Abortion regret nearly killed Sean. Now he works with a pro-life men's ministry

When Sean Corcoran was a freshman in college, his girlfriend of several months told him she was pregnant. He knew fatherhood would change his life, and he fully embraced it. He was stunned when his girlfriend told him she was planning to have an abortion.

“I was accepting of my responsibility in this pregnancy and tried hard to dissuade her from having the abortion. When you get pregnant, you’re already a parent," Corcoran told Live Action News.

Despite his support for her and their baby and his objections to abortion, his girlfriend remained firm in her decision. So Corcoran turned to his father for help. 

“My dad met with my girlfriend’s mom,” Corcoran said. “He offered to adopt the baby and raise the child, but both my girlfriend and her mother was set on having the abortion. My girlfriend felt the pregnancy would get in the way of college and subsequent career plans. She wasn’t willing to place the baby for adoption.”

Corcoran doesn’t remember much about the day his girlfriend had the abortion. He recalls driving her there as he didn’t want her to go alone, but everything else remains fuzzy. Afterward, his girlfriend struggled with the weight of her decision to abort.

“She talked to a school counselor,” Corcoran said. “As a result, her classes were waived. I went to the same person to discuss my struggle with the abortion and was told I wasn’t in the same situation as her. My trauma was dismissed because I wasn’t the one who had the abortion.”

But his trauma was real. Corcoran was suffering from a depression so deep that he wouldn’t leave his room during the rest of the semester. He was suspended from the university due to failing grades, returned home, and enrolled at a local college.

“I failed twice out of that college as well," he said. "Then, I started abusing alcohol and drugs and engaging in a destructive lifestyle to numb the way I felt. I didn’t at the time connect my behavior to the abortion because I had been told it didn’t impact me.”

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Downward spiral leads to addiction and homelessness

His life continued to spiral downward for the next seven years, marked by homelessness, unemployment, and addiction. His parents cut him off, having bailed him out for so long. He was fired from his job for stealing from his employer.

“I had been ... isolating myself in a dirty motel room for two weeks, hoping to overdose, waiting for the police to arrest me,” Corcoran said. “I hadn’t spoken to my parents for six weeks. I had stolen from my family, and broken their trust, so my dad finally set some boundaries.”

A hurricane had just devastated the area where Corcoran was living, and the motel had no staff at the time. There was a single light bulb left in his room, which Corcoran used to feed his seven-year addiction to methamphetamine.

“I knew someone was going to come find me dead. As I was lying on the filthy carpet, I started praying, asking God to help me only because I didn’t want to embarrass my family by dying of an overdose in a seedy motel room.”

Corcoran passed out, and when he awoke the next morning, his head was clear. He knew what he needed to do — he went to his truck and pulled out a pamphlet for a treatment center he had shoved under the driver’s seat two years prior.

“Strange that I remembered where to find that pamphlet,” Corcoran said. “But I got in my dying, rickety truck that I hadn’t maintained in five years and managed to drive three hours to the treatment center.”

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When the counselor reviewed Corcoran’s history, he mentioned the abortion. The counselor encouraged him to talk about it.

“That’s when I finally got permission to mourn the loss of my child,” Corcoran said.

She helped him to write letters of forgiveness to his girlfriend, himself, and to his child. Now, he could start to heal.

Finding a new calling in the fight for life

After Corcoran completed treatment for his addictions, he returned to college, eventually graduated from law school, and started his own law practice.

Corcoran said, “I remember at the time that my counselor didn’t mention I wasn’t the only man who had suffered the loss of a child from abortion. I had been plagued with guilt and regret and there were other men like me as I would find out.”

It would be another eight years before he talked about the abortion at a men’s church retreat.  

“After sharing my story, three men came up to me and confided that they, too, had abortion in their background. Like me, they felt so isolated; this is just not something men talk about freely.”

As Corcoran began speaking at more retreats, more men came forward.

In 2022, Corcoran, now married with five children, three of whom were adopted, quit his law practice. Then Men for Life contacted him, asking him to lead the organization. Its mission: “to reignite authentic masculinity, calling men off the sidelines to protect, provide, lead and serve as the men God called them to be.” But Corcoran wasn’t interested.

Corcoran said, “I planned to start another business and flew to California to meet with a business consultant I had been working with for eight months. While on the plane, God told me I was going to run Men for Life, but I hadn’t been in contact with them in four months.”

When he met with the business consultant and mentioned that Men for Life had contacted him, the consultant encouraged him to take the job. He told Corcoran the ministry sounded like a perfect fit.

“I was surprised, I was hoping he’d tell me it was a bad idea,” Corcoran said. “It would have given me a reason to move on.”

Corcoran emailed Men for Life and asked if the position was still open. He started in August 2024. 

 “We are in a spiritual war, one in which 90% of those fighting are women,” Corcoran said. “If we have men consigned to sit back and write checks while we send our women off to fight, then we are failing in our own masculinity. When we change the culture, we save babies.”