Highlight: How abortion affects men

We often hear that abortion only affects women, and that men should just butt out. But could it be affecting men as well?

Brian Walker, an activist for 40 Days for Life and Pro-Life Action Ministries, is taking a different approach to saving lives from abortion through sidewalk advocacy.

40 Days for Life takes a Christ-focused approach of accessing God’s power through prayer, fasting, and peaceful vigil to reach couples headed for abortions. Since 2007, the organization has hosted 4,100 campaigns worldwide in 636 cities across 36 countries, including 18,000 churches.

By praying with fathers on the streets, Brian encourages them to step up and lead their partners away from clinics, and shows from personal experience how abortion really does affect men. Brian was the father to an aborted child 17 years ago, a decision he credits to his own self-centeredness. He speaks to men from the perspective of one who acknowledges a failure to accept his role as a leader in the relationship.

“My wife saw it as either me or the abortion and, as my manly role, I didn’t step up and say, let’s go to the clerk tomorrow. You will go down the aisle with child but you’ll have the covering of Jesus Christ and the covering of our marriage as well. I didn’t do that and so it wreaked havoc on our marriage for 17 years.”

“You can imagine a woman full of life, full of love, full of the Lord, that has to look at a man that decided to have our child killed because of convenience. And so how can you trust a person like that, how can you respect a man like that?”

Brian learned that you will reap what you sow.

There are prices to pay. The emotional, spiritual, physical toll that take a place on a man, because he knows that the image of God in the earth is going to be destroyed or brought to life because of his decision.”

These men are deeply affected by the knowledge that they truly are fathers responsible to protect the lives of their own children. Brian’s story is just one of those lives redeemed to become someone who now calls the broken to hope in Jesus Christ, the true hope for the hopeless.


Rev. Brian Walker is a minister and pro-life advocate in the Greater Minneapolis-St. Paul area, administering sidewalk counseling ministry with 40 Days for Life. He is Program Director for Pro-Life Action Ministries, providing rescue mission services, and training and equipping ministers for sidewalk counseling at abortion clinics. Brian is also Co-Founder of Everlasting Light Ministries, providing abortion and miscarriage recovery ministry.

How abortion affects men