Post-Abortive Fatherhood: A Penitent's View on Predation in American Culture

Post-abortive fatherhood explains a great deal about the behavior of modern men. Science and data points convey part of the story, but for many of us personal testimony connects the dots. Following contemporary science, Welch reveals the main drivers (despair, self-pity, selfishness) of self-destructive behavior to an inability to handle the remorse from the loss of unborn children. ("Contemporary reliance on abortion as a "contraceptive back-up" may in fact be promoting male detachment, desertion and irresponsibility. According to Morabito (1991), abortion can actually encourage sexual exploitation of women. In this scenario, the male may view his partner's pregnancy as a "biological quirk corrected by abortion.")" (https: //www.usccb.org/committees/pro-life-activities/hollow-men-male-grief-trauma-following-abortion, accessed 7/4/2022).

The goal is not to convince a close-minded skeptic about the reality of complex grief and its well-documented effects on a large portion of post-abortive fathers. "All the evidence in the world will fail to convince a perverted will," as Fulton Sheen has said. But even the most insipid individual, when confronted with not less than 2,300 human beings killed every day in America alone (Guttmacher Institute 2019 statistics), may give pause to reflect that people cannot do such things without effect. Many men, the author included, have been negatively impacted by the murder of their own children. The harm to post-abortive women has been well-documented. The forgotten frustration for fathers (being told they don't matter and don't have a say) has contributed to the current attitude that makes way for men to behave as cads and creeps. The lie of modern American culture "If fathers don't matter, why should we care about women?" has evaporated with the smoke of this sin.

But father's matter; mother's matter; and the hope that is a new life pro-created with the essence of being itself, altogether and objectively lasts beyond any culture's attitudes to the contrary. This book is a raw and unvarnished look at the darkest and deepest of sexual offenses: creating a child only to kill the natural consequences of that pro-creation.

Cover design by Margarita Felix