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Beyond men, PAS is becoming a family affair. There's some talk of PAS for siblings, otherwise known as Post-Abortion Survivor Syndrome, which is said to mimic guilt and fear suffered by Holocaust survivors. A combination of these emotions, writes Philip Ney, a prominent antiabortion researcher, "may result in angry, narcissistic, destructive young people. There are millions of abortion survivors who are all too ready to destroy or be destroyed." Ney and others are also working on PAS for grandparents who, "having aborted some of their children or having urged their children to abort...[will] have a deep fear of retaliation."

Suddenly, using nothing but anecdote framed in scientific forms, a single abortion has not one victim, or even two, but three or four or five. And beyond that, millions of abortions have millions of victims: one in four women, and by extension one in four men, and one in four parents, and countless children, until society itself is a victim, filled with all sorts of personal and interpersonal tragedies of divorce, drug use and suicide from which we--all Americans--need protection.

And that becomes a justification for many things: for banning abortion; for spousal notification laws, currently deemed unconstitutional (though the new Supreme Court, in a new political climate, could change that); for compelling women to hear fabricated dangers in the name of "informed consent"; for coercing women into carrying children they do not wish to bear; even for murder--the very kind of violent strategy that had seemed to be replaced by the empathetic stance of PAS.

In a surreal moment in San Francisco in November, Vincent Rue interwove his compassionate PowerPoint presentation on the suffering of the hollow men with a strange selection of text that flashed brightly on a black screen. It read: "'He was upset because it was his child and he was not consulted. It just broke him. When he found out about it, it just flipped him out.' --Emaline Kopp, Stepmother of James Kopp who killed NY abortion provider Dr. Slepian."

Now we understand. Pity the man.

As with nearly everything in the antichoice world, it all comes back to traditional gender roles -- how feminism wrecked America, and how conservative Christianity is the only way to "redemption." As the antichoicers see it,

...if women's pain from abortion has been ignored, men's has been ignored all the more because men have been marginalized in our feminist, feminized society. Here the story gets entwined with traditional, and essentialized, ways of seeing men. Because a man's instinct is to protect and provide for his offspring, his very masculinity is challenged when his child, born or unborn, is killed.

And:

...That's because in addition to suffering from the effects of abortion, postabortive men are also suffering from the effects of feminism. The clues to this culture-war agenda are hidden throughout the men's PAS materials. The San Francisco conference was speckled with references to being "politically incorrect" with a sort of glee at confronting the culture head-on; it was filled with oblique references to what the women's movement has done to men's emotional lives--a grown-up version of Christina Hoff Sommers's The War Against Boys. Did you know, for instance, that the form of women's healing is a "bowl," while the form of men's healing is a "spear"? (Subtle, this.)

Sarah makes a strong case that this isn't just a crackpot wing of the antichoice movement that we can ignore. We've seen the "women need to be protected from their own choices" rhetoric pop up all over -- from the South Dakota ban to Gonzales v. Carhart to Missouri's biased abortion task force. She warns that, as antichoicers collect men's stories, men's PAS threatens to do the same.