Publish September, 2000
Impassioned discussions on abortion focus on the death of the innocent unborn and the physical and mental pain women suffer. But there is a silent victim who remains in the background. Abortion hurts men, too.
Larry Mann speaks to this truth. As a newsman, he is able to look at articles on abortion with an empathetic eye. He’s been there. And it’s a story he is willing to share, “as a testimony for other people who have been in the same situation.”
Larry begins, “I grew up without God in my life and thought that I lived by the Golden Rule. My own ‘golden rule,’ though. I lived a wild and crazy, go-for-all-the-gusto, kind of lifestyle.”
He attended a social singles group and was drawn to the “cut loose and party” atmosphere. This is where Larry met Kathy. “She and I had an instant attraction and were at the stage where we wanted to be busy all the time, on the run. There were tons of private parties going on. We often attended two or three activities in the same day and seldom got home before 2:00 a.m.
“It was not a good time economically,” Larry remembers. “It was not a good time in our relationship to want to get married.” At this juncture in their life together, Larry and Kathy unexpectedly faced their most difficult challenge. After only a couple of months together, “She got pregnant. We talked about it. She said, ‘There’s just no way I can have this child.’ And I agreed.”
Like so many couples, many factors weighed on Larry and Kathy. Their relationship was insecure. She was struggling to parent two girls from a previous marriage. Larry pondered the serious responsibilities of fathering a child. “One of my main concerns was possibly getting stuck with paying child support for the next 18 to 20 years….It was a selfish decision.”
Today, his quiet voice gives way to the pain he carries inside. “She was seven or eight weeks pregnant. So I took her to an abortion clinic in the Chicago area, and I paid for the abortion. I gave her a ride. Of course, she’s the one who had to go through the abortion.
“I’m not trying to convince anybody that I didn’t know in my own mind what was going on. People who say that this isn’t a viable human being, I think are kidding themselves….I think I knew in my own mind exactly what I was doing, despite the fact that I didn’t know Christ.”
Following the abortion, Larry and Kathy continued their relationship. Engaged twice, they never got married. “Her children were just not conducive to us getting together.” The children weren’t their only problem. “We were so messed up and confused. We were living a destructive lifestyle, going from one bar to another.”
Eventually, Kathy concluded that a Christian influence might be good for her daughter. “She asked me if I would take them to church.” They began a church search that led them one Sunday to Willow Creek Community Church. “Bill Hybels was speaking on abortion. Kathy just cried, the tears really welled up inside of her….I felt like he was really talking to me. He had selected me out of the group.”
This was the beginning of the end for their relationship. “That was where I really got touched by the spirit. I continued to go to church. I went in one direction, and she didn’t.”
But Larry was no easy convert. “After I went to church that first time, I wrote a scathing letter to the church challenging them. ‘God wasn’t any more real than the Easter bunny or Santa Claus. What a bunch of phonies they were!’ The church turned the letter over to a man named Mark in charge of their evangelism department. He called me and asked me to come in to talk with him.
“I agreed to do that, but I was real angry.” Larry pushed against Mark with question after question. Mark was patient, answering each question. “We just kept on ‘shuffling through’ my anger and trying to figure out what I was angry about.”
When all of his questions were answered, Mark challenged Larry, “OK, so what’s holding you back now? There’s something. There’s something there. What is it?”
Larry’s voice slows. “It was at that point that I was able to say.” He confessed to the abortion and Mark’s response was unexpected. “He told me that God was gracious and forgiving, that there was no sin that couldn’t be forgiven if you could bring that sin to God and confess to Him.
“I had always thought of religion in the past as God being a punitive God, somebody standing behind you waiting to hit you with a two-by-four for whatever you did wrong. Finding out the love, the grace, and the forgiveness was the turning point for me.”
In December, 1988, Larry Mann was baptized. “The pastor of the church I went to allowed people to write their sins on a piece of paper, fold it up, and physically pin it to the cross. I wrote one word on that piece of paper.”
Larry explains, “Dealing with that sin was the biggest stumbling block to me coming to Christ. I have compassion for the people who have been there, whether they kidded themselves into thinking this wasn’t a human being, or whether they came to the realization later…I have a real heart for those people.”
He also has a special understanding for men who may suffer with the guilt of abortion. “I think they just kind of sweep it under the rug….Men oftentimes consider themselves to be an island unto themselves. To confess your weaknesses to somebody else is to make yourself vulnerable. I think this is something that a lot of men aren’t dealing with, that figure when it happened, it was her problem.”
Larry today has a desire to reach out to anybody who is hurting from the guilt and pain of an abortion. “The message I would like to get out is, if you’ve been through this, instead of stuffing it, figure out how to get it out and handle it. It’s hard to grow in your faith, it’s hard to be used by God, if you have something festering in you that isn’t getting solved. There is healing available.”
