Cristian Budău, post-abortive father: Life is far too precious. And our silence can end it / March for Life Bucharest 2026

A Romanian post-abortive father spoke on Saturday, March 28, at the Bucharest March for Life, 24 years after he let her life partner get an abortion:

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I am going to ask you something, and I want you to sit with this question. How many of us have been complicit in a crime… and did not know it for years?

I have. My silence made me an accomplice to a crime. The crime against my own child.

I was 27 years old.
She told me she was pregnant. And she looked at me.

Do you know what a woman looks for in a man’s eyes in that moment?
She wants to see that she exists for him. That she is seen. That the man beside her does not run away.

I chose to run away. And instead of hope, I left her with six words:
“I will pay for the procedure.”

I saw with my own eyes how the last spark of hope faded from her gaze.
And that child never came into the world.

For years I believed I had escaped.
But the truth is that you never escape. The weight of that decision settles on your shoulders slowly, surely, permanently.

Because a woman’s decision to keep her child depends enormously on the man beside her.
She did not choose alone. I chose for her—through silence, through a few cold words spoken by a man who was simply afraid.

Today I speak to every man who can hear me.

They say we are half of the responsibility. Apparently.
Now, twenty-five years later, I know something that I completely ignored back then: if a woman feels that the man beside her does not run away from responsibility—in more than 90 percent of cases—she chooses to keep the child.

Ninety percent.

That means that we, men, are not half of the story. Most of the time, the decision is in our hands.
And yet, most of the time… we leave the woman beside us—our girlfriend, our wife, our partner—to carry everything alone.

If you are a man and someone in your life is going through this right now—stop.

What is needed from you is simple:
Do not push her toward a choice that her soul does not want.
You push her through your silence. You push her through your distance. That is what I did.

“I am here. We will go through this together.”
Nine words. That would have been enough.
I did not say them.

My child would be 24 years old today.
I do not know what he or she would have looked like. I do not know what dreams he or she would have had.
I only know that this child would have existed—if I had chosen, in that moment, to be a man.

Life is far too precious.
And our silence can end it.

Dear men, I am telling you this from the position of someone who can no longer turn back time.
I cannot return to that moment. But you can avoid ending up where I am now.
Choose life.

I have said everything I had to say to men. Now a thought for the women in this square.

When I met my current wife, what intrigued me—what attracted me enough to want to stay beside her—was a “NO.”
Spoken calmly, firmly, without leaving room for negotiation. No to intimate relationships before marriage.

Paradoxically, the more a woman respects herself, the more a man feels that he has something to gain by staying beside her.

And a man who chooses to stay beside you without the stake of intimate relationships—that man will also be beside you at the most important moment in your life as a couple: when, after marriage, God sends you a child.

Ladies, give him this test.
It will be the most important test in your life as a couple.

Thank you.