Writing feature articles for a pro-life organization seemed like intriguing work for a year-long internship.
Curious, a week or so before my first day on the job, I looked at Heartbeat International’s Facebook page and scrolled through some of the reviews: Positive reviews from those who were pro-life and negative reviews from those who were pro-choice. “To be expected,” I thought to myself, “it’s a divisive issue, after all.”
It was then I saw the most unique and intriguing review on Heartbeat International’s Facebook page.
“I am completely pro-choice,” the woman had posted. “I am also grateful that there are organizations out there that are willing to help out women in need during their pregnancy.”
Helping women in need during their pregnancy is, in essence, what the pregnancy help community is all about.
Even before my internship with Heartbeat International and Pregnancy Help News, I was pro-life. I heard sermons in church, shared pro-life memes on social media and understood from Psalm 139:13 that every child has been created in the image of God from within his or her mother’s womb. I was disgusted that Planned Parenthood sells baby body parts and covers up sex trafficking and sexual abuse.
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I had also done fundraising walks and filled up baby bottles with coins for Cleveland (OH) Pregnancy Center. Still, I did not understand the full connection between pregnancy help organizations and the pro-life movement.
The pregnancy help community offers life-saving, life-changing help to women and couples facing unplanned pregnancy. From pregnancy testing to adoption referrals, and from baby boutiques and incentive-based learning programs like Earn While You Learn to STD/STI testing—not to mention post-abortive help and healing—pregnancy centers are there to walk alongside each mother who faces an unplanned pregnancy.
The pregnancy help movement is not limited to one culture or geographic location. Pregnancy help centers exist in wealthy and poor communities, in all 50 states and in various countries around the world. Pregnancy centers and maternity homes are regularly among first responders in communities facing weather-related crises—a fact most recently shown in reaction to Hurricane Harvey, Hurricane Irma and the California wildfires, to name just a few.
Of course, the work of pregnancy help is not without opposition from absolutists intent on presenting abortion as the only choice in an unexpected pregnancy. Along with pushing for a spate of state and local laws forcing pregnancy centers to advertise government-funded abortions—a matter now before the U.S. Supreme Court—abortion advocates fight to all the way to the end of each abortion to keep women in the dark about their options.
As it turns out, so-called “pro-choice” advocates aren’t so pro-choice when a woman has second thoughts about aborting her baby. Heaven forbid she’s given the option to halt her abortion once it’s started.
Tweet This: What I didn't know about the #prolife movement before 2017. @jtaggart17
Many who consider themselves pro-choice allege that the pro-life community—with its significant contingent of small-government conservatives—stops caring about a baby once he or she is born. The pregnancy help community shows the ignorance of these statements.
Every day, pregnancy help organizations not only walk alongside women who are facing an unexpected pregnancy, but also alongside new mothers and fathers learning to provide for their newborn children.
Those who serve women, children and families with life-changing help are far from hypocrites, they’re heroes.
