Can a man experience an abortion? No, but apparently he can suffer sympathy stress over what might have been:

These days, he channels the grief into activism in a burgeoning movement of “post-abortive men.” Abortion is usually portrayed as a woman’s issue: her body, her choice, her relief or her regret. This new movement — both political and deeply personal in nature — contends that the pronoun is all wrong.

“We had abortions,” said Mark B. Morrow, a Christian counselor. “I’ve had abortions.”

Morrow spoke to more than 150 antiabortion activists gathered recently in San Francisco for what was billed as the first national conference on men and abortion. Participants — mostly counselors and clergy — heard two days of lectures on topics such as “Medicating the Pain of Lost Fatherhood” and “Forgiveness Therapy With Post-Abortion Men.”

This seems to be a natural outgrowth of the pre-natal hyper-involvement manifested by couples who declare, “We’re pregnant”. If having a baby is characterized as a team effort, then it follows that not having a baby would be just as much a shared experience.

Or maybe it’s just another disembodied view of reproductive rights, with a focus on the fetus above all else:

In the end, [Houston lawyer Chris] Aubert says his moral objection to abortion always wins. If he could go back in time, he would try to save the babies.

But would his long-ago girlfriends agree? Or might they also consider the abortions a choice that set them on a better path?

Aubert looks startled. “I never really thought about it for the woman,” he says slowly.

Yeah, I recognize a set-up “gotcha” moment when I read it. It doesn’t invalidate the fundamentals here: At root, just as the woman is the one who has to bear the nine-month pregnancy, the woman’s the one who bears the direct physical and emotional scars of an abortion. The male partner can empathize all he wants, but ultimately, he’s doing so just so he can say he’s along for the ride, for whatever reason — emotional, political, whatever. The heavy lifting remains with the X chromosome.