11/21/08: "Take responsibility" is not an effective answer

I’m against abortion.

But then, I don’t know anyone who considers herself “for” abortion. To my knowledge, I’ve never met a woman who was happy about having one. I suspect these women are fictional, like Santa Claus or the Easter Bunny — only, you know, evil.

So why do people who call themselves “pro-life” seem to believe in them? It’s never made sense to me that pro-life advocates appear to believe both that women seeking abortions are wicked and that they should be required to raise children.

The assumption from the right often seems to be that women who have ended up pregnant are so because they’ve made bad decisions.

OK, sure. That may sometimes be true. But even if it were true in every case, the prevailing attitude that these women should be made to “take responsibility” for their mistakes is foolish.

Now, I’m for taking responsibility. I consider myself a responsible person — almost boringly so — and wherever possible, I like to see other people holding up their ends, too.

The trouble is that this responsibility often falls exclusively on women, consumes entire lives and careers and requires more than a dutiful attitude to be executed properly — it requires love. And yet we expect women to buckle down, grit their teeth and do it anyway. Lovingly.

And alone.

This doesn’t seem very pro-lifelike to me. And it doesn’t seem very effective.

Neither does arguing that women who decide to have their children in less-than-ideal circumstances — into single-parent households, into families whose budgets are already strained beyond breaking, into abusive situations — will be suddenly swept up by “the joy of parenting” and able to overcome any obstacle. “When you hold the baby, you’ll feel great” is not an argument that puts food on the table. It doesn’t solve real problems.

If we want fewer abortions, we need to admit it’s a difficult question. There are no easy answers.

Then we need to look to ourselves to “take responsibility,” not to women in desperate or unfair circumstances.

I’m not saying women can abdicate responsibility. And I’m not talking politics here. I’m talking about us pro-lifers acting like the kind of people we say we want to be: actually pro-life.

Here’s a thought: We can have legalized abortion and still live in a country that performs none. Legalized abortion is not the problem. The need for it is. Let’s stop focusing on political solutions and work on relational ones.

Pro-lifers need to stop advocating for abstinence-only education. It’s obvious abstinence is the only foolproof method of pregnancy prevention; it’s also obvious that abstinence-only education doesn’t work. Teens in abstinence-only areas contract just as many sexually transmitted diseases and get pregnant just as often, and more often in many cases, than kids getting taught sex ed.

We also need to think hard about the other options we list for women considering abortion and ensure they’re real options, not just things we say to make ourselves feel better.We have to remember, for instance, that we care about these children when we fund food stamps and health coverage — more than we care about our taxes going up.

And while adoption is an option, the number of couples looking for children cannot possibly rival the number of children aborted every year. I say this seriously: If you’re really pro-life, next time you meet a woman thinking about abortion, consider offering to adopt her child yourself.

At the very least, thinking about it will help you see what she’s going through. At best, “when you hold the baby, you’ll feel great.”