From churches to government, pregnant women have many resources available.
From churches to government, pregnant women have many resources available.
I n the five months since the U.S. Supreme Court returned abortion policies to the states, abortion issues have dominated the political and media landscape. They were among the most important issues Americans took with them to the polls last month because, no matter where you fall on the issue, abortion is a defining moral and cultural matter of our era.
I’ve been on both sides of the abortion debate during my 30-plus years as an OB-GYN. I performed elective abortions during the first two years of my medical residency. Then, one day, things didn’t go as I had planned in the hospital. My conscience pricked me hard, and I realized that I served two patients: mother and child. I later founded Tepeyac OB/GYN, a life-affirming practice, and now work full-time for its sister organization Divine Mercy Care, which raises money to provide services for women in financial need.
Elective abortions — a term I use to distinguish between spontaneous miscarriages and the intentional ending of unborn life — are heartbreaking because they end the life of a human person. But they don’t harm just the baby; they also harm mothers who let fear prevent them from bringing a child into the world.
We know that three out of four women who have elective abortions do so when they fear financial hardship, according to the Guttmacher Institute. Nearly half of women either fear being a single mother or view an elective abortion as a way to save a troubled relationship with the child’s father. That decision has long-term consequences; the organization Support After Abortion indicates in its research that women often seek psychological and emotional comfort after a medicated abortion because the experience is so traumatizing.
Mothers who experience economic hardship or have been abandoned by the father of their child are in crisis. The moral truth of elective abortion is not the first thing on their minds. Their struggles — whether emotional, financial, or medical — can understandably crowd out any other consideration. That’s why Tepeyac OB/GYN seeks to provide for the needs of struggling pregnant women.
It’s also why I’m proud to be Catholic. The Catholic Diocese of Arlington, Va., gave more than 1.7 million pounds of food in fiscal year 2022, provided free care to 1,229 uninsured or underinsured people at two free medical clinics, and provided over 12,000 free meals to homeless and hungry individuals. Expectant mothers in need are offered parish-based pregnancy assistance as well as Catholic Charities adoption services, and after-abortion care is provided to women and men who suffer emotional, psychological, and spiritual pain from their abortions.
Most Americans want to help their neighbors in times of need, both during a crisis and after it has been resolved. Elective abortions are bad medicine. They never resolve a crisis, and always make things worse — certainly for the baby, and often for the men and women whose child is now gone. That’s clear from the Guttmacher and Support After Abortion studies, as well as from the abortion industry’s Turnaway Study.
Moral issues aside, there is never a need for abortion. From pre-birth to infancy, from toddlerhood through college, our society offers many private resources like Divine Mercy Care and Catholic Charities, and government programs like Medicaid and public schools. But women aren’t told that during early-pregnancy panic. They are told that abortion is the best — possibly the only — path that they should choose. And once they make that choice, the media, politicians, and academics tell women to shout their abortions and ignore any negative feelings.
Resources are available to make elective abortion unthinkable, but the study from Support After Abortion shows that just 18 percent of women who have had a medicated abortion knew where to find after-abortion healing help — a sharp contrast to the 63 percent of women who sought help or said they could have benefited from talking to someone. Women are owed transparency about the best choice to make and the resources available to help them make that choice.
For 50 years, the political abortion debate has pitted mothers against babies. For over 30 of those years, I’ve tried to help both patients, because that’s the only way to truly help mothers, children, and families thrive.