Students with A Lot to Learn

Those who argue in favor of abortion rights in this country have begun to lash out at pregnancy centers. Most recently, and very close to home, is a student group at the University of Michigan who is falsely accusing the pregnancy center in Ann Arbor as being a threat to women. They have asked the City of Ann Arbor to force them to post signage indicating they “…do not refer for or perform abortions.” In short, they’re being accused of being biased.

This is mere harassment; laws and signs are not needed to protect women from those serving them at any of the 100 pregnancy centers throughout Michigan. These organizations exist to help women and their families make life-affirming decisions; ones they can live with, guilt-free, for the rest of their lives.

But, I suppose that if pregnancy centers are biased it’s because they err on the side of life, and not death. The bias I have personally developed as director of a pregnancy center that sees 200 otherwise aborted babies given life every year, is that most women don’t want an abortion in the first place. They have abortions because they feel they have no other option.

My bias is that no woman (if she was able to sleep) wakes up on the day of her abortion appointment thinking, “Alright! Today I get to go to the abortion clinic and terminate my pregnancy!” On the contrary, women agonize over this decision. And they go through with it often in spite of deep emotional and spiritual anguish.

One author and counselor (Theresa Burke), who has made it her life’s purpose to work with post-abortive women, describes the choice they make as being similar to that of an animal whose foot is caught in a trap—both gnaw off a part of their own flesh to get free.

But at this point I have to ask, does that sound like the “freedom of choice” the abortion rights people so ardently fight for? Not to me it doesn’t.

January 22nd marks 37 years of legalized abortion in the United States. Since then an estimated 50 million babies have been lost to this freedom of choice; the hard reality is that many of them could have been spared this fate if their mothers were simply shown a life-affirming option. Furthermore, I suspect that many of these moms regret their abortion decision, but they saw no other way out at the time.

If those who object to the work being done by pregnancy centers truly cared about choice, then they should have no trouble supporting an organization that is careful to present medically accurate information about all three responses to a pregnancy: parenting, adoption, and abortion. It’s true that pregnancy centers don’t perform or refer for abortions, but they don’t profit from them either. The valuable information they provide a woman in a crisis is factual, accurate, and (as tastefully as possible) describes what happens to both the baby and the mother during the abortion procedure. And do you know what? Abortion clinics don’t present all 3 options in this way; they benefit from only one—abortion. Pregnancy centers present information about all three and benefit from none.

They are not in it for the money, they’re in it because abortion hurts women and most of those seeking abortion don’t understand this.

What’s more, those serving women at pregnancy centers are the ones who will be there for her after the abortion. Statistically, 4 to 6 years after her abortion a woman will begin to suffer the emotional effects of her decision to the point that she finally seeks help. And its pregnancy centers that will be there for her; not the abortion clinics.

The students at U of M who stand in opposition to the work of their community’s pregnancy center would do well to learn from the experiences of women who’ve selected abortion as their way to be free. In listening to them they will realize that while the women are no longer pregnant, they most certainly are not free either. These students would also do well to support, or at the very least leave alone, an organization that presents all of the options—"choice's" if you will. Instead of being a detriment to women, I argue that pregnancy centers are the complete opposite: these organizations are often a woman’s only hope in an otherwise desperate situation.

If centers are biased, they are biased toward women being empowered to make informed decisions—decisions they can live with. Their job is to help those considering abortions discover another way out of their “trap.” They help remove the barriers to doing what a mother of a pre-born child wants to do in the first place; choose life.

And what’s so threatening about that?