he dumped his first wife for a woman 20 years younger, which caused him some political problems — but not enough. True to form, the man died in the arms of his mistress in 1979. She was nearly 40 years younger than he was.

Pro-life researchers will tell you that anywhere from 30 to 60 percent of abortions in this country are performed on women who didn't want them, women who were pressured by the men in their lives who didn't want what Blackmun described as the "distress … associated with the unwanted child." The abortion industry, however, admits to a lower number. According to the Alan Guttmacher Institute, an affiliate of Planned Parenthood, 26.3 percent of abortions in the U.S. are performed on women because of "relationship problems."

There are approximately 4,000 abortions performed in this country every day, 167 every hour. If we use the very conservative Guttmacher percentage — over 1,000 unborn babies will be dispatched today, not because their mothers don't want them, but because the people around their mothers, most often the men who fathered the babies, don't want to deal with the "distress."

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