I think abortion should remain legal, but it needs to be safe and rare. And I have spent many years now, as a private citizen, as first lady, and now as senator, trying to make it rare, trying to create the conditions where women had other choices (emphasis added).
Hilary Clinton is pro-choice, but she is not pro-abortion. She wants to bring the abortion rate down dramatically. Her goal is to create the conditions where women have other choices than abortion.
The founder of the National Women's Coalition for Life, Jeannie W. French, was not very far removed from Ms Clinton's statement when she said:
The answer to a crisis pregnancy is to eliminate the crisis, not the child.
Call me crazy, but I see a good deal of common ground there. Sure, the two spokespeople won't agree on the moral acceptability of abortion. But they agree big time on desirable options to eliminate the crises that often lead to the termination of pregnancies.
The issue for us in the life camp, however, is to first define what a crisis pregnancy is, and then to look at options.
Or we can stand on the sidelines and call for change to legislation and/or make moralistic judgments about women like Hillary Clinton. To put it another way, we can engage the culture or we can live outside of it.
So let's begin by defining just what a crisis is. For that, I want to post a guest column I first ran in this blog in 2007. It is an anonymous post, but I know the woman who wrote it, and I can affirm that she is pro-life. Yet her experience with women and girls in crisis has led her to certain conclusions, some of which you may find surprising. She also has some options to suggest.
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Who put the crisis in crisis pregnancy?
First of all we raise girls to be hyper sexual. We put our little girls in tiny bikinis. We allow our pre-teens to dress like prostitutes. Ads on TV and in print present young women as sexual prizes for men who can afford an expensive car. Male publishers (and female ones too) market women as sexually available to anyone anytime. The message is: women exist for men. It's called female subordination. Pregnancy is not part of the message. Male responsibility is not mentioned.
So a pregnancy can be a crisis in the relationship. He never meant to be a father. She was not raised to support herself and her child(ren).
Societally, women have been streamed into low wage jobs, and although feminists have worked hard to change that, women's wages, even for those who can work full time full year, still average 70% of men's.
In addition, maternity benefits and child care provisions are still poor. For every small improvement, there seems to be a setback and except for Quebec, there aren't enough accessible regulated programs affordable to average income women. Child care subsidies are inadequate. Mr. Harper's government offered a taxable benefit of a hundred dollars a month to mothers of a child under six. My daughter's childcare expenses for her four year old are $650 a month.
So pregnancy can be an economic crisis for a woman without a partner willing to contribute financially or personally to the raising of the child. A male-dominant individualistic society leaves her and her child on her own.
People in my church are under the illusion that “the government takes care of people like her.” They are unaware that income assistance is less than half the income she requires to support herself and her child. And it ends when the child is three.
Adoption, the alternative proffered by many pro-life people, is also anti-life, particularly if the adoption is closed. It ignores the child's lifelong feelings of abandonment as well as the mother's pain.
One woman who had given up a child said to me, years later, “Every time I read about a child molested or killed I wonder, “Is that my child? “
So after one adoption, next time she will have an abortion. There often is a next time, because her grief, her low self-esteem and her lifelong training in subordination will drive her into another man's arms. As a society, we have made a “life choice” very difficult for her.
Many people see all this as “no more than she deserves,” but that's blaming the victim. A truly pro-life society would work on male responsibility, different socialization, better wages for women, more affordable regulated child care programs and improved income assistance. Changing the world is harder than we think.
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