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Ryan thought that "it would make everyone miserable" if his girlfriend kept the baby. When Tammy had the abortion, they both felt relieved, but broke up right away.

Ryan was devastated. "I can't get Tammy and the baby out of my mind," he lamented. "I see babies everywhere, and they all seem to look at me like they know what I did wrong. I see little boys with their parents, and it hurts so much. I just want to crawl in a hole and die." He admits that he encouraged Tammy to get the abortion because he cared about "what other people thought." For Ryan, the other people included his Christian parents, the kids at the Christian school where he coached basketball, and the people at his church.

In a similar situation, Richard was in high school, growing up in a Christian home, and serious about wanting to follow the Lord. He knew it was wrong to have sex with his girlfriend and, in fact, the couple said prayers of repentance together after it happened. Since they only had sex once, neither of them thought she would get pregnant. But she did. He found out from his girlfriend's mother that she was planning to have an abortion, and the couple soon broke up. But for Richard, it took 15 years and becoming the father of three more children to comprehend the reality of that event. "It wasn't a problem that was aborted, it was my child. I wanted to be a good father, but even before I had begun, I had failed my first son."

As someone in his late twenties, Chris was hopeful about his relationship with Elise. They were going to church together and involved with a career group Bible study. "We even studied The Celebration of Discipline together, and I was trying to take the lead spiritually." They never planned it, but sex just seemed to happen. They had come back to Chris's apartment after an invigorating bike ride, and one thing led to another. Since they were never intending to commit the unchristian act of having sex as an unmarried couple, neither used birth control. They were sitting in the waiting room at the abortion clinic when Chris made a last attempt at talking her out of it. "Let's just go! You don't have to do this. I want to get serious." But Elise didn't want a pregnancy to be the reason for getting married. They broke up, and Chris spent years hating himself for what happened.

While their names have been changed to protect confidentiality, their stories are real. But are these unusual instances? Recent statistics say no. In one year, almost a quarter of a million women getting abortions identified themselves as evangelical or born-again Christians. With simple logic, it is easy to see the probability of a similar number of Christian men who gave assent to, or encouraged, the abortion of the children they fathered. What's more, the number keeps increasing. So what does this mean for the next generation of male Christian leaders?

It is having a profoundly negative impact on believers, according to Warren Williams, who has counseled 65 postabortive fathers. He describes it as a form of "spiritual emasculation." Williams finds that a Christian guy knows in his heart "that he's cashed out the life of one of his children. He knows that—without the grace of God—killing a child requires the death penalty, a life for a life." The man has trouble repenting, because he doesn't know who to talk to. Therefore, he is always looking over his shoulder, afraid of God's wrath. "When things happen to him after the abortion, he tends to see God as getting even by condemning him to fail forever." One postabortive father acknowledged that "more than a child is aborted; a man's maleness is aborted."

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December 9 1996, Vol. 40, No. 14