Dr Paul Allen

I have been interested in the development of a small but growing backlash against the abortion lobby’s assertion that there is only one person, and one person’s rights, involved in abortion. In law around the world, the decision to have an abortion is entirely, and legally exclusively, the woman’s. No one, neither her parents nor her doctor can, so the logic goes, be allowed to influence her. And that goes triple for the father of the child.

I have been interested in the development of a small but growing backlash against the abortion lobby’s assertion that there is only one person, and one person’s rights, involved in abortion. In law around the world, the decision to have an abortion is entirely, and legally exclusively, the woman’s. No one, neither her parents nor her doctor can, so the logic goes, be allowed to influence her. And that goes triple for the father of the child.

"Women are hard-wired for relationships—and a woman’s relationship to her baby is one of the most powerful of all, whether she realizes it or not. The hard-wiring of the brain may explain many women’s disturbing post-abortion feelings," write Evelyn Birge Vitz and Paul C. Vitz in  an article  published in the September 20 issue of Public Discourse. Evelyn Vitz is Professor of French and Affiliated Professor of Comparative Literature at New York University . Paul C. Vitz is Professor Emeritus of Psychology at New York University and Senior Scholar at the Institute for the Psychological Sciences. In the article the authors relate spending a semester with students studying the stories of women who shared their experiences after an abortion. The authors found that "many of these women are in acute pain ; some are almost totally incapacitated" by their post-abortion feelings. "What is particularly striking is that most of the women who have these powerful emotional