The following is the opinion and analysis of the writer:
I’ve held a friend’s hand as she recalled the story of her early abortion and expressed relief that she wouldn’t be tied to her volatile, underemployed, erratic boyfriend forever because of a child. And even though I’m anti-abortion, I, too, was grateful she wasn’t trapped with that man.
I’ve listened as another friend wept, “That was my grandbaby,” in one sentence and said, “But he’s my son” in the next, ashamed to be grateful that her 19-year-old son’s almost 17-year-old girlfriend got an abortion because the girl was afraid her father would press charges against her boyfriend. Due to sexual offender laws in that state, the young man would have been on “the list” for life, despite the sex being consensual, because our broken legal system can’t discern between pedophiles and college freshmen with their high school girlfriends. And even though I’m anti-abortion, I found myself grateful as well.
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I’ve watched a woman develop such severe mental illness during pregnancy it terrified all around her and observed as doctors realized the only cure to what pregnancy hormones had wrought in her brain was getting the baby out of her. She reached normalcy about the time her child blew out his first birthday candle and even though I’m anti-abortion, I’ve wondered mightily about the risk another pregnancy would pose.
I’ve paid a single mom’s utility bills and rent, donated hundreds of dollars to a childcare scholarship fund in one of Tucson’s poorest neighborhoods, contributed to the purchase of an ultrasound machine at a local crisis pregnancy center and helped a distraught, exhausted, crying mom and her screaming infant in the grocery store while chastising those around us who stood staring instead of helping. I’ve done these things flaming angry at a supposed pro-life country that can’t seem to manage the most basic support for motherhood.
And I’ve sat on the floor of a cramped but love-filled home, massively sedated by medications given to ease my postpartum depression, feeding my 3-week-old infant while my 16-month-old ran his little cars up my leg and I tried to read a book to my 3-year-old, thinking I wouldn’t make it through the day. Years later, I received a phone call from a priest who knew my history, asking me to visit a new mom whose desperate husband had called the church in a panic.
I did that mom’s laundry, fed her toddler, changed the baby’s diaper and, after six hours of undoing lousy theology she’d heard at her church — “If you have faith, your depression will go away” — convinced her to get psychiatric treatment. Three months later, she saw me at a bowling alley, ran up and hugged me, saying I’d saved her life. I literally didn’t recognize her because she was so happy. The woman I’d visited months earlier, the one whose depression had convinced her she couldn’t be successful in motherhood, had looked dead.
These memories have flooded me lately, following the leak of a Supreme Court draft ruling pointing to the likely abolition of Roe v. Wade, the nearly 50-year-old Court ruling guaranteeing a federal right to abortion up to 24 weeks gestation. Because no matter what some say, life is not black and white, pregnancy is not always ribbons and rainbows, and raising children in a country with leadership that supports getting babies out of the womb but vehemently fights legislation to support the hard work of raising them is fraught at best. And frankly, this part of the village can’t do everything by myself.
And yet, here we are. So, what to do?
Well, if you claim the title pro-life, now’s the time to prove you’re actually more than pro-birth by championing public policies to help mothers and children, which means voting for politicians who actually want to pass such policies. Here’s a newsflash: that ain’t Republicans.
Both political parties “waste” money, but Democrats are far more likely than Republicans to “waste” it on policies that help the poor, working families, the middle class and children. Republicans are more likely to “waste” it giving massive tax breaks to the rich, believing that trickle-down economics will lift all boats — even though history has shown it does little more than drown people downstream.
The Biden Administration came up with a pro-family plan in its Build Back Better legislation and the GOP — aided by Arizona’s own Democrat-in-name-only Kyrsten Sinema — have blocked its passage. For decades, the party of big business and rampant capitalism has made a habit of fighting everything mothers need to establish crucial early bonds with their infants, raise healthy children, get out of poverty and succeed in the job market: federally mandated paid maternity leave, affordable quality childcare, universal preschool, increases in the minimum wage, universal health care that covers contraception, comprehensive sexual education, job training, and any tax break that might benefit the mom working at a company instead of the CEO running it.
According to women — and it’s always women — who work in crisis pregnancy centers and in under-served communities, abortion isn’t caused by legal access. Instead, these women in the trenches explain, abortion is caused by lack of access to all the things listed above, as well as violence against women, religious shame and exclusion, family coercion or shunning, and the wholesale inability of employers and educational institutions to respect what a woman’s body and brain is doing when growing a human being and provide for those needs without the not-so-subtle “preggers punishment” at the office or in school.
The United States is the sole country of the 38-member Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development that does not offer working women at least 12 weeks of paid maternity leave. Canada offers 39 and France and the United Kingdom offer 52! In Sweden, both parents qualify for some paid leave, so together, Baby can have an entire 18 months with one parent at home. Most of these countries also offer subsidized child care and free preschool.
Compare those options with the fact that only 21% of U.S. workers have access to paid family leave through their companies, according to U.S. Department of Labor statistics, and 40% of working moms don’t even qualify for the Family Medical Leave Act, which guarantees 12 weeks of unpaid leave to care for a family member. Many new moms return to work only two weeks after giving birth to put food on the table or, in white-collar jobs, to demonstrate to the boss that motherhood won’t stop them from being a “crucial contributor.” And day care, on average, costs more than a year’s tuition at a public university — while the average child care worker earns less than $35,000 annually.
Those on the far left want abortion with zero restrictions, blindly ignoring that the difference between an abortion at 25 weeks and infanticide is simply the location of the body being killed. The worst of them do “performance art” outside Catholic churches where they pull dolls out of their shirts, smash them on the ground and say, “I’m killing my baby!”
Those on the far right want no abortion, no matter the circumstances, and also want to block access to sexual education and contraception. The worst of them push female-damaging purity culture and chant “baby killer” outside of abortion clinics.
Neither extreme represents the majority of Americans. A Pew Research Center survey of 11,044 citizens conducted the week of March 7-13, showed that 61% support legal abortion in the first trimester, but only 22% support it at 24 weeks, the deadline allowed under Roe. (Ninety-four percent of all abortions take place before 13 weeks, according to the Guttmacher Institute.)
The Centers for Disease Control reports that nearly 60% of all abortions are obtained by women who already have at least one child, pointing to the truth that poverty often plays an outsized role in these decisions. These women understand what it takes to raise a child in the Land of the Poor and know quite well, thank you very much, that they can’t support another — even with three years of free diapers from the local crisis pregnancy center.
As Angela Garbes wrote in her recent book, “Essential Labor: Mothering as Social Change,” parenting is “not a private hobby, not an individual duty … It is a social responsibility, one that requires robust community support.” (Italics mine.) Indeed, it takes a village to raise children, and that village needs to include the government.
If Roe falls, the pro-life movement will finally have the chance to prove it is more than simply pro-birth. To do so, it should break ranks with politicians who believe everyone can pull themselves up by their bootstraps if they just try hard enough, and support politicians committed to providing the systemic change needed to fully support mothers and children. Only then will women see abortion for what it really is, instead of the light at the end of a dark tunnel. And only then will we truly be a pro-life country.
