With all the attention that the Church focuses on abortion and its aftermath, here is one group often overlooked: the fathers.

A California conference later this fall will seek to change that, according to this item from the Catholic News Service:

It took a long time for attorney Chris Aubert to miss his children — the ones he lost to abortion.

But once he did — and it took the better part of a decade — he was ready to make his choice for life.

Aubert is scheduled to speak at a “Reclaiming Fatherhood” conference Nov. 28-29 in San Francisco, funded by the Knights of Columbus and co-sponsored by the Knights and the Archdiocese of San Francisco.

It is being organized by the Milwaukee-based Office of Post-Abortion Reconciliation and Healing, headed by Vicki Thorn, and according to the office, the event is the first to focus on the effects of abortion on men.

The conference, according to Thorn, could help men dealing with the psychological trauma of post-abortion reality the way Project Rachel — the post-abortion healing ministry of the Catholic Church Thorn founded — has helped women who have undergone abortions deal with their own psychological scars.

Aubert, in a telephone interview with Catholic News Service from The Woodlands, Texas, a Houston suburb, said that in 1985, when he first impregnated a woman who was ” a friend, but not really a girlfriend, I was not a one-woman man, let’s say, at the time, and I had no qualms about premarital sex or anything like that.”

Nor did he have any qualms about her decision to have an abortion. “She got the abortion. I did not go. It was a complete and total nonevent for me,” he said. “My thinking was at the time this was just a collection of nonviable tissue cells, it’s perfectly legal, it’s her body — all the things today I find as laughably silly. I bought into it.” He never saw the woman again.

Much the same was true in 1991, six years later, when he got his girlfriend pregnant. “I had just been civilly divorced outside the church and I was not ready to get married again. She was a Methodist, I was a ‘nothing.'” Nominally Jewish, Aubert said his bar mitzvah in 1970 was the last time he had stepped into a synagogue. “She had no quarrel with the abortion. I said, ‘Fine with me,'” he recalled.

There was a difference, though, between the two abortions.

“This time, however, I did go into the clinic with her. I went into the waiting room with her,” Aubert said. “Looking back, it was probably something very, very deep within me that said, ‘Something about this isn’t right.’ I wouldn’t have been able to articulate it if you asked me. … Something about the second one seems different.”

Thorn told CNS in a Sept. 19 interview that research indicates men go through their own physical changes as they go through pregnancy with their mate. One is a lessening of testosterone. Men also bond more closely with their mate after childbirth and are willing to make sacrifices to solidify the family unit: “I’ll make that midnight run for diapers, and, honey, since I’m out, do you want any Starbucks?” Those changes, Thorn added, are short-circuited in an abortion.

There’s much more at the link — and more information about Reclaiming Fatherhood right here.