The brochure is celestial blue with wafting clouds. Its cover is darkest, suggesting a lowering storm; each successive panel grows lighter. The logo is a dove. Last week’s two-day San Francisco conference “Reclaiming Fatherhood: A Multifaceted Examination of Men Dealing with Abortion” clearly hoped to move men in a heavenly direction.

But the presentations’ titles — “Forgiveness Therapy with Post-Abortion Men”; “Trauma and Abortion: When Men Hollow”; “The Masculine Side of Healing” — hint at the first task facing this gathering and the crusade of which it is part: to make men feel hurt by abortion.

“Reclaiming Men,” which was organized by the National Organization of Post-Abortion Reconciliation and Healing (NOPARH) and funded by the Catholic Knights of Columbus and the San Francisco Archdiocese, was billed as the inauguration of a new anti-abortion ministry — the rescue of “male victims of abortion.” Announced at the National Right to Life convention in June, the campaign is already gaining steam. YouTube features several anti-abortion videos aimed at men, which share an elegiac tone and a heavy reliance on fade-ins and fade-outs. Many anti-choice websites now include sections on “other victims” of abortion, besides the fetus and the woman. According to NOPARH, the would-be baby’s siblings experience survivor guilt; cousins, aunts and uncles grieve. Even friends of an aborting woman may turn inward or engage in “serious risk-taking behavior,” hauling around “a burden of concern” for years.

The addition of men to the casualty list is only the most recent stroke in a broader anti-choice strategy. After a decade of equivocal progress using a sin-and-punishment rhetoric, the Christian Right took a page from modern psychology: They translated sin into psychological illness, trading in a punitive tone for a compassionate one.

Thus, in 1981, a new affliction was born — “post-abortion syndrome,” or PAS, a form of post-traumatic stress disorder following abortion. Its symptoms include anxiety, depression, flashbacks and suicide. If women before were made to feel bad — ashamed and guilty — about having abortions, PAS allowed them to feel only sad. No longer murderers, they were now the victims of a murderous society that places expediency and economic gain above the welfare of women, children and families. If you remove the Right’s named perpetrator of this immorality — feminists — it’s a cultural critique not unlike feminism’s.

The “discovery” of PAS dovetailed with the construction by conservative evangelicals of a sort of parallel universe to the secular practice of psychotherapy. Within a church movement that stresses a direct, emotional relationship with God, Christian counselors applied to troubles from adolescent disaffection to sexual dissatisfaction a mixture of New Age philosophies, addictionology, Bible study and prayer, as well as conventional psychological techniques and language. Many secular therapists, especially psychoanalysts, eschew connecting their patients’ distress to phenomena outside the self or the family — medicalization, the view that psychological problems result from chemical or hormonal imbalances, is the most extreme form of this trend. Yet Christian therapists have no trouble diagnosing their clients’ misery as symptoms of the social and moral scourges they are politically committed to eradicating: pornography, “promiscuity,” feminism, homosexuality and abortion.

Already, “pornography addiction” and the “disorder” of homosexuality could pull men into their offices, but post-abortion syndrome lay more or less outside the male psyche. If a kinder, gentler approach worked with women, why not exonerate men, too, who were long portrayed by anti-choice forces as seducer-abandoners abetted by abortion law?

Like loaves and fishes, the books, workshops and weekend retreats with the words men, abortion, and healing in their titles began to multiply.

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Post-abortion syndrome is not a medically recognized disorder. The American Psychological Association and the American Psychiatric Association do not recognize it, and PAS is not included in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. In fact, a large body of data strongly refutes the notion that abortion raises the risk of depression, drug abuse or any other psychological problem any more than does having an unwanted pregnancy — or, for that matter, a baby.?

Still, grief is historical. In medieval times, parents did not generally grieve the death of human infants, since so many babies died. Could they have predicted the proliferation of 21st-century “pet-loss grief support” institutions, including funeral homes, where Americans mourn the deaths of their dogs and fish as profoundly as those of their parents? Grief is permitted — you might say encouraged — within certain cultural contexts. Research shows that women whose religions condemn abortion — and one in five pregnancy-terminators fall into this category — are most likely to suffer psychologically afterwards. Even if PAS is caused by the Vatican and not by vacuum aspiration, it is real for some women.

Will men agree to succumb to post-abortion syndrome? Their numbers on marches and in clinic-bombing arrests indicate that men constitute a substantial portion of anti-abortion activists. But the role they play is heroic, manly: protecting innocent women and children from the evil abortion merchants. Victimization, on the other hand, is feminine; even grief is a little sissified.

The lost-fatherhood ministers seem to have thought through this gender problem. “These guys are in crisis,” Gregory Hasek, a licensed family therapist and director of the Misty Mountain Counseling Center in Portland, Oregon, told the Right to Life convention about the men in his practice. “They don’t hold up signs saying, ‘Hi, I’m post-abortion,’ but one of the pains in their lives is abortion.”

That pain, Hasek implied, is related to the theft of their masculinity. “God created the need for men to get up and care for women and children,” he continued. “Women look to men for decisions. Women often equate sex with love and choose love from a man over having a child.” In other words, sensing the man doesn’t want a child, a woman may choose to abort — and that implicates the man in the sin of killing the fetus.

If the woman ends the pregnancy without consulting him, the man can suffer PAS without guilt — and in a hairy-chested way. “Men use anger as a way of processing grief,” explained Hasek, who was also a headliner at “Reclaiming Fatherhood.” “Abortion makes a lot of men angry, and the men who are kept out of the decision are the angriest. They need to talk about what it would have meant for them to have had the child.”

Reporting on Hasek’s talk in the newsletter of the think tank Political Research Associates, Eleanor Bader noted, “To hear him . . . tell it, the country is filled with men longing to be fathers” and “deadbeat dads are rare birds.”

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In this, the lost-fatherhood ministry is like the rest of the men’s movement, whether the guys are singing hymns with the Promise Keepers or beating drums with Robert Bly. Aside from a few pro-feminists, not many talk about their brothers on the lam. More commonly, they resent the bad rap the deadbeats give men in general, which they believe accounts for an unjust pro-mother bias in divorce court. Even if men want custody of their children, say “father’s rights” activists, judges won’t give it to them. And the epitome of fatherhood denied is abortion unilaterally procured.

Although conservative Christians male and female claim never to have met a baby, born or unborn, whom they didn’t want to take home, other men’s rights activists are equally peeved about the opposite situation: Legally powerless to intercede in a woman’s decision to bring a pregnancy to term, men are nevertheless held to paying child support once the kid is born. Writer Cathy Young summarized this concern: “Women have reproductive rights, and men have reproductive responsibilities.”

Considering this asymmetry in 2005, Los Angeles Times columnist Meghan Daum floated a proposal: “If abortion is to remain legal and relatively unrestricted — and I believe it should — why shouldn’t men have the right during at least the first trimester of pregnancy to terminate their legal and financial rights and responsibilities to the child?” This sounds reasonable to me, if the man could prove in court that he hadn’t been with the program at the start and only belatedly got cold feet.

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The scant research on the subject suggests that, at least within committed couples, most decisions to have or not have a baby are made jointly. But the law protects rights and apportions responsibility when consensus can’t be reached. Who decides? That is the fundamental question of abortion law and, by extension, about having children, too. Daum did not dream up her opt-out clause randomly; Samuel Alito was undergoing his Supreme Court confirmation hearings at the time, and she was responding to his opinion, as a circuit court judge, that spousal consent for abortion was OK.

Thinking about Alito, the lost fathers of Christendom start to make me nervous. What happens when they no longer feel satisfied with a therapeutic shoulder to cry on? When reclaiming fatherhood turns toward legal efforts to reclaim fathers’ “God-given role” of family patriarch?

We pro-choicers are absolutists for a reason: Abortion law is all about slippery slopes. So let’s imagine sliding, shall we? The Roberts court rules spousal consent constitutional. After a while, an unmarried boyfriend sues, claiming unequal protection, and boyfriend consent gets the go-ahead, followed by sperm-donor consent. Eventually, Roe is overturned. Doctors — and maybe women, too — are convicted of murdering fetuses. Judges start adding years to their sentences based on the victim impact statements of bereaved fathers. Then legislatures encode payback for paternal grief in mandatory minima. The scarcity and danger of illegal abortion increase.

And, once again, women’s bodies are crushed under the law of the father.

This article originally appeared in Seven Days.

NARAL Pro-Choice America asked me to forward my friends a message starting, “I’m sending you an email because I want you to help protect privacy and a woman’s right to choose.”

NOW’s missive reminded me that the organization had fought Justices Samuel Alito’s and John Roberts’ confirmations. It spent a precious sentence on the attempted filibuster and pointed out that Roberts lied about his commitment to the principle of stare decisis, or respect for precedent.

From Planned Parenthood came: “We are outraged by this dangerous intrusion into the private relationships between a woman and her doctor. It is simply unconscionable for politicians to masquerade as doctors, dictating what is ‘best’ for women’s health and safety, as though they know more about medicine than skilled health-care professionals.”

Privacy? Filibuster? Skilled health-care professionals?

Are these words to mobilize the rage of women as the state seizes control of our bodies?

Health-care professionals have, of course, played a starring role in the fight over “partial-birth abortion.” On the first round of appeals, doctors helped persuade three lower courts and, seven years ago, the Supreme Court itself to overturn the ban. Not only did the statute neglect to make an exception to safeguard the pregnant woman’s health, but the term “partial-birth abortion” was so vague as to include, according to Dr. Leroy Carhart (of the original Nebraska challenge), as many as 21 methods of terminating pregnancies as early as 12 weeks. Doctors could never be sure whether they were breaking the law.

This time, weighing the opinion of such “prominent medical organizations” as the Christian Medical and Dental Associations against those of the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists and the American Medical Association, the majority concluded that a health exception was not needed, because there is widespread “medical uncertainty” over whether the banned procedure, intact dilation and extraction, is ever “truly necessary.”

This alleged uncertainty is about as significant among physicians as the doubts about evolution or global warming are among biologists or climatologists.

For the Roberts court — like the Bush administration that installed it and the Rehnquist court that installed the Bush Administration — politics trumped fact. Still, it was politics dressed up as fact, and disdain for science dressed up as respect. Writing the majority opinion, Justice Anthony Kennedy even expressed faith that “the medical profession” would “find different and less shocking methods to abort the fetus in the second trimester, thereby accommodating legislative demand.”

Apparently physicians’ first duty is not to “do no harm” to the patient, but to do no harm to the delicate sensitivities of Congress.

It’s no surprise that the abortion debate has circled again and again around doctors’ opinions and prerogatives. The medical profession — which a century ago seized control of contraception and childbirth from midwives and other female lay practitioners — was instrumental in outlawing abortion. But doctors were also central to bringing it back. Physicians gave some of the most compelling testimony in Roe v. Wade, speaking of women rushed to their hospitals bleeding from back-alley abortions — and of the 5000 a year who didn’t make it. Some of these doctors understood that their profession was implicated in those deaths, since the only way a woman could obtain a “therapeutic” abortion was to submit to interrogation by a hospital board and prove that pregnancy or childbirth would endanger her physical or mental health. Authorization often hinged on a bizarre combination of her fitness to plead rationally and her unfitness to mother — and on the whims of the men on the board.

This system was undone by Roe v. Wade, but the ruling did not eliminate medical paternalism in the law. The Court recognized a right of privacy, “broad enough to encompass a woman’s decision whether or not to terminate her pregnancy.” The forceful and moving opinion, written by Harry Blackmun, enumerated many possible harms resulting from having a child, including a “distressful life and future.” But the justices also spoke for a compelling state interest in the regulation of medical abortion. The woman’s right of privacy, therefore, would be exercised “in consultation” with “her responsible physician.”

In Carhart, Kennedy employs the latest anti-choice tactic: He twists the feminist rhetoric of harm to argue that abortion, not maternity, leads to a distressful life or future. He recasts Roe’s doctor-patient collaboration as a relationship between trickster and victim and depicts the ordinary preoperative practice of withholding the gruesome details of the impending procedure as a subterfuge practiced on vulnerable, naive women. Seen this way, the ban on a particularly gory procedure, of the particulars of which few patients are informed, does not deny women rights — it saves them untold pain. The “partial birth abortion” ban, in other words, is good for women, or, as he calls us, “mothers.”

“The Act also recognizes that respect for human life finds an ultimate expression in a mother’s love for her child,” Kennedy writes. “It is self-evident that a mother who comes to regret her choice to abort must struggle with grief more anguished and sorrow more profound when she learns, only after the event, what she once did not know: that she allowed a doctor to pierce the skull and vacuum the fast-developing brain of her unborn child, a child assuming human form.”

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg, writing the dissent, shoots back in fury. Citing cases that she successfully argued and in which, as Justice, she wrote the majority opinion, she zeroes in on the sexism inherent in Kennedy’s use of the word mother and reiterates the real meaning of Roe and the subsequent 30 years of jurisprudence on abortion.

“‘There was a time, not so long ago,’ when women were ‘regarded as the center of home and family life, with attendant special responsibilities that precluded full and independent legal status under the Constitution,’” she writes. “Women, it is now acknowledged, have the talent, capacity, and right ‘to participate equally in the economic and social life of the Nation.’ Their ability to realize their full potential . . . is intimately connected to ‘their ability to control their reproductive lives.’”

Make no mistake, Ginsberg declares. The defense of abortion rights is not about “some generalized notion of privacy.” At stake is “a woman’s autonomy to determine her life’s course, and thus to enjoy equal citizenship stature.”

Pro-choice Constitutional scholars have long lamented that Roe was decided on this flimsy principle of privacy. Some also regret that the court extrapolated that right mainly from the Fourteenth Amendment’s guarantees of personal liberty and equal protection under law. To many radical feminists, including me, the decriminalization of abortion went far beyond equal protection, even beyond its protection from undue state restriction on life and liberty. To us, it was an act more akin to what the Thirteenth Amendment did: abolish slavery and involuntary servitude. In our first action in 1979, my feminist guerrilla theater group No More Nice Girls dressed in black, stuffed pillows under our gowns to appear pregnant, and wrapped ourselves in chains. Our banner read: “Forced Pregnancy = Slavery.”

Carhart is not just about a particular medical procedure. It is not about doctors’ ability to practice medicine — even to safeguard women’s health — unrestrained by know-nothing statutes. It is a threat not just to Constitutional rights but to the most fundamental of human rights: Each person owns her own body.

This ruling is the latest salvo by a state that imprisons two million of its people, indefinitely detains and tortures a vaguely defined “enemy,” and wastes hundreds of Iraqi lives a day.

It strengthens the terrifying hold of an administration — and its court — on the bodies of others. Or, should I say, of Others: “aliens,” Muslims, poor people of color, and women.

In the coming fight for abortion, women must claim not just the autonomy of doctors or patients, but the liberty of women. We must defend not just our health but our lives. Jurists are confined to building upon precedent. Radicals envision the future. This time, we must demand not privacy but freedom.

This article originally appeared in Seven Days.

The usual arguments were joined. Champions of the legislation spoke of evil abortionists fishing for business in parental-consent states; of older men smuggling their teen prey down the highway to destroy the evidence of seductions gone awry.

Pro-choicers countered that the CCPA would hurt more teens than it would help. For some girls, the disclosure of a pregnancy may meet with parental rage. The Center for Reproductive Rights dubbed the bill the “Teen Endangerment Act.”

And as they’ve done with each of four similar bills that have reached the floor, pundits dismissed the CCPA as pure politicking — a Grand Old Party favor tossed to the base. They suggested that claims of violence and death for thousands of teens — either prevented or caused by the law, depending on your viewpoint — were hyperbolic. If the CCPA affects anyone, they said, the winners and losers will be counted at the ballot box.

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I’m here to tell you that abortion law affects women. During the months when I live in New York, I volunteer with Haven, a group whose members open their homes to women traveling to the city for late-term abortions.

The Hyde Amendment, the first restriction of Roe, passed only four years after the landmark law, pretty much rules out abortions for women without money by prohibiting Medicaid from funding them. That affected “Tiffany,” who lives with her daughter in a working-class suburb of Philadelphia. Tiffany’s boyfriend had left. Her parents were a menace. “If my dad knew, he’d beat the shit outa me, and my mother would cheer him on,” she said. “Good thing I’m fat.” (At 23 weeks, her pregnancy barely showed.) A part-time car-service dispatcher, Tiffany qualified for Medicaid, to no avail. By the time she’d scraped up $350 for an early abortion, it was no longer early, or $350 – or, in her town, even available.

The “Partial-Birth” Abortion Ban, passed in 2000, affected Desiree, a waitress and college student in her mid-twenties, whose irregular periods gave no clue to her pregnancy. Most providers in her West Virginia county had stopped offering the procedure much earlier, perhaps as a result of incessant picketing or even fire-bombing. But the ban was the coup de grâce: Now doctors risked not only their lives, but also their medical licenses, by performing an operation that might include any “late” removal of fetal tissue. The closest clinic that would do it, said Desiree, was in Manhat- tan. She added carfare and two days’ lost wages to the $1000-plus price, which she paid out of pocket: A 1996 federal law eliminated abortion from her husband’s Navy medical benefits.

The Child Custody Protection Act would affect Mary, who accompanied her 17-and-a-half-year-old pregnant “baby sister” Lila from Massachusetts on the Greyhound bus. The family is Hawaiian; their mother, religious, uneducated and naïve, they implied. “She wouldn’t understand,” said Lila, who already had a small son. Added Mary: “It would hurt Mama so much.” In fact, it hurt Mary, who told me she is “pro-life” and infertile — and longed for a baby. It must have been hard for Mary to support Lila. Would threat of jail prevent this act of sisterly love?

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No question: Abortion restrictions hurt women. And the laws are less effective than their supporters would like. They don’t generally prevent abortion, just postpone it. That compounds anxiety, medical risk and cost. It also exacerbates the troublesomeness of the ordinary troubles that lead to unwanted pregnancy and late-term abortions in the first place: poverty, family or relational conflict, denial and personal ineptitude.

If unwanted pregnancy was a crisis before 1973, Roe turned it into a problem, a soluble problem. These laws have turned it back into a crisis.

One place this is expressed — and you could hear it in the debate over the Child Custody Protection Act — is in the political rhetoric: the whole story of abortion must be a melodrama from start to finish. Both sides feel compelled to present the most harrowing of circumstances.

The text of the CCPA is such a narrative of violence and predation. Pro-choice pols talk the same way. “Sometimes tragedies happen, and sometimes families are not just negligent but abusive,” declared Hillary Rodham Clinton, speaking against S.403, “and sometimes young girls are taken advantage of by a member of their family, people in whom they should be able to trust.” Typically clinging to the fence, Clinton left unclear whether the “tragedy” was the abusive family or the abortion itself. Later, she predicted the law would lead to teenage deaths.

The only amendment the Democrats managed to get into the bill was Barbara Boxer’s, imposing criminal penalties on fathers who aid their daughters in aborting the fruits of their own sexual abuse. Conservatives who’d rather eat scorpions than vote with a California liberal hurried to sign on. Why? In the tragedy contest, Boxer had trumped even abortion — with incest. She later voted against the bill.

Before Roe, a pregnant woman might get an abortion if she could convince a doctor that having a baby would make her incurably ill, drive her insane or kill her. After Roe, human fallibility was enough to inspire sympathy. The ordinary horribles — carrying an unwanted fetus, giving up a baby for adoption, raising a child you can’t support or don’t love, losing your life as you know it — were, briefly, justification enough. Now, to legitimize abortion, a woman must also become pregnant “innocently,” preferably by victimization.

Unwanted pregnancy can no longer be an ordinary problem, or even an ordinary crisis.

This article originally appeared in Seven Days.

The justices stiffened the statute. “Well-informed” now means knowledgeable about the alternatives to abortion and its risks. But Owen wanted more: The girl must also be aware of the religious arguments against abortion. And she must contemplate grief.

The opinion reveals more than Owen’s zeal to save a fetus at any cost — including overstepping the law. It enshrines particular emotions as the only legitimate ones a woman might feel when ending a pregnancy.

If she really wanted to inform teens about the emotions around abortion, the judge might hand out DVDs of “Speak Out: I Had an Abortion,” a new film by Gillian Aldrich and Jennifer Baumgardner. In it, 11 women tell their stories. A couple express regret. Most express many other things.

In 1938, Florence Rice, a laundress and single mother, was too poor to raise two children. Even when an illegal procedure landed her in Harlem Hospital, Florence resisted demands that she squeal on the abortionist. Now tiny and aged, she remains firm: “I have no regrets.”

In 1953, Sally Aldrich got pregnant the first time she had sex. The abortionist groped her, and she felt “vile.” She tossed the diaphragm when her fiance found her insufficiently “spontaneous.” Got pregnant again, found another abortionist. Sally was summoned before a grand jury. Like the doctor, she was called a criminal. She told her interrogators the doctor was a hero.

In 1971, two years before Roe v. Wade, Florida undergrad Marion Banzhaf was as desperate as her foremothers, but rather than vile, she felt riled. She and her dorm-mates circulated a petition for legalization — and collected $350 for her legal abortion in New York. Afterwards, Marion says, she skipped down the street, singing.

In 1992, Robin Ringleka-Kottke, a Catholic with a cheerleading scholarship, telephoned a Christian “crisis pregnancy center.” The counselors promised to shelter her and find her baby a home. But when they learned the father was black, their hearts turned. “I should have been so angry,” says the tearful Robin, but she was ashamed — and bereft of all options but one. Waking in the recovery room, she felt “immensely relieved.” But for six silent years, “that seed of shame … thrived.”

In 2003, A’yen Tran became pregnant by her abusive boyfriend. She procured an at-home abortion drug, but it wasn’t until she was writhing in bed alone that she called her feminist mom. A’Yen is enraged that abortion opponents are “trying to … manufacture … guilt.” Yet even in her pro-choice circle, she cannot talk about her own abortion.

These personal stories tell a historical one: The terrors of the pre-Roe era turned, fleetingly, to empowerment and joy in the feminist ’70s. Three decades later, abortion is again cloaked in shame and silence. Even among proponents, this hard-won right is considered a sad, if necessary, evil. Activist Marge Ripper calls it “the awfulization of abortion.”

The youngest women in the film are torn by ambivalence. None wants a baby, yet almost all are indecisive about abortion. “Ambivalence is a function of legality,” observes Gloria Steinem. When she ended a pregnancy in 1957, desperation required resolve.

Perhaps ambivalence is the wages of choice. You walk one road. What if the other was better? But women make difficult choices all the time. Why should abortion be harder?

This ambivalence may be the greatest triumph of the anti-abortion movement. Sanctifying the fetus while demonizing women’s freedom as “selfishness,” it shifts moral sympathy from the woman to the potential baby. But the strategy is emotional: to unbalance the loss-gain equation of choosing. The loss is idealized: a perfect child, healthy, loved, provided-for. The gain is humbly real: life without pregnancy, with its rewards but also its disappointments. Even women who don’t share conservative values — who don’t believe nonmarital sex is sinful or abortion murder — can be induced to mourn the life they are not creating.

Still, choosing isn’t abstract; rarely are consequences unambiguous. Leave a bad marriage, become a single parent. Win the just war, lose lives. Feminist Ann Snitow says, “It’s the existential condition” — until now, the masculine condition. By defeating the tyranny of the body, she adds, “abortion makes women existential actors,” like men. Abortion makes women equal. It makes them free: responsible for their own actions.

This is not just a burden, though. It is empowering. And therein lies the strength of the pro-choice movement.

At 44, mother of two, Annie Finch got pregnant. She and her husband felt another child would be catastrophic for their family, yet Annie wept for the unborn baby. Seizing existential freedom, Annie realized her power: to give or “to not give” life. Then she chose life — her existing family’s and her own.

“Abortion is a real test for a woman’s self-respect,” says Annie. “It is to say, my life is worth this sacrifice.”

This article originally appeared in Seven Days.