{"id":293716,"date":"2023-07-05T06:30:21","date_gmt":"2023-07-05T11:30:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.liveaction.org\/news\/?p=293716"},"modified":"2023-07-03T12:40:13","modified_gmt":"2023-07-03T17:40:13","slug":"women-dont-abortion-need-support","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archive.liveaction.org\/news\/women-dont-abortion-need-support\/","title":{"rendered":"Women don’t need abortion. They need support."},"content":{"rendered":"
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An article published by In These Times<\/a> makes the claim that without wide access to abortion following the fall of Roe v. Wade<\/em>, lives will be thrown into “disarray.” While every new parent must adapt and change how they live in one way or another, it doesn’t mean that mothers \u2014 even those facing the biggest challenges \u2014 need to resort to killing their preborn children in order to keep their lives on track.<\/p>\n

The article focuses on one mother \u2014 Lationna Halbert, the mother of a four-year-old son with her boyfriend Kendall. Halbert was working at a school IT job for $8.50 an hour, doing hair and makeup on the side, and planned to attend cosmetology school. Her hormonal birth control implant had expired, and she couldn’t afford to replace it, as it cost $300 just to have it removed. It is unclear if she used other types of birth control in the interim, such as condoms, but she became pregnant about a month later. Halbert didn’t think she was going to get pregnant that quickly. Upon learning of her baby, she said, “I cried, I cried, I cried. It was a surprise. Lord, it was a surprise.”<\/p>\n

She had wanted to be married, have a steady job, a new car, a house instead of an apartment, and a better school system before she had another baby. But she didn’t avoid sex, and when she helped to create a new life, she decided she wanted an abortion. She called Jackson Women’s Health Organization \u2014 the very abortion facility in Mississippi at the center of Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization<\/em>, the case that ended Roe<\/em>. But it was July 2022, the Dobbs<\/em> decision had been handed down, and Mississippi’s pro-life trigger law was in effect. The abortion business was closed. She considered going out of state, but the price was too high. The abortion cost $700, and more would have been required to travel there and back. Like anyone who becomes pregnant, Halbert would have to pivot and adjust her life to accommodate her new baby.<\/p>\n

But Halbert was facing the possibility of utter poverty. She had no paid maternity leave, and a partner who made $18 an hour and had to take on side jobs. Her life goals were put on hold. In These Times claimed that in this new post-Dobbs<\/em> world, her story is a “glimpse of things to come, on a massive scale… foreshadowing the economic harm as yet untold numbers of people will endure and the dreams a new generation will be forced to put aside.”<\/p>\n

But it never had to be this way and it still doesn’t. Though there is room for improvement within the systems that exist, Halbert has real choices and real support available to her and her baby. She just won’t find them in pro-abortion organizations<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Flawed research and the feminization of poverty<\/h3>\n

Painting a grim picture of what life is like for women giving birth to children they didn’t plan, In These Times looked to the incredibly flawed<\/a> Turnaway Study in an attempt to prove that lack of abortion puts and keeps women such as Halbert in poverty. But that study used a minuscule starting sample size, with additional women dropping out in large numbers. Only 27% of the women recruited, who were hand-picked by abortion facility employees, actually agreed to participate after receiving an incentive to do so. In the end, only 17% of the women remained in the study<\/em>. The women who reported the most negative abortion experiences and the least amount of relief from their abortions were the ones most likely<\/em> to drop out. It’s impossible to draw clear conclusions when your participants refuse to participate.<\/p>\n

The reality is, wide contraception use and legalized abortion have led to what’s now known as the feminization of poverty<\/a>. Women in the United States are 35%\u00a0more likely than men<\/a> to be poor. Single mothers face the highest risk of living in poverty; 30.6% of households headed by single mothers live in poverty, compared to less than 15% of households headed by a man, and about five percent of households headed by a married couple. Five million more women than men were poor in 2012, and it seems that since abortion was legalized, this problem has only increased.<\/p>\n

In “Poverty and Abortion: A Vicious Cycle<\/a>,” the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops explained, “Beginning in the 1990s, groundbreaking research has found that the ‘technology shock’ of widely available contraception and abortion has increased out-of-wedlock births. Previously, it was widely accepted that an unexpected pregnancy out-of-wedlock should lead a man to offer marriage.” However, the USCCB noted that once contraception and abortion became widely available, that same pregnancy came to be seen as solely the woman’s responsibility and problem. The man’s obligation now ends with an offer to pay for an abortion. If the woman refuses the abortion, she is left alone to be a single mother.<\/p>\n

Since the rate of divorce and breakup after an abortion increases<\/a>\u00a0by as much as 75%, according to the\u00a0deVeber Institute<\/a>, any woman who already has a child at the time of the abortion is now at an increased risk of being a single mother, just like the woman who refused the abortion.<\/p>\n