This week we have a guest post from Pro-Life Advocate and speaker, Meagan Weber.
IMG_5006We are just days away from the 42nd anniversary date of the Supreme Court’s decision to pass Roe v Wade and Doe v Bolton. Many pro-life organizations are solidifying the final details of their annual pilgrimage to Washington DC, and the over 600,000 supporters with the means to travel are trying to figure out how to fit their winter jackets and boots into a carry-on travel bag. I am personally hoping that this will be the last year that we march, that this will be the year that the abortion rights movement will finally see that their arguments for “safe,” legal and “rare” abortion are null and void. I’m hoping that they will finally see that pro-life people have stepped up to the plate to provide abundantly for the circumstances in which they deem an abortion “necessary.” Never in our history has abortion been a “need” because we know that with God, all things are possible. However, there was a time in our history where the true needs of women and the children they conceived out of wedlock were not being compassionately met.
During the time that abortion first became legal in the United States, there was a lot of stigma surrounding unwed/unplanned pregnancy. Women were often shunned from their families and churches if they were found to be with child. Women were also secretly sent to homes for unwed mothers where they would remain until they had given birth. Their children would then be placed into closed adoptions which would usually mean they would never again have contact with their children. These women would then return home with their head hanging in shame…shame that could never be shared with anyone. They carried these burdens alone. Many of these women went on to get married and have families, but sadly took the secret of their children born out of wedlock to the grave, leaving their other children to never learn of their siblings unless by some chance a relative chose to speak up and break the silence. Recently, there has been a trend on social media in which people are sharing pictures of themselves with signs containing the limited information they have about their birth stories. Many of these adopted children now have a desire to meet the women who sacrificed so much to bring them into this world.
Not all women caved into the demands of secrecy and silence. Some rebelliously fought to keep and parent their children, but often found it difficult to find and maintain a job with a sustainable wage. Their children were treated and labeled as “illegitimate,” and they were labeled as “loose” women. So few people were willing to support and/or babysit for them, as their involvement put them at risk for being judged by association. The life of a single mom looked a whole lot different back then compared to now. As a result of this stigma, there were many people who forced their teenage or young adult children into marriage in order to protect the families’ reputations. Even my own mother posed for wedding pictures with her belly, containing my brother, neatly tucked behind the wedding cake. Two wrongs don’t make a right and many of these forced marriages led to resentment and even abuse. Just because two people make a poor decision to engage in sexual activity outside of marriage doesn’t mean that they will have a healthy or successful life together. I know in my own circumstances of unwed/unplanned pregnancy, being a single parent to my children was much healthier for them than marrying either of their fathers. Although I have no doubts that there were some wonderful and well-intentioned people who were trying to provide support and resources, their voices and presence were just not strong or loud enough to make a large, community-wide impact. To sum up the available options for unwed pregnant women back then, they could:

  1. hide away in secret and give birth to a child they would never know;
  2. be shunned and labeled as they fought tooth and nail to raise their child, typically in poverty; or
  3. submit to a forced marriage and hope that it would all work out.

As a committed Christian, I must admit that the status of unwed mothers during this time is a direct failure of the Christian church. I do not say this to bash on the church, but the church truly did miss an amazing opportunity to minister to those in these fragile circumstances. Judgment, shame, secrets, and rejection took place where unconditional love, discipleship, and charity were meant to be. Further evidence is the deafening silence of the church during the Roe v Wade/Doe v Bolton cases.
Insert the option of abortion. To a woman facing this situation, it would be quite tempting to just “make it all go away.” Her other options seemed bleak. There is a quote that I heard by Frederica Mathewes-Green that truly sums up how a woman in this position feels. She said, “Women choose abortion the same way that an animal caught in a trap chooses to gnaw its own leg off.” It is a tragic reality, but if we take a moment to really evaluate the manner in which the church reacted back then to women in these situations, we will see that the church unknowingly helped pave the way and provided the building blocks for the arguments used to legalize abortion. The same church that would reject a woman for her unwed/unplanned pregnancy would also reject her for having an abortion. If a woman was going to be rejected either way, then at least if she chose to have an abortion she wouldn’t be left to care for her child alone and without any support. At least these children wouldn’t be doomed to grow up in severe poverty as they watched their mothers beg for jobs, only to be rejected by those who should have shown them support.
As pro-life people, we KNOW that abortion is wrong. We don’t sit back and say, “Well gee, I suppose that making abortion legal was the best thing to do for these poor women and unwanted children.” NO, Certainly NOT!! We KNOW that ending a human life is not the solution to an unwed/unplanned pregnancy and we KNOW that there is no such thing as an unwanted child. Knowing this, while holding on to our firm and factual belief that life begins at conception and that ALL life is deserving of equal protection, we can still look back with an ache in our hearts over the position that these women were in. They were truly between a rock and a hard place. At that time, these women really didn’t have a well-known option that would allow them to make a life affirming decision as well as provide dignity and redemption to their own lives. Many women eventually resorted to attempting self-induced abortions and thus injuring themselves as a last resort to avoid shame and judgment while also avoiding a “back alley” illegal abortion.
There was however a growing group of women who had had enough of the shame women were facing. They saw how these limited options, paired with rejection and judgment, were breaking women down, destroying families and causing oppression. The abortion rights movement had been born and they saw how the church and society had ignored those who needed help. Sadly, rather than offering the much needed life-affirming support and resources to women and children, they simply offered a new solution, but one that only continued to perpetuate shame and silence. They began the fight to legalize abortion, and they were ready to fight with made-up stories and skewed perceptions. These women wanted to take abortion out of the shadows where it lingered and standardize it in order to make it legal and easily available.
In 1973, the Supreme Court simultaneously passed Roe v Wade and Doe v Bolton and by so doing, they legalized abortion for any reason, at any gestational age. However, the abortion rights movement did not succeed in this effort because of their abilities, but rather because of the church’s inability to do the right thing when they had it within their means to do so and their deafening silence during the court proceedings. Yet, somehow this group convinced the courts that there would be no more “unwanted” children and that with access to “safe” and legal abortion, no more women would suffer injury or death. Since then, just in the United States alone, around 57 million children have lost their lives to this legal practice and that number is increasing each day. Despite the promises of the abortion rights movement, children are still being abused and neglected and many women are suffering injuries and even death in the “safe” practice of legal abortion. Their arguments have not held up and the abortion rights they fought for are causing such a wide array of damage to our world today. Abortion is being used to mask the “evidence” of abuse and sex trafficking, statutory rape, and causing our women to live with guilt and shame. For many it has stolen their ability to ever plan a future pregnancy. We can clearly see now that “safe” and legal abortion is not panning out to be what it was promised to be.
A friend of mine, former Planned Parenthood Director turned Pro-Life Advocate Abby Johnson, has founded a ministry called And Then There Were None (ATTWN). I am incredibly blessed to be a part of this ministry and working directly with the workers who join the program. ATTWN provides emotional, spiritual, financial and legal support for abortion clinic workers who are ready to quit their jobs after experiencing a conversion of heart. We also provide retreats at no cost to our clients where we help them find healing and forgiveness in Christ.
Last fall I was able to attend one of these retreats and something happened that truly opened my eyes. One of our clients has been out of the industry for over thirty years. She was trained to become an abortion provider before 1973, and was one of the first legal abortion providers in the country. She became visibly unsettled as she listened to other former abortion workers share their experiences in the abortion industry over the last decade. She interjected into the conversation and stated that she was horrified to hear of the unprofessional conduct, sloppy medical practices, and ill treatment of the women who enter today’s abortion facilities. She went on to share that when she first entered into the world of the abortion industry that she and her colleagues cared about the women. They wanted abortion to be a last resort. They offered adoption resources and volunteered to help women reach out to their families for support. Safety, sanitation and following rigorous protocols was of highest importance to them.  She explained that because they had fought so long and hard for the legalization of abortion, they wanted to practice within the laws and standards that were granted to them. Although she is now 100% pro-life and has healed and repented from her role in the abortion industry, she painted a far different picture of what the abortion industry looked like back then in comparison to what it looks like today.
Even though abortion was as morally wrong back then as it is today, the beginnings of the abortion movement were not about topless women demanding government-funded abortions and screaming at innocent bystanders who peacefully disagreed and it was certainly not about corralling women into overbooked abortion clinics like cattle just to meet a budgetary quota. For these early abortion providers, it was about providing a way out of that proverbial rock and a hard place. As wrong and manipulative as the system was even at that time, it stemmed from a place of compassion, albeit terribly confused and misguided compassion.
There has been quite a learning curve in the pro-life movement since 1973. At first, many abortion opponents were driven by anger. Abortion was now legal and innocent babies were dying every day. Women were being viewed as murderers rather than secondary victims of abortion. Extremists were blowing up clinics and shooting abortionists rather than viewing them also as human beings with the right to life and potential to change and repent. Slowly but surely the pro-life movement has risen up to meet the needs and countered every argument that can be used to attempt to justify an abortion. Although there are still some radicals out there, now more than ever, the unconditional love of our loud majority is blossoming, not only toward the women and children in need but also toward those who rally support for abortion rights and those who facilitate abortions.
We have seen incredible breakthroughs in medical science. We now have the ability to see into the womb with incredible detail and clarity. We now know that at the early gestation of just 12 weeks a baby in the womb has everything that they need to survive outside the womb; arms, legs, fingers, toes, all internal organs, a beating heart from 18 days and brain waves. This distinct person even has their own blood type and DNA. Many of these scientific facts were not known to the early abortion providers. When they told women that their baby was a clump of cells, many of them truly believed that was true. We no longer hide women away for nine months only to rip their babies from their arms. Today we have open adoption where a woman can literally hand select a family to raise her child. Sometimes the birth mom will have many face to face meetings with the adoptive family throughout their child’s life. They sometimes even take family photos together at the birth of their child. Open adoption allows for a lifelong relationship. We also now have amazing resources for birth mothers, such as counseling and support programs.
Single parents have never been more supported than they are today. If there is a need, there is an agency (or dozens), along with multiple church-funded organizations, ready to step in and provide assistance. We even have underutilized resources today. The church may have dropped the ball back in the 70’s but she has since picked that ball back up and taken it far beyond what could have been imagined. We can now see a woman’s needs met from her very first pregnancy test and ultrasound all the way through her child’s toddler years with resources in abundance. From food, medical care, housing, utilities, clothing and furniture, the church and other non-profit organizations are there to provide both material and emotional support to mothers. Women facing unwed/unplanned pregnancy are no longer turned away and rejected by the church corporately, nor by society. I have yet to see a grant or college scholarship offered specifically for post abortive women, yet they are available in abundance for single moms. I have also never seen an effective post-abortive recovery program offered by anyone outside of the pro-life or faith based community, we are no longer shunning women for their regretful decisions but we are extending our arms and hearts to them and helping them find hope again.
You see, we have woken up. We have changed, and we have seen the errors and corrected them. There is not an argument out there today that is used to justify abortion, in which we don’t have the means to remedy. Yet the radical feminists, political figures who support abortion, and those who profit financially from it are still using those same untrue arguments that were initially used to legalize abortion. They are still screaming that women have no rights over their reproduction. The truth is that women have rights over their reproduction that they ought not to. No one should have the right to decide the date of death for another human being. So next time you hear an abortion supporter proclaim that pro-lifers don’t care about women, you can let them know that we are here to offer real solutions to women and their children. We are winning this fight and have overturned their arguments with real solutions and we will not rest until all human life is protected and viewed as having intrinsic value.
 
 
To learn more about Meagan, you can read her testimony:
https://www.lifesitenews.com/news/sex-drugs-abuse-and-suicide-my-journey-from-the-darkness-to-pro-life-activi
To keep up to date with Meagan, follow her on FaceBook:
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Meagan is a proud member of the elite Catholic Speakers Bureau CMG Booking, if you would like to invite Meagan to speak at your event on the topic of the Abortion Minded Woman, Assisted Suicide or to share her inspiring testimony please submit your request here:
http://www.cmgbooking.com/catholic-speakers/meagan-weber