Video Transcript

Nick Freitas - Husband, father, and Green Beret Combat Veteran

“Men shouldn’t have a say when it comes to abortion. If you don’t have a uterus, you don’t get an opinion. Her body, her choice”. We hear all the time that since females are the only ones who can get pregnant, they should be the only voices that matter on the subject of abortion.

Here’s the deal: this argument is both hypocritical toward men, and incredibly damaging to women.

First off, gatekeeping who can have an opinion on the topic of abortion based on their sex–is sexist. You don’t need to have been impacted by, or experience, or have expertise on something to be allowed an opinion on that topic. Everyone does this all the time. Nobody questions when single people say child abuse is wrong. Women and men protested against the military draft during the Vietnam War, even though only men could be drafted. When people who are not married say spousal abuse is wrong, their judgment is valid.

Second, and more importantly, it is a terrible argument because the killing of children concerns everyone. Abortion is the intentional killing of preborn sons and daughters through dismemberment, starvation, exsanguination (draining blood), or lethal injection with poison to the child’s heart or head. And this is happening over 2800 times every single day in America. People are literally trying to say that men have no right to protect these children from murder, just because they are men? That’s insane.

No. Men not only have the right to protect children from murder, they have the responsibility to care for children, especially their own, regardless of the child’s age, in the womb or out of the womb.

And don’t be fooled, it isn’t really men that the pro-choice crowd wants to silence. It’s pro-life men. They love to hear the opinions of pro-abortion men. Roe v Wade was the Supreme Court opinion that required states to allow abortion - and it was decided completely by men. Abortion was championed in America mainly by two men, Larry Lader and Bernard Nathanson, the co-founders of NARAL, who actually complained that the Women’s Movement was too slow to embrace abortion. What did these men want? They wanted to make lots of money and they wanted men to be able to have sex without responsibility.

Look at the men who have championed Planned Parenthood over the years, and whose voices have been platformed by the abortion lobby. Hugh Hefner. Harvey Weinstein. Eric Schneiderman. Bill Clinton. Look at the way they have treated women and tell me these guys are “feminists”.

And it’s no surprise, when you think about the kind of men that abortion is going to appeal to MOST: men who want to have casual sex with women, but who haven’t got the slightest bit of interest in taking responsibility for the children they might create in doing so. “It’s HER decision!” said the pro-choice man as he abandoned his child and the woman he got pregnant. When people say that abortion is a “woman’s issue”, “woman’s right,” a “decision between a woman and her doctor,” the implication is that a man shouldn’t be expected to be involved in anything beyond the sexual act – no long-term commitment to the woman or their child, financially or relationally.

This kind of language also cripples the men who want to support women and who desperately want to protect their own child from being killed by abortion.

To all the men out there who are being told to sit down and shut up on this issue: Do you think they are saying that because you have no power… or because you do? The reason they are telling you to shut up is BECAUSE of the power that you have.

The stats are in. If you talk to a woman who’s in a situation where she doesn’t know if she wants to have an abortion or not, the most influential person in her life is not Taylor Swift. It’s not even her parents. It’s the father of the child. If the father of the child comes up and says “look no matter what happens here I’m going to be with you I’m going to provide for you financially and I’m going to be there for our child”, the chance of that woman having an abortion drops dramatically. 87% of abortions are obtained by unmarried women.

And get this, 6 in 10 women who abort are already raising a child. Where are the husbands? Where are the fathers? Oh yeah, we said that “it’s a women’s issue,” and “men have no say.”

Abortion and fatherlessness go hand in hand. The United States has the highest rate of children living in single parent households. Almost a quarter of U.S. children under the age of 18 live with one parent and no other adults. This is over three times the worldwide average. And guess who roughly 80 percent of those single parent homes are led by? Single mothers. This is the outcome in a society that says pregnancy is just a “woman’s issue.”

We need men who…

Martin Luther King Jr. once said, “A man dies when he refuses to stand up for justice.” As men, we have a responsibility to stand up and make our voices heard for the sake of the women, the children, and even the other men who are counting on us.