Is it selfish? Is she safe?
Starting to unpick the “culture of self” in pregnancy and abortion decisions
"She also has a deep and instinctive need to know who is going to look after her – yes, keep her safe"
Opinion blog, Emily Traynor
I’ll dive straight in. There’s a common conversation that women who are considering abortion are doing so because of a “culture of self”. There seems to be a societal insistence that building a career and a personally fufiling life isn’t possible if you are also living one based on service to a family (and it’s definitely harder than it should be – more on that another day). This can cause a general murmur that a woman who chooses the first option is doing so from a place of selfishness. If only it were that simple.
This blog is going to be little difficult to handle, so let me start with the caveat that it’s about a particular, but very common, circumstance that women find themselves in. We all know that it’s going to take several lifetimes of blogging to write about all the stories surrounding women’s pregnancy experiences.
However, I’m ready to stick my head above the parapet here to talk as a woman who has considered abortion, and who knows and loves women who have considered it too.
She's starting from somewhere other than herself
It’s understood that women are more agreeable than men, generally speaking. We are fully as capable of reaching the heights of leadership and weathering storms of hardship as our male counterparts. But we do often try to find solutions in our personal, work, and social lives that allow the least conflict and the most understanding possible.
Unfortunately, women have been critically disempowered through generations of campaigns telling us to look, act, speak, think, and behave a certain way. This has led to what I don’t wish to, but must, term ‘people pleasing’.
We can only continue supporting women in their unexpected pregnancy journeys with your help. If you can spare anything at all, women, children and future generations all over the UK will benefit from your generosity today.
Finding out you are pregnant can be like stepping into a hurricane.
When a woman finds out she’s pregnant and takes the news (or plastic pregnancy test) trembling to her partner, friend, or family member, she wants to know what they think.
Our woman needs time to process what this means for her and how it’s going to change her. But even in this day and age she also has a deep and instinctive need to know who is going to look after her – yes, keep her safe – while she is in the incredibly vulnerable state of pregnancy, childbirth, and early years of mothering.
So you can see how easy it is for that ‘people pleasing’ mechanism to click into place, as all her hormones are battening down the hatches to find a sense of safety and not do anything to be ostracised.
You can see how hard it would be to stand against a clear direction from her partner that he “doesn’t want it”, or her mother that “this will hold you back”, or her friends that “you’re too young/too busy/it’s too expensive/you won’t be able to be part of our group any more”?
Confusing priorities
It was suggested to me that a woman facing unexpected pregnancy is fighting a tide of cultural pressure to put herself first when making decisions.
In many cases, she’s not. She’s fighting the habit of putting others first. She often does it precisely because she believes that her feelings are less important than the opinions, wants, advice and needs of the people around her.
She’s fighting the even more present and pressing wave of “no-one wants this baby, no-one is going to help keep us safe”.
When a woman makes a decision to have an abortion, she’s usually gone through a very difficult process and come to the end believing that it’s best for everyone around her not to let the pregnancy continue. That’s her putting everyone else first, often before her own heart.
It’s even harder for single or divorced mums to know how they are going to protect a new baby as well as the ones they are already working so hard to raise every day.
These women aren’t selfish; they are alone and terrified.
What's the answer?
At Life, we’ve learned what makes the greatest difference in situations like these: compassion and a safe space for the woman to talk about what she thinks and feels. It’s why we need to train more staff for our National Helpline. Did you know we get the highest volume of calls, texts and emails between 6pm and 12 midnight? And that we don’t have enough specialist staff to keep the Helpline open for these hours?
This blog wasn’t about asking for anything. I wrote it because I had to speak up for the women who are sadly putting others – often the wrong people – first out of fear of abandonment in their most vulnerable hour.
But I will add: if you do feel you are suited to training in counselling skills, take a look at the accredited courses our Helpline runs. If that’s not possible for you, would you consider helping to fund longer opening hours with whatever you can give, or getting in touch to sponsor someone else’s training, so they can pick up a call from a woman with no one else to make her feel safe?
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