A father who lost two unborn babies to abortions decades ago has expressed the pain and guilt he felt following his partners’ decisions.
“The choice to terminate your child’s life will change you forever,” Nashville resident Keith Branson told The Daily Caller News Foundation Tuesday. While it may seem difficult at first to keep the child as part of your life or to give up the baby for adoption, “the consequence of your choice to have sex should not be murder that will just compound your guilt and misery for years to come,” he said.
He recounted that two different women aborted two of his children and he struggled to come to grips with ending two lives for a long time. His first partner made him promise not to tell anyone she was pregnant and had an abortion against his will.
“I was a paralyzed, young, self-focused guy with no clue what to do but to become passive with no plan of action,” Branson told TheDCNF. His partner went to a friend to get the abortion and didn’t offer for him to be involved.
Branson recounted that his second partner didn’t tell him she was pregnant until after she already had an abortion.
“My relationship ended in both cases,” Branson told TheDCNF. “Neither of the women has given me permission to share about them, nor have I been able to speak to either since about it.”
“The gravity of what happened in both situations hit me hard,” he continued, explaining that he’d put the guilt and shame he felt in a box and was afraid to remove the lid. “For decades I tried to mask the pain and negative emotions from it by escapism.”
Following the abortions, Branson struggled with alcohol and drugs and prayed for forgiveness in order to feel able to move forward through the pain. His prayers eventually set him free, but “the regret of what I had done has always been a part of my memories.”
His comments come on the heels of a June 12 #ChooseFatherhood video featuring fathers and would-be fathers describing the pain and regret they experienced when their partners aborted their unborn children. (RELATED: Save The Storks Vans Protecting Thousands Of Babies From Abortion [VIDEO])
Branson has been married for 32 years and has three children and four grandchildren.
He is the the director of the nonprofit “Westminster Home Connection,“ which provides critical home repairs and mobility modifications to low income seniors in Middle Tennessee. He also served as the director of Youth Encouragement Services and Beam Research Center.
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