Abortion
Frederica Mathewes-Green
Yet the most important thing pregnancy centers provide will always remain the individual friendship support that a pregnant woman needs. When I began research for my book, "Real Choices: Listening to Women, Looking for Alternatives to Abortion," I had the goal of discovering the main reasons women had abortions. I thought that if we could rank-order the problems women faced, material, practical, and financial, we’d be able to address them more effectively.
To my great surprise, I found that these practical forms of support were only secondarily important. Over and over, women told me that the reason she’d had an abortion was that someone she cared about told her she should. The people she needed to lean on for support in a crisis pregnancy, like her boyfriend or mother, didn’t supply that support, but instead encouraged her -- and sometimes, sadly, coerced her -- to have an abortion instead.
*You can get to the whole essay by following the link essays->Three Bad Ideas*
Yet the most important thing pregnancy centers provide will always remain the individual friendship support that a pregnant woman needs. When I began research for my book, "Real Choices: Listening to Women, Looking for Alternatives to Abortion," I had the goal of discovering the main reasons women had abortions. I thought that if we could rank-order the problems women faced, material, practical, and financial, we’d be able to address them more effectively.
To my great surprise, I found that these practical forms of support were only secondarily important. Over and over, women told me that the reason she’d had an abortion was that someone she cared about told her she should. The people she needed to lean on for support in a crisis pregnancy, like her boyfriend or mother, didn’t supply that support, but instead encouraged her -- and sometimes, sadly, coerced her -- to have an abortion instead.
*You can get to the whole essay by following the link essays->Three Bad Ideas*
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