News Notes

 

SAN DIEGO'S LAY CATHOLIC NEWSPAPER                                VOLUME 8, NUMBER 5 / MAY 1997

 

Stuff It Down

Men and Abortion

MEN SADDENED BY PAST ABORTION PAIN, one-day healing workshop April 12,  9 a.m  to 4:30 p.m. For more information, contact Jim Benefield MA, MFC at 581-3022. Cost $I5.

BY DAN TRIMLY

I SAW THE NOTICE in News Notes. When I phoned the workshop facilitator, Catholic therapist Jim Benefield, and asked to sit in, his voice was guarded.

"The workshop is only for men who have been involved in an abortion;" he said. "Because of confidentiality, I really couldn't let an outsider observe:"

"Well," I replied, "how about if I quali­fy as a participant?"

I HAVE A FRIEND who has thought deeply about the abortion debate; as a for­mer member of Operation Rescue he has known jail time and the excruciating pain of police nunchakus. "I'm not convinced," he said, "that the man suffers any real trau­ma.”

I can attest firsthand to some of the symptoms: depression, guilt, nightmares, and grief.

"Men have been legally and psycholog­ically bypassed in this debate," Benefield told me. "When we experience an emotion like grief or guilt that we can't control, we tend to suppress it. Yet three out of four men report they had a difficult time with the abortion experience:"

In researching his book Forgotten Fathers: Men and Abortion (Life Cycle Books, 1986), Dr. Vincent M. Rue found that, when the man objected to the abor­tion, 75 percent of the relationships between married and unmarried couples fell apart within one month. Benefield cited a study of 400 couples that put the one-month break-up figure at 70 percent.

"When I started these all-day work­shops, I made a promise to God that if even one man showed up, I would con­duct the whole workshop for him," said Benefield. The first two times, that's exact­ly what happened. This third time, April 12,, four men - including myself - were scheduled to show.

The Saturday workshops are held at the Catholic Charismatic Center, next door to St. Francis Seminary on the University of San Diego campus. I was the first to arrive, followed shortly by Gus, then Will. Bene­field greeted us warmly. The therapist has lost the use of much of his upper body to Muscular Dystrophy, but his eyes are  quick and sympathetic. After waiting a while, the fourth guy was a declared no-show. "It happens," Benefield said. "People get scared:"

The conference room we entered was furnished with a simple wooden table and folding chairs. On the walls were a few felt banners in bright col­ors - "Mother Mary, we love you" and "The Kingdom of God is within you" - and a crucifix. We began with a prayer, heads bowed, holding hands in a circle. As Benefield prayed for God's grace and healing power to work in us, I studied our shoes.

With the help of an overhead pro­jector operated by Benefield's assis­tant, Don Dake, the therapist began by citing statistics and reactions typ­ical of women and men who have experienced abortion. Benefield uses the 12-step model of programs such as Alcoholics Anonymous. An aver­sion to AA and all things touchy­ feely made me nervous.

Though the workshop was geared toward Catholics, the other two par­ticipants were Protestants, members of separate offshoots of Calvary Chapel. Gus is active in a well-known Protestant pro-life group. One of the reasons he was taking the workshop was to see if his own group should establish something similar.

I asked Benefield if he had en­countered any non-Christian men in need of abortion healing. He shook his head.

"It's the Christianity that brings you to the recognition of how wrong you did;" said Will, who said he was involved in two abortions. "My par­ents weren't Christians, so I wasn't raised with any sense of value for life. The first one was my decision, for expediency." Earlier, when Benefield had offered us notepads, Will had instead pulled out a PowerBook lap­top computer to take notes. As he talked now he stared straight ahead at the monitor. "The second one I was against, but she insisted. I felt powerless:" Will closed the Power­Book and fiddled with its fold-out feet.

"`Powerlessness' is a word men fear," said Benefield. "Often that's the key word in their abortion experi­ence. They had no control. It was the woman's decision:"

With that thought Benefield segued into the first of his 12 steps of abortion healing." 1. We admit that we're powerless over the impact of the abortion - that our lives have become unmanageable and painful." I scanned the eight-page handout. Under "Personal application for Step 1" I picked out items from a long list of "personal goals": "Be able to talk about it with my family ...Overcome procrastination and sabotage... Complete projects ...To know that God forgives me..."

I doodled on a pamphlet and glanced ahead in the handout. The program included many homework exercises and written assignments I knew I would never follow through with. I was more curious as to the personal nature of abortion pain.  Had the others suffer as I had?

"Maybe we could tell our stories now, instead of letting the details trickle out," I said.

Though Benefield told us later he had scheduled the person­al stories as part of step 5 - "Admitting to God, to ourselves and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs" - he agreed to my sugges­tion. Everyone looked at me. I hesitated.

"HELL, I'LL GO first," said Don. "I've already told my story a few times:" He leaned back and folded his arms across his chest. "I was going with a girl. I thought we were serious. I was 30 years old, already been divorced, and I was living at the beach, just fooling around. This girl had had one kid out of wedlock. She knew I was a Catholic. So when she got pregnant she wanted an abor­tion.

"I was adamant against it. But my mother convinced me to, so a few days later, I called her, and I said, `Go ahead: Turns out she'd already done it. She said it had been horrible:"

"How long had you been dating?" someone asked.

"Oh, about four months. A week later she broke off the relationship. I don't know where she's at. I haven't seen her since." After a few seconds of silence, Don, who is 57, added, "Sometimes I still get very angry about it:"

Gus, who looked much younger than his age of 36, is clean-cut and earnest. In his early 20s, he said, he had met a girl through his work. "She lived in L.A. We would see each other on the weekends.  I wasn’t a Christian at the time, and she was brought up in a Catholic family.  When she told me she was pregnant, my reaction was “Your not going to have the child are you?” ' We discussed it—how her family would react, the inconvenience of it. We decided - both of us together, I guess - to have an abortion.

"We drove separate cars to a clin­ic in L.A. I asked her if I could pick her up, but she was insistent about driving herself. I think maybe we were both coming from work. Afterwards we planned to go off and spend the weekend together. I sat in the waiting room while she went in:" "How long did it take?" I asked. "Forever;" muttered Will.

"It seemed like a pretty short time," Gus said. "Maybe an hour. I just knew I had to be there for her, I had to be sensitive. Anyway, it was weird, on the freeway afterwards - we were driving along, I was follow­ing her, and she seemed really dis­tracted, because she started to get off the freeway, and I pulled up along­side her and gestured or something, like, `What are you doing?' And she swerved back onto the freeway and hit my car."

"On purpose?”

“No, she was just really spaced out:"

"How long did you guys stay together?"

"A few more months. Then she got a job offer in New York. She told me she would stay here if she had a commitment from me. And I was like-- he spread his hands in a what-more-do-you-want-from-me gesture.

"`We're dating, aren't we?"' I interjected. We all laughed.

"She took the job, and moved away." Gus rolled his pen in his fin­gers. "Until I became a Christian I never really thought about the abor­tion;" he said. "Then one day I was telling about it to a friend in my pro-­life group, and she said, “Just think - you're going to meet your child in heaven!' I was dumbfounded. I went through a lot of grief. Then I asked God for forgiveness.  I don’t know, maybe I’m active in pro-life because of my guilt.  Maybe it’s divine appointment—God put you there so He can use you later.”

His ex-girlfriend had called about a year ago, Gus said. "Just to see how I was doing. She's married now, and has a family." He raised his eyebrows and looked over toward me and Will.

"I'll go," said Will. He paused, as if collecting his thoughts. "I was a young ensign in the Navy, 23 or 24 years old at the time:' he said. There was a lot in her past that I won't go into here. But she was in need of res­cue, she had a 3-year-old son, and I was the knight in shining armor. She was just about to move to San Francisco when we met. She actually did go there, then came back. We dated for two months, then she moved in with me. Within a year she got pregnant.

"It was a rocky relationship, and it didn't seem like a good idea to bring a child into it. And of course I thought about the negative impact it would have on me, and on my bud­ding career in the Navy. So I told her I thought we should get an abortion, and she agreed. We just weren't con­fident in the relationship. Afterward, we were both very depressed, but we didn't talk about it.

"We did end up getting married, but in looking back, I believe I mar­ried for the wrong reasons - out of guilt, or, because of the intimacy we already had, I felt like I owed it to her." Will didn't make eye contact as he spoke. "I really thought I loved her. I had a high sense of responsibil­ity. I had the desire to fix things that were broken:"

"Was the second abortion with the same woman?"

"Yes. She had been estranged from her family for ten years. They were living in Australia, and she finally arranged to visit them. "This was when we'd been married about two years. She got pregnant again, and

 she didn't want to be pregnant for the reunion with her family. She wanted to look good.  I told her I didn’t want her to have an abortion.  She said the relationship wasn’t stable, anyway.”

"For the three days before the abortion I went on a hunger strike to show her how serious I was about it. But she pulled a guilt trip on me, and I ended up going with her. I stayed in the waiting room. It seemed like a very long time. I was feeling frustra­tion, rage, helplessness. But I ended up stuffing it down. I never looked at it as being a key ingredient to our dysfunction as a couple.

"We were married for eight years, and separated for five:"

"Wow," someone said.

"I refused to accept I couldn't make the relationship work through sheer perseverance," explained Will.

"She was manipulating me for years. I realize that now:" He had "become a believer" at 37, which must have been around the time of his separa­tion from his wife. "Plus, we have two children and her son, who is my adopted son. I really wanted to make it work:"

WILL FINISHED AND LOOKED UP at me. I took a deep breath. Suddenly I was aware of the sounds outside in the sunlit world - the wind through eucalyptus leaves, birds twittering, the roar of machinery somewhere on campus. I thought about my college dramas that had played out in stu­dent housing a literal stone's throw away from where we were now sit­ting.

"It was 15 years ago," I said. "I was going to school here at USD. Mary and I had been dating for a year and a half. I was a senior, she was a junior. I assumed we were going to get mar­ried, but Mary had this deep fear about graduating then getting mar­ried right away and having kids and sort of fading from sight. She wanted a career.

“Anyway, that fall we were both feeling restless, and we agreed to date other people but still see each other.  Mary started dating Jeb, a friend of mine who had graduated that spring. I ended up messing around with another girl. We didn't actually have intercourse, but she spent the night in my dorm room. Mary found out about it and she said, ‘That's it’ I freaked out and begged for forgive­ness until she finally relented.

"Mary went home to Arizona for Christmas. Then, in January, she called and told me she was pregnant. Of course, I was devastated. I think I told her then I wanted us to have the baby, but we agreed to talk about it when she came back a couple of weeks later.

"Well, she was deadset on having an abortion. We both came from strong Catholic families, and I imag­ine she couldn't bear facing her fam­ily, especially her dad. She didn't want to ruin her life. I argued, but probably pretty weakly. I felt a tremendous sense of guilt: I was the one who had cheated on her. I was the one who had gotten her preg­nant. How could I demand anything of her? Mary was a pro in the guilt department. In the end she was basi­cally, “You can stand by me or you can abandon me, but I'm going to have this abortion.”

"We went to the old Planned Parenthood office on Fifth Avenue and they referred us to this clinic on Washington Street. Somehow I scraped up the money - it was like $125 - or maybe that's what I paid and Mary paid the rest - anyway, we went there late one morning and she filled out these forms. Then we went into this small room where there was an examining table with stirrups."

"They usually make the man stay in the waiting room," said Benefield. "It's very unusual to let him go in with the woman.”

 “I think we insisted”, I said. “I mean, I really didn’t want her to go through it alone. Anyway, I don’t remember all that clearly, but I think they dilated her and left the room while it took effect.  When they came back—“ I looked at Benefield. "When you mentioned earlier how some post-abortion women can't stand the sound of a vacuum clean­er?  That's what it was like:"

"How far along was she?" "Probably two months or so:" Benefield nodded.

"They had draped a sheet over her legs so we couldn't see what they were doing. I remember holding Mary's hand. She would clench mine really hard every time she felt pain. I remember her face looked so pale in the fluorescent light. Then I felt like I was going to get sick or pass out, so the nurse showed me to a bathroom. But I didn't throw up, and when I went back to the room it was over, and Mary was there alone. She was crying really hard."

"Did the relationship break up soon after that?"

I tried to recall. "About four or five months later," I said. It had actu­ally muddled on for years, but with more recrimination than romance. "She started dating another friend of mine. But it's weird - for me, the abortion had the effect of making my commitment to Mary stronger. It showed me how much I really loved her. I felt somehow that if we ended up together and got married and had more kids, that would in some way mitigate this terrible thing we'd done. But to kill your baby, then  walk away from the relationship - that seemed to me to make it even worse.

"I didn't have the excuse of not being a Christian. I knew full well the awfulness of what I'd done. The guilt was overwhelming. For years I'd have nightmares and wake up crying. I was too ashamed to confess it to a priest. I was going to church, but rarely to Communion. What made it worse was that Mary swore me to secrecy, then she refused to talk about it. So I didn't have anyone I could confide in.

"This went on for years. Mary moved back to Arizona after she graduated. We both had other rela­tionships, but we stayed in touch, and she would come out here or I would go back there at least once or twice a year. And each time I tried to bring it up, she would get mad and refuse to talk about it.”  The guys shook their heads.

"Six years later I drove out to visit her and, as usual, at some point I tried to bring it up. I'm not sure what I wanted from her, I just wanted to talk about it. But she shut me down again. Then, as I was leaving, we were standing out by my car saying good­bye and I thought she looked partic­ularly sad. When I got home, I was unpacking and I found a letter she had stuck in my suitcase. It said something like, `You may never talk to me again after you read this ...But the baby wasn't yours. If you'll think, you'll realize it couldn't have been. It was Jeb's.. The guy she was seeing that fall.”

Everyone was looking at me. I tried to stop the shaking in my voice. "Of course, I was completely blown away. I didn't know what to think. My whole reality was thrown out of whack. But you know the interesting thing? In the end, it didn't really matter that it wasn't my child. The woman I loved had still killed her baby, and I had been party to it.

The grieving was still real. "Within the year I went to confession to one of the priests up at Prince of Peace Abbey. I told him the whole story and just broke down. He was won­derful. He told me to name the child, and give it up to God. At that point the healing process real­ly began. It's still going on. Now a few people know. My wife, of course. A few close friends. I've never told my parents because I knew how much it would hurt them. I guess I'll tell them now:"

"That's a further part of the heal­ing process for you," Benefield said. I nodded.

"Didn't you get mad when she told you?" asked Will.

"I did at first.”

"Because when you said it wasn't yours," Don said, "I got so mad, I just wanted to -" The tattoo on his arm jumped as he smacked a fist into the palm of his other hand.

"I guess either through the grace of God or sheer stupidity, I never got really angry at her. People who care about me, when I've told them, get more upset than I do:"

BEFORE WE BROKE FOR a bite to eat, Benefield covered a couple more of the 12 steps: 2. To come to believe that Jesus can restore us to sanity and wholeness, and 3. To decide to turn our lives over to God. After lunch we continued with. 4. Make a searching/ fearless inventory of self. Again the handout listed symptoms common of post-abortion syndrome. I glanced over like a kid cheating on a test to see what Will was underlining. "Low self-worth. Anger. Emotional numb­ness. Irrational fears. Distrust.”

The laundry lists of emotions ("Anger is a normal, healthy response to an emotional hurt") and writing assignments ("Write an anger letter - not to be mailed - to the people or institutions you are most angry

with") put me off. I wasn't angry. I was sad. Even in the sharing of our stories, we were men. Our emotions - okay, maybe not mine entirely - were under control. No one broke down. Eye contact was minimal.

"The emotions that surface when you begin to put your feelings down on paper may surprise you by their intensity," advised the handout. "Don't be afraid. Admit your power­lessness, and turn yourself and your anger over to Jesus, your Higher Power:'

The next step: 5. Admitting to God, ourselves and to another hu­man being the exact nature of our wrongs. Benefield pointed out that for a Catholic this would involve the sacrament of Reconciliation.

"Do any of you have a sense as to the sex of your aborted child?" he asked. We looked at each other. Guesses, maybe.

"What I want you to do now is to name your child, write a letter to it, that Jesus will deliver, expressing apology for killing it:" I sat without moving. Will and Gus rustled paper and reached for their pens. "I'll give you 15 minutes," said Benefield. He wandered out into the sunlight with Don.

The others started writing. Do I have to do this? I thought. I put pen to paper, just to be busy. The words started slowly, then came out in a rush. After what seemed like five minutes, Benefield called time.

"Okay, now I'm going to ask you to read them out loud," he said. Perhaps sensing my reluctance, he

added, "This is an important part of step 5."

We went in the same order as we had earlier.

"Dear child," read Gus. "I am overwhelmed with joy and grief, know someday I will meet you and be spending all eternity with you. The sadness in my heart pains me, knowing I took part in a decision not to let you enjoy. I know you are in the presence of the Lord, but knowing you can't enjoy things like blue skies with puffy clouds, green grass in between your toes.” Gus, who had been the most dispassionate in telling his abortion story, began pausing every few words. "...making snow angels ...and building sand cas­tles like other children ...pains me. I hope ...you could find it in your heart... to forgive me. Someday we'll do all those things together." He stopped and took a breath. "Please pray for me. I hope and wait for the day we'll be together. Love, your father:'

"Thank you, Lord," Benefield said quietly. Gus set his notepad down and looked straight ahead.

"I always thought one was a son and one was a daughter," said Will. He began reading:

"Dear William and Mandy: This is my second letter to you. I have never been very good about writing, so you are not alone in this. I only ask that you believe that I think about you more often than I write.

"My children, it is a crazy world that I live in. I know God is grieving at the foolishness of man and all the pain inflicted in the name of pro­gress. You are silent victims of that `progress,' the legacy of shame for my willful, prideful arrogance in pre­suming to usurp God's own preroga­tives in order to architect my false security in the control of my life's circumstances:" Will paused. "I know God has forgiven me and you have forgiven me, but I need His power to forgive myself. For I fully recognize that admission of past sin is not a guarantee against future sin. May He have mercy on me as I seek to accept my past and submit to His will.” "Amen," said Benefield. "Thank

you Lord. Thank you Jesus:"

My heart was racing like it used to in school when I was asked to read something aloud to the class. I felt a moment of presumption that these men were addressing their own chil­dren and I was not.

"I always thought the baby was a girl," I said. I began reading. "Dear Marie, Know first of all that I feel totally goofy participating in an exer­cise like this. But the others are writ­ing, so I guess I may as well be a team player.”

Will chuckled.

"For years I grieved for you and wept over your murder and prayed for your mother and myself and the terrible secret of your death." I stopped for uncomfortable lengths at each conjuction and punctuation

mark, trying to keep my wavering voice from snuffing out altogether. Benefield filled in the blanks with his murmuring. "Thank you, Lord. Thank you, Jesus:"

"I imagined then you were a girl. Now, with small daughters of my own, the reality of your femaleness is even more real to me. I know how lit­tle girls smile; how their eyes sparkle; how their laughter rises into the air; how hot their tears are, and how quickly they pass; how their bodies, held in sleep, melt into my own. I am sorry your father and mother will never know these things with you. I pray your forgiveness for my part in your death. I ask you to look down from your place near God and pray for me, and your father, and your mother, and for the whole suffering sea of humankind."

 

WE WERE ALREADY DEEP into the afternoon, and Benefield moved quickly through the remaining seven steps. When we came to step 9 - "make amends to those injured by the abortion except where it would cause harm" - I was dubious.

"She's married now," I said, "with a child of her own. I'm not sure she's told her husband, so I'd be afraid to write."

11 How about a phone call?" sug­gested Benefield. "K.I.S.S. `Keep It Simple, Stupid” Just explain that you want to apologize for your part in the decision. Don't stay on the phone too long.

I imagined hearing Mary's voice after all these years. To what effect? I had it on good authority she had re­turned fully to the Faith as I had. She told me years ago she had confessed it. Why muddy the waters?

"Gus, you said she called out of the blue a year ago," I said. "Are you going to call her now?"

Gus nodded. I looked at Will. "I'm not emotionally detached from the woman," he said slowly. "It might be harmful to try to reconcile with her."

Step 11 told us: "Seek, through prayer and meditation, to improve our conscious contact with God, praying only for knowledge of His will and the power to carry it out And step 12 said "try to carry this message to others, and to practice these principles in all our affairs."

It was this last admonition I was thinking of, after our closing prayer and the handshakes and good wishes had been exchanged and I was back in my car. As I passed the USD dor­mitories, late sunlight fired like sparklers through the leaves of elm trees that weren't even here when I was in school. Students walked along the side of the road. A guy said some­thing to two girls in halter tops that made them laugh, then put his hand on one girl's smooth, brown shoul­der. He glanced at me as I drove by. *

The next workshop is scheduled for November 1. For more information, call (858) 581-3022.