The Free Press
They swaddle the baby before they put her in his arms, in a soft cotton blanket that practically engulfs her tiny body. It’s just the two of them, father and daughter, together in this hospital room on a late summer evening.
It’s a noisy place, the hospital. The rattle of utility carts, the ringing of phones, the scratch of pen on paper as someone hurriedly scrawls a note in a patient’s file. But coming from this room, there’s another sound—audible even through the closed door, loud enough that people passing by hear it, and look at each other, and wince. The crying is not the fussy squalling of a newborn, but a wild, horrible keening that makes your hair stand on end. The sound a father makes as he rocks the baby whose eyes never opened, and never will.
“It’s just beyond the depth of horror,” Tim Hanson remembers. He is 62 and a father of two—not including the daughter whose body he wept over in that hospital room, stillborn at 26 weeks. Today, when a woman goes into labor prematurely, the baby has a far better chance of survival. Twenty years ago, there wasn’t much to be done.
“I cried so hard, I scared the nurse,” Tim remembers. “She put her back against the wall at first, and then eventually she just fled.”
If the nurse’s reaction seems insensitive, it was also to be expected. Tim’s wife lost eight pregnancies in all. As well as this stillbirth, there were seven miscarriages. Each time, he encountered medical professionals who, despite their skill in matters of life and death, could not stand to acknowledge his grief. Some, like that nurse, found it frightening. Others ignored it—or worse. A year or two before the stillbirth, after an ultrasound revealed that another unborn baby’s heartbeat had stopped, the doctor who’d delivered the bad news found Tim and his wife collapsed in the hallway outside the ultrasound room. “He crouches down," Tim says. “And he said, ‘I’m so sorry, Mrs. Hanson, but you know what? We can get you a sperm donor.’ ”
To the original sperm donor—the one who was weeping on the floor with his wife in his arms—the doctor said nothing at all.
Tim wants to tell me this last story, he says, because it’s funny—which is to say, he’s managed to put a humorous spin on something that was unfathomably painful at the time. (I do this, too. When people ask why I don’t have kids, my punchline is that I was so bad at IVF, my fertility doctor ghosted me. Ha, ha!)
But this doctor's absurd callousness also reveals something real, and heartbreaking, about how men are sidelined from conversations about pregnancy and childbirth, even when their emotional stake should be obvious. Once, flipping through a dusty basket of mid-century stationery at a flea market, I came across a 1940s greeting card, meant as a gag gift for expectant fathers. It read, “The stork brought it. Your wife carried it. The doctor spanked it. The nurse swaddled it. . . . ”—and then inside, above an illustration of a disheveled-looking man smoking and pacing alone in a hospital waiting room, the accusatory punch line: “What did you do?”
The obvious implication—that men are basically superfluous to the propagation of the species, outside the initial donation of, er, raw material—speaks to a long-standing cultural consensus that childbirth is none of men’s business. Men weren't regularly invited into hospital rooms to witness the birth of their children until the 1970s; before that, a father would have to join a throng of male exiles outside the nursery, jostling for a glimpse of his baby through a plate glass window.
Even now, that a man might actually feel a profound emotional connection to his unborn child as it lives—or dies—inside someone else’s body is not a truth we’re especially comfortable with. “My body, my choice,” the longtime rallying cry of abortion rights advocates, emphasizes exactly whose body and whose choice it isn’t. In the public imagination, men’s feelings on this topic are of no consequence; some find it inconceivable that they even have feelings at all. When I told a friend, a millennial mother of two, that I was writing a story about what men think and feel about pregnancy loss, her response was the same as the implied punchline on that old greeting card. She raised an eyebrow: “You mean… nothing?”
This attitude might explain why so many men were not just willing but eager to talk about this topic with me—a stranger. When I put out word that I was looking to speak to men about their experiences with pregnancy loss, my inbox lit up. Ultimately, I chatted with 11 and corresponded with half a dozen more. Three had been partners to women who had abortions; the rest had lost children to miscarriages at various stages, including two stillbirths.
Some of the men told their stories with the painstaking slowness of an archaeologist, unburying their memories broken piece by broken piece, handling the sharp edges with care. Some unspooled the details in one long tumble of words, like releasing a breath they’d been holding too long. Some of them cried pretty much the whole time. But before all that, many of the men delayed our conversation because they wanted to get permission to have it.
“I need to make sure it’s okay with her if I talk about this,” they would say.
Clifton Fels, a 43 year-old attorney, vividly remembers the moment when he decided to delete the pregnancy-tracking app from his phone—the kind that tells you how big your baby is compared with various fruits and vegetables. His wife had recently miscarried at 10 weeks (“the size of a small apricot”). When the app asked him to enter his reason for deleting, his finger hovered over the option that read, “I lost my baby.”
It felt strange to select it.
“Did I lose my baby?” Fels wrote me in an email. “That’s when I started to feel very emotional. I did lose my baby. We both lost our baby.”
That words can't quite capture the relationship between father and fetus has always been a minor source of tension, evident in the way men struggle to describe the condition of expecting a child. There’s the usually good-natured guy who declares, “We’re pregnant.” (And the woman who’ll react with an eyebrow raise and a snort.) There’s the friend of mine who announced the impending birth of his third child by saying, “I got my wife pregnant,” as if people might have otherwise concluded that the milkman was to blame. But the joking subtext of that ’40s greeting card—“What did YOU do?”—becomes more like a twist of the knife when the pregnancy ends in loss. What did he do? What could he do? Nothing.
“Our baby died in her,” Fels wrote. “But we both lost it. And I think that’s something that guys maybe don’t want to say, or don’t like to think about, because it feels selfish.”
If not in so many words, virtually every man I spoke to described feeling something like this: overwhelmed by grief, but also by the conviction that talking about it would be unforgivably self-centered. And each was sure, however terrible his anguish, that it couldn't compare to what his partner was going through.
Phillip Vaden, a 42-year-old whose wife miscarried their first child during the first trimester in 2010, told me: “It just has to be worse for the woman, because she's had this connection to this awesome thing that women can do, that guys just can’t.”
Sometimes, that sense of being the less wounded party also offered a way forward: Instead of trying to manage his own grief, a husband could find purpose in caring for his wife. “It was good for me, from a selfish perspective, because it helped me feel less powerless to be doing what I could to help her,” said Phillip, a software engineer from Texas. “My focus was: How am I there for her? Do I comfort her? Does she not want me to hold her right now? Or do you need to be holding her right now?”
Phillip was certain—as were many of the men I spoke to—that the one thing his wife didn’t need was to hear about how bad he was feeling.
“It feels kind of terrible,” he said. “We’re, like, best friends. We don’t have one of those distant marriages where we sleep in different rooms. But there’s something about talking to her about it that makes me feel selfish.”
The men I spoke to often found their most reliable solace in talking to other men who had gone through the same thing. The conversations usually happened by accident: One man described how a fantasy football league meetup suddenly transformed into an impromptu group therapy session when he blurted out the news that his wife had miscarried. If this is absurd, it’s also undeniably endearing: Few of the men had been to formal therapy, and most found the idea of it unappealing. But they all liked the idea of being there for another guy who was going through hell.
For Phillip, a conversation with a coworker whose wife had miscarried proved cathartic for both of them—“two guys, just, you know, having a little cry over some beers,” he said, laughing. “The amount that we were trying to cover up the fact that we're both crying—I’m sure that people were like, ‘Look at this sweet gay couple that's breaking up.’ ”
“Maybe next time we’ll do this in the backyard over a fire or something like that,” they ended up concluding. “That way, the darkness will hide our tears.”
If talking about miscarriage is hard for men, the experience of loss is at least made easier when there’s a partner who shares his grief—a woman who wanted the baby just as much as he did.
But what happens when his loss is her choice?
“I started, you know, doing the math,” Paul said. “He would have been—or she would have been—35 now.”
Paul was in his mid-30s, a pilot-turned-airline software executive, when his then-wife aborted an unplanned pregnancy in 1992. She had her reasons—she was in her early 40s, they already had a child, she didn’t want to go through another birth—and he had no reason to argue, or at least, not one he could articulate at the time. Paul’s wife made her choice. He’s spent nearly four decades regretting his.
“I wish I would have had a set of balls and said, ‘Let’s just talk about this. There’s a life at stake here,’ ” he said. “It’s not my body. I understand that, but it’s part of me. And I didn't open my mouth.”
Among pro-choice activists, it has long been an article of faith that men who are against abortion—or even have reservations about a specific abortion—are really just anti-woman, driven by the desire to shame and punish and control. But the men I spoke to didn’t blame their female partners for aborting; they blamed themselves, reliving over and over a choice that was never theirs to make.
“What would have happened if I had said, I don’t want to do this? We don’t need to do this?” Paul asked. He knows he’s tormenting himself with these questions. He also believes he deserves to be tormented. “I know what I’ve done wrong and what I’ve done right in my life. That’s one of the wrong things. And this, I can’t undo.”
Other men did speak up, but found it made no difference. Ryan Osentowski, who manages a radio station in Nebraska, was party to two unplanned pregnancies as a 20-year-old college student (he’s nearly 50 now). Both were with the same woman; both times, she had an abortion. The first time, he said, he felt it was his responsibility to support her. “She picked me up in Lincoln—I’m a blind guy, so I don’t drive—and we went to the clinic in Omaha, and I sat and waited for her.” But the second time, it didn’t feel right: “I was like, ‘We’ve done this. We can’t keep doing this.’ ” He begged his girlfriend to consider putting the child up for adoption. She wouldn’t.
“It resulted in a lot of emotional conversations that were never productive,” he said. “At the end of the day, I just sent her the money with the understanding we would never speak again.”
Ryan has struggled to talk about pregnancy loss—the abortions, and a miscarriage with another woman about 10 years later—for nearly 30 years, partly because it’s hard, but also because nobody listens in quite the right way. He tried a therapist, and she wanted him to have a funeral for the aborted fetuses, but that felt like too much. Mostly, the responses he gets—from friends, from family, from the few other mental health professionals he’s mentioned it to—feel like too little. “They just go, ‘I’m sorry, here’s a hug,’ and that’s all there is,” he told me. “There’s been no real reckoning with it.”
He’s not sure what a reckoning would actually look like. Ryan never wanted kids; he also wishes, desperately, that the kids he didn’t want had been given a chance to live. And though the abortion was not his choice, he, like Paul, nevertheless believes he deserves to feel bad about it for the rest of his life.
“I’m not at peace with it. I don’t think I’ll ever get there. I don’t think I want to get there,” he told me. “It’s a flexible, ever-changing, undulating thing inside of you. That I not only took part in it, but I was willing. . . . You realize that you’ve murdered part of yourself.” There was a pause. “I know that sounds dramatic. I don’t mean it to be that way. But it is what it is.”
But what I thought, hearing this, was not that it sounded dramatic. It sounded raw, and honest, and—in the present political environment—shocking.
What I thought was, “You’re not supposed to say that.”
Like many politically liberal women my age, I’ve always felt reflexively prickly toward men who have strong feelings about abortion. Growing up in the ’90s, I resented the right-wing pundits who chucklingly suggested that sex was for whores, birth control for prostitutes, and that if women wanted to prevent unplanned pregnancies, they should do it by clamping an aspirin tablet between their slutty knees. In 2003, when I was in my early 20s, Congress passed the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act, banning a form of late-term abortion known as dilation and extraction—an admittedly grisly procedure, but at the time, I cared less about this than about the photo of President George W. Bush signing the bill into law. There he sat, surrounded by the bill’s architects: all of them grinning, all of them men. They seemed like the living embodiment of everything wrong with the pro-life movement: a bunch of people who would never be pregnant, using the power of the state to strip women of their autonomy.
Women’s fears of being rendered powerless over our own bodies by a bunch of politicians who think they know better have only intensified in a post-Roe world. But even in the years leading up to the decision being overturned, the only thing we wanted to hear from men about abortion was how passionately they endorsed it, not just for women’s sake, but for their own. In 2019, on Father’s Day, a viral tweet from Jill Gutowitz read, "Happy Father’s Day to all the men who aren't fathers and have benefited from their girlfriends’ abortions, yet have remained silent in the fight for safe access to abortion.”
Likewise, in 2022, Philip Lerman, a former co-executive producer of America's Most Wanted, wrote a paean to the procedure in The Washington Post, describing the two abortions he’d been party to—including one resulting from an affair. “Would those two pregnancies, had they come to term—had actual babies been born—have affected those women more than me? Possibly destroyed their lives and dreams in ways I can’t imagine? Absolutely so. But would I have been unaffected?
Absolutely not.”
If I believe unequivocally in the necessity of legal abortion, I also find this particular argument in its favor both unconvincing and vaguely repulsive. Abortion rights: saving men from the consequences of their own actions since 1973!
But more than that, I believe that men are better, and deserve better, than the assumption that their ultimate desire is to swan around, ejaculating indiscriminately, safe in the knowledge that whoever they impregnate can just have an abortion, so who cares. This was the argument made by Pete Buttigieg at a campaign event for male Kamala Harris supporters last year, when he noted that “men are also more free” when women have the freedom to terminate a pregnancy.
When I spoke to Tony Perry, a 47-year-old who moved from Oklahoma to London in the early 2000s, he told me he found Buttigieg’s comments alarming. He wanted to know: More free to do what, exactly? “Is your freedom to try to pressure a woman to have an abortion she may not want?”
Tony is one of relatively few men to have written publicly on this topic. In 2016, he self-published an essay-length memoir titled A Father's Choice, reflecting on his lingering grief over a pregnancy his then-girlfriend terminated in late 2004, when he was in his late 20s. He also recently wrote an op-ed at The Federalist advocating for policies that would “invite men to recognize their responsibilities as fathers” and “make it easier for mothers and fathers to choose life.” What he wants, he explains to me, is for men and women alike to be fully cognizant of the possibility that sex will lead to pregnancy—but, crucially, without instilling in them the idea that pregnancy is the worst thing that could possibly happen to them.
He still remembers the moment, 20 years ago last November, when his girlfriend told him she was pregnant, and how quickly the shock gave way to excitement, to hope. “It’s like, this will change your life, but it’s not necessarily a bad thing.”
Tony is disturbed by the fact that unplanned pregnancy is widely seen as a nightmare. For this, we may at least partially blame the teen pregnancy epidemic of the 1980s and ’90s, which spawned 30-odd years of sex education centered on the message that pregnancy is something to be feared and avoided, a catastrophe that will destroy your body, your dreams, and whatever hope you might have had for the future. And while this appears to have had the desired effect on the rate of teenage pregnancy—and maybe a not-so-desired effect on the birth rate as a whole—it’s not hard to see how it might also prime young people, men and women alike, to see abortion not just as an option, but the only option.
In Tony’s case, he and his girlfriend initially agreed that they would keep the baby. When she changed her mind and chose to terminate, he took it hard; the relationship ended not long after. He’s now married, with two children. The loss of his unborn child still stings, but it doesn’t consume him. “I do try not to think about it too much, and I’m trying to focus on the kids I have got, and my family, and just being the best dad I can be.”
But Tony still scheduled our conversation for a time when he was home alone, knowing it might make him emotional. And even now, he’s looking for ways to find closure. At the end of our conversation, he mentioned that in the UK—where he still lives—the government now allows people to make an official record of pregnancies lost before 24 weeks. It can be as a result of either a miscarriage or an abortion for medical reasons, and either parent can register for the certificate. "It's like recording that there was someone there. A potential life, however you want to call it," Tony says. He wouldn't put his ex-girlfriend’s name on it—he has always taken care to shield her identity when writing about the abortion, and you can’t include the other parent’s details without consent, anyway—but he’s thinking about registering under his own name. Even after all these years, he says, it would matter: “To say that this child—and for me it was a child—was there.”
I suspect some people will find Tony’s idea infuriating, even invasive. To their credit, all the men I spoke to made a point of saying they would never support a society that compelled women to give birth against their will. And still, that a man may have feelings of his own about abortion—and that those feelings may put him at odds with a woman who desperately wants one—is not an easy thing to confront.
And yet, if what lies inside a woman's womb in those first months isn’t a life, per se, it is also not nothing. And in the course of reporting this piece, I have been persuaded that when a pregnancy ends—by accident or by choice—there must be a way to include men in the conversation. I think of the men whose voices broke as they described that terrible moment in the ultrasound room, the wand sweeping and sweeping in search of a heartbeat as the technician’s face turns to stone. I think of the men who are still haunted by the loss of a child they never had.
I think of Adam Sparks. When he discovered a few years ago that his wife was pregnant with their fourth child, it seemed like both an incredible gift and a testament to the resilience of the human race. Adam, 43, had undergone a vasectomy four years earlier, only to learn that he was among the one in 10,000 patients for whom the procedure doesn’t take.
“It’s like that Ian Malcolm moment in Jurassic Park,” he said. “Life finds a way!”
He and his wife hadn’t wanted another baby. Now, they couldn’t wait to have one.
But at the next ultrasound, the technician’s smile faded, her demeanor turning businesslike. When the woman left to summon their doctor, Adam's wife burst into tears.
“We knew as soon as she left the room,” he said.
Months later, around the time the child would have been born, Adam glanced in the rearview mirror while driving and experienced a jolt of intense grief mixed with something like panic: “There should be a baby seat in the back. There is supposed to be a baby back there,” he thought. “I knew better intellectually. I knew better. But it’s like a phantom limb.”
The panic eventually subsided; the sense of loss remains.
Today, the positive pregnancy test—the only trace of the baby they never had—is still in a drawer in Adam’s bathroom. It has been there for years.
All this time, he says, and even now, “It’s felt like there's been something missing from our lives.”