ABORTION IS A HUMAN AND FAMILY ISSUE.

I remember the day the Chicago radio station announced the Roe v. Wade decision. There was a sound of shock and pain from my parents as they both said, "Oh, no!" Little did anyone know at the time that abortion would strike our family, and that I would someday lose my son to that evil.

Harry Blackmun and six of his colleagues said the "right" to "terminate a pregnancy" was guaranteed by the Constitution. We can believe that they knew what "terminating a pregnancy" would do to the baby. Yet nowhere in the 60-plus pages of their opinion does it address what aborting a child would mean to the relationship between a man and a woman, and to the child's father. Nor did Blackmun and the rest discuss abortion's long-term effects.

"Emma" (a pseudonym) and I met when we were in our early 20s. We were crazy about each other. Despite our upbringings, we lived in a time and place where the books, magazines, movies, and music told us we could do what we wanted, as long as it felt good, and it didn't "hurt anyone." These same voices told us that each of us was the center of the universe. Heck, they told us we were the universe.

We fell into this stupidity, and when our son was conceived, we were faced with the question of what to do. His fate was decided not by a painstaking, frank discussion, but with two short answers to two questions exchanged in the middle of the night.

Emma and I did not know what we were doing, and we did not know what our son's loss would do to us. We did not understand the feelings we had after the abortion, nor did we know how to deal with them.

If we tried to discuss his loss there was anger, yelling, accusations, or outright dismissal of the subject with a joke or quick turn of phrase. I think that we believed by ignoring what had happened, the whole thing would just "go away" and things could go back to the way they were.

But things couldn't, and wouldn't, ever be the same. We drifted apart, and the relationship ended as most do when there is an abortion.