Abortion Insists That Mothers Aren’t Amazing

H ave you ever been on a roller coaster and felt as if your stomach was falling out of your body? That’s the closest Gina can get to describing what it was like to see her unborn, developing son, Jeremiah, on a sonogram for the first time. She was 17 and living with her grandmother, having been ditching high-school classes and making all kinds of “bad decisions.” Jeremiah’s father was facing criminal charges because of her age. Deciding not to have an abortion was “scary” — because it was choosing not to make it all “go away,” she says.

Gina gives her witness testimony in a video for Aid for Women, a Chicago organization that ultimately helped her on her journey to stability, the kind of journey that it is for anyone, never mind a single mom. She begins the video by talking about how helpful she finds cleaning her home — the simple things that keep one steady amid the chaos of motherhood and life. She is amazed at where she is today, given where she’s been. “I thought I was either going to prison or I was going to be dead, in all honesty.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vMJVw39Uwa0

It wasn’t until Jeremiah was four that she managed her own apartment. Jeremiah’s father got out of prison, moved in, and wound up back in prison. Things “were getting way too out of control,” and Gina had Jeremiah stay with her parents.

She needed money and started working at a strip club and started using drugs. She was living in her car. She “got caught with crystal meth and went to jail” for three and a half months. Back on the streets, she went back to heavy drug and alcohol use and “didn’t care” she was on probation, because she didn’t have her son. Gina describes falling asleep on a bench and waking up somewhere else not knowing why or how. She would “lose stuff all the time.”

And then she realized she had serious morning sickness. “I couldn’t bring myself to have an abortion, but I didn’t know what I was going to do.” During a court hearing, she was told she was going to spend the next two years in jail. Asking to use the restroom, she ran out of the courtroom.

And no one followed her.

She wound up in shelters. She met up with her mother. And her mother gave her the number for Aid for Women. “It was all uphill from that moment. . . . It was not easy. I did not want to go. I was going to have to make some major changes in my life.” She was angry about that and having to submit to authority at the maternity home. Until something clicked. She realized: “These people are giving you a place to live. And food. And clothes. And whatever you need.”

Getting with the program and having her daughter gave her “the perseverance and stamina and fight” within herself “to change things, to turn it around.”

“I cannot put into words just how much support there was. It was literally everything that I needed.” There was the material help, but also the accompaniment that goes beyond — including a listening ear.

Getting her life back together, she stood before a judge and admitted she had been gone on a warrant for a year and a half. She went back to jail. The old jail guards were shocked by the difference in Gina. Her family believed she was changed and bailed her out after a week. Aid for Women helped her put together a binder of all the work she had done — there are regular productivity check-ins and paperwork at the maternity home. (The maternity homes are not free rides — what’s expected are chores and a commitment to acquiring skills and education and to not living there forever.) She stood before a judge who said that Gina “was giving her goodness” in her presentation. And Gina’s record was cleared — opening new doors for opportunity for her and her children. She was unbelievably relieved to no longer be a felon. It was a whole new freedom.

Gina is now raising her two children and studying to be an ultrasound technician. I recently met her in all her coolness, at Heather’s House, one of Aid for Women’s maternity homes, where she is now working accompanying other mothers. She exudes the kind of wisdom that comes only from the kind of perseverance she’s lived. She credits Faith Cintron, who manages the homes — a woman who is an expert in tough love — with so much of her success.

In the video testimony, Gina reflects: “It is hard to imagine where my life would be if it weren’t for Aid for Women. It would be somewhere very, very dark, if it was anywhere at all.” She also says Faith remains one of the closest people in her life.

This January 22 marks 50 years since the Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade decision. January 20 is the first March for Life since the Court threw it out. People keep asking me why we pro-life people are bothering to go to Washington this year. Because the human-rights issue of our time is not over until every Gina has someone to walk with her. And she isn’t bombarded with the lie that having the realistic choice to choose life for her child is “forced birth.” Women like Gina don’t need abortion pills by mail or at CVS and Walgreen’s. They need someone to love them enough to show them what incredible things they are capable of. Women not only deserve better than abortion. They also deserve more credit than the culture of death gives them.

I do have a dream that we can put our debates over the rightness or wrongness of abortion on hold occasionally, to actually help women and children. So a woman will see options other than working at a strip club and sleeping on park benches. It takes courage to have a family in the best of circumstances. Stepping up to the plate and helping the Ginas in our world is worth more than many TV debates. And the House floor needs to be more about policies that remove obstacles to the flourishing of families than about votes that help in primaries but not much else — it needs to be about policies that can actually help real people.

Gina is not an anomaly. The stories of such mothers are often largely confined to fundraising dinners for pro-life ministries. But their living witness shows what’s possible and why yelling about abortion as supposedly widespread mainstream necessary health care — and remaining divided on the issue, on either of two sides about it — is not enough.

This column is based on one available through Andrews McMeel Universal’s Newspaper Enterprise Association.