Editor’s note: The following is an edited version of the sixth in a series of articles for pregnancy help organizations outlining techniques that abortion facility staff have used to deceive women seeking information to make a pregnancy decision. Heartbeat International manages the Abortion Pill Rescue® Network (APRN) and Pregnancy Help News.
Deception: “You can have motherhood or success, but you cannot have both…”
NARAL Pro-Choice America states that without reproductive rights - including abortion - women cannot be fully empowered to achieve professional goals and economic security, stating “we know that reproductive rights are deeply tied to employees’ professional success and economic security.”
Pregnancy help clinics around the world empower women daily with accurate patient education, encouragement, and practical assistance.
However, Big Abortion instead emphasizes the challenges women face. In order to make the sale and close the deal, they often cast doubts for women who are weighing their pregnancy options.
One abortion activist argued that “reproductive rights, including the rights to contraception and abortion, play a central role in freeing women from historically routine conscription into maternity.”
But is it necessary for women be able to terminate the life of a child in order to control her own destiny?
A woman without sufficient support, finances, or living arrangements can be more vulnerable to suggestion, discrimination, violence, and sexual exploitation, including trafficking.
Women should never be manipulated into a decision that contradicts their core beliefs or values. And yet across the world women are convinced thousands of times every day to start an abortion. In speaking with them in centers and on helplines, we know that many of them are hoping for a different way.
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Sold as a medical procedure that seemingly solves a problem and eliminates the pressures of an unexpected pregnancy, the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists states that “induced abortion is an essential component of women’s health care.”
Every day there are women who are told by abortion providers, boyfriends, husbands, family members, friends, and the media that maybe this isn’t the right time to have a child.
Maybe this isn’t the right circumstance. Maybe they can’t parent their current children if they have one more. Maybe the thought of being a single parent feels overwhelming or there is fear a partner will leave if they don’t abort the pregnancy. Or maybe this isn’t the right person to have a child with.
Sometimes there is fear of a parent's reaction to the pregnancy. Doubts are cast that they can’t finish school, focus on work, or achieve other goals before having a baby.
And during a time of vulnerability and struggle, some fall for the lies and cave under the pressure even when there is love for that child.
Women's reasons for seeking abortion include financial reasons (40%), timing (36%), partner-related reasons (31%), and the need to focus on other children (29%).
Most women report multiple reasons for seeking an abortion (64%).
Thirty-eight percent of women indicate that the father of the baby was the most influential person in their abortion decision.
Fifty-seven percent of women who obtain an abortion experienced a potentially traumatic life event in the 12 months leading up to their abortion. The most common factors included unemployment, a breakup, or falling behind on rent or mortgage.
Only 12% of women state a physical problem with their health influenced them to have an abortion. Only 1% of women who choose abortion report they are the survivors of rape and less than half of one percent cited incest.
Women’s lives have improved vastly over the last four decades but is there a correlation between any of these gains and legalized abortion?
Gynecologists before the Supreme Court during the Dec. 1, 2021,
oral arguments for Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization/AAPLOG
The American Association of Pro-Life Obstetricians and Gynecologists (AAPLOG) states that “virtually all progress in legal, social, and employment rights has come about through federal or state legislation and judicial interpretation unrelated to legalized abortion.”
In Roe vs. Wade, the court noted the “distressful life and future” of a woman facing an unplanned pregnancy.
But, as noted in a brief at the Supreme Court supporting Mississippi’s law limiting abortion after 15 weeks, dramatic changes in society and policy now allow mothers to reach “the highest echelons of economic and social life independent of the right bestowed on them by seven men in Roe.”
Women who are also mothers have influenced the world. Women who are mothers are also so much more, such as:
Olympic athletes: Mothers have been competing at the Olympics since the Paris 1900 games when women’s events were first added. Because pregnancy no longer marks the end of an athlete’s career, many elite athletes not only return to sport, but go on to break personal and world records as new moms.
Six-time gold medalist Allyson Felix gave birth to daughter Camryn in 2018. Felix recently partnered with apparel company Athleta to provide a total of $200,000 in childcare grants to 10 athletes who are also mothers.
Actresses: Meryl Streep won an Oscar the same year her first child was born. Two more Oscars would follow, as would three more kids. In the years following she has been nominated an additional 13 times. Motherhood did not hinder her success.
News anchors: Katie Couric took the co-anchor chair at the Today show while five months pregnant with her first child. On her first day, opposite a male anchor, she reminisced: “I got up, threw up and came to work.” By the time Couric became the first female anchor of the CBS Evening News she’d spent 15 years raising two girls as a single mom.
Television head writers: Tina Fey, SNL’s first female head writer, in summing up working motherhood wrote: “You go through big chunks of time where you're just thinking, 'This is impossible—oh, this is impossible.' And then you just keep going and keep going, and you sort of do the impossible."
U.S. Supreme Court Justices: Despite her pro-abortion values and career goals, Ruth Bader Ginsburg was already mother to two children when she was appointed to the Supreme Court. Judge Amy Coney Barrett is a mother of seven children who had indisputable career accomplishments prior to her appointment to the Supreme Court in 2020.
Authors: Agatha Christie was a new mother when she published her first book in 1920. Christie's daughter was raised alongside Christie's popular characters. Christie wrote 66 novels and 14 short stories during her life and to this day remains the best-selling novelist of all time.
J.K. Rowling wrote the first four Harry Potter books as a single mother and she now serves as the president of Gingerbread, an organization that works with single parents and their children to find resources and programs to help them succeed.
She said of that difficult time, “I was as poor as it's possible to be... Now I am able to give.”
“I would say to any single parent currently feeling the weight of stereotype or stigmatization that I am prouder of my years as a single mother than of any other part of my life.” - J.K. Rowling
First Ladies: Eleanor Roosevelt was the longest serving first lady in the United States and had six children. Roosevelt was a strong supporter of civil rights and regularly held her own press conferences, wrote columns, and shared her opinions with the public, redefining the role of first lady.
Nobel Prize recipients: Marie Curie is best known for being the first woman to win a Nobel Prize, but she also raised her two young daughters alone after her husband died in 1906. One of their daughters, Irène Joliot-Curie, went on to co-win the Nobel Prize in Chemistry with her husband for their own work with radioactivity. Joliot-Curie said her mother instilled hard work and flexibility in her children: “That one must do some work seriously and must be independent and not merely amuse oneself in life—this our mother has told us always, but never that science was the only career worth following.”
International leaders: India’s first female Prime Minister was a mother to two children. Indira Gandhi worked to institute democracy and create jobs to combat food shortages. She also entrusted a sense of duty in her two sons, Rajiv and Sanjay Gandhi, who both grew up to become politicians; Rajiv became Prime Minister of India after his mother was assassinated in 1984.
Life savers: Irena Sendler, a Polish employee at the Warsaw Social Welfare Department, was a mother of three children who smuggled almost 2500 Jewish children out of the Warsaw Ghetto during the Holocaust, saving their lives. Although the Nazis arrested her, tortured her, and sentenced her to execution, she didn’t give them any information about the whereabouts of the children or the inner workings of her smuggling operation. Sendler received Poland’s Order of the White Eagle award in 2003.
At least four women who have undergone the Abortion Pill Reversal regimen have gone on to earn nursing degrees after delivering their healthy babies. Rather than feeling like motherhood was holding them back, they have been inspired to save more lives through a career in nursing after successfully reversing their chemical abortions.
and went on to complete her nursing degree and works in a busy emergency department of her local hospital.
Throughout history women have been mothers and simultaneously achieved success in careers as they influenced the world.
The idea that the two must be mutually exclusive is an insult to the millions of women who have successfully navigated this balance.
Big Abortion is an industry that shouts its support of women while at the same time saying that women are not enough. By their standard, we can choose success or family but not both. Their heavy-handed influence and inaccurate messages have cost our world millions of lives.
Pregnancy help clinics throughout the world are a beacon of truth and hope for mothers who do not want to make that choice. We support each woman in choosing a life for herself and a life for her child.
