Building a Model for Life: Key Starting Points
Starting with people who already care and are caring.
There are outstanding works of service across America that reach out to help people avoid an unwanted pregnancy and that serve women facing uncertainty over their pregnancies. Any model of service should start with finding the people and organizations in local communities that are already providing loving kindness to women facing challenges. Listening and supporting these care givers is a right place to start.
Reconnecting sexual activity and pregnancy.
How often in American culture is a message sent across digital media encouraging people to enjoy sexuality? How often do people hear a reminder that sexual activity between males and females can and often does result in pregnancy? Connecting those activities in messaging across media and in classrooms is a good way to remind all people that scientific advances have not made the possibility of pregnancy obsolete.
Listening to the needs of women facing a pregnancy in crisis.
The research summarized in Abortion in America makes it clear that the number one reason women turn to abortion is financial. In such a moment there are wealthy foundations in America that regularly provide financial assistance to woman to have an abortion. What if those same foundations and many more were encouraged to give their dollars to support women through their pregnancy and the first years of caring for their newborn children? How might such funding provide more choices to women?
Mobilizing Local and State resources to help women in need.
What if communities mobilized local resources to assist in pregnancy care, child delivery and the first year of raising a newborn child? What if those efforts were enhanced by matching funds from county and state governments? What if facilitating these needs and distributing these funds was conducted by local agencies, properly licensed and regulated, who could help women in need? Such programs could be encouraged by providing state tax credits to individuals and corporations that participate in funding these needs.
Renewing infant-adoption in America
Research further reveals the second reason women state for having an abortion is that they are unable to care for a child. There are thousands of families in America that could step forward to solve this problem by adopting these infant children. State governments can play a major role here by establishing adoption task forces to identify obstacles to adoption and construct networks of resources to renew the work of voluntary adoption.
These are starting points to a much larger conversation that can bring women practical, attainable alternative choices to abortion. For these choices to happen, however, citizens across America must step up and help.