Life’s great oxymoron: Pro-woman, reducing abortions
Why I’m with Life, by Emily Traynor
"If we want to see more children being born in today’s increasingly hard world then the best way to do that is to look after the women with the wombs."
Abortion is one of the most contentious and keenly avoided topics in contemporary culture, but if we look beyond the assumptions, sideways glances and through-the-keyhole information gathering, we might begin to see that a great cultural oxymoron, ‘pro-woman, reducing the abortion rate’, is actually more common than we might think.
Not only is there a secret army of support for this ‘view’ on abortion’s place in our world*, there’s also a charity that’s made it their business to discover how this works practically.
Meet Life, standing in our culture’s most controversial no-man’s land, and inviting us to join them.
Joining the mission
I was so inspired to find an organisation doing something that made sense, I was delighted when an opportunity came up that fit my skill set. I didn’t want to work in the prolife activism movement, but having been in the agonizing position of making a ‘keep it or don’t keep it’ decision more than once in my life, I absolutely wanted to support women going through the same.
Founded in 1970 by the much respected Jack and Nuala Scarisbrick, today Life is a non-religious, non-directive charity (non-directive means no personal opinions are allowed to even subtly influence client services). Through a great deal of learning and growth in an area that most won’t touch with a barge-pole, Life has attained professional accreditation and excellence in their national services: social housing, listening and counselling helpline, and education services. In a controversial prolife movement, this charity has made its place in territory that shuns judgment and focuses on finding out what women actually want and need in order to become mothers.
The charity offers services that empower women to embrace an unexpected pregnancy and gives the support that many women today just don’t have when they find out they are carrying an new, unplanned baby. There’s also free support for women and men after an upsetting prenatal diagnosis or after an abortion.
With so many failings in our society to support women leading as fulfilling and successful a life as their male counterparts, even without children in the mix, it makes for a sometimes harrowing (and often lonely) decision-making process.
The charity has had to develop expertise over the years that simply hasn’t been necessary in other helpline services, where there’s usually a clear mutual and social agreement over what’s ‘right’ and what’s not. The Life Helpline team have become increasingly adept at training counsellors and skilled listeners to discern the slightest nuances of potentially directive conversations, in order to make sure that clients truly receive the support they want and are looking for.
Why the work matters
Half of all pregnancies in the UK are unexpected. Half of those end in abortion. The statistics are not easy to be certain of and there’s a lot of further research to do, but studies show that nearly 60% percent of abortions are believed necessary due to financial pressures and 15% of women have been coerced into having an abortion. Life’s helpline clients have revealed that often women will cite financial pressures as a reason for abortion when they were in fact instructed to say this through coercion.
I can’t find any other way to describe this than as an endemic tragedy.
So when a charity pours itself into the gap left by poor support for women in terms of careers, maternity care and benefits, crippling childcare fees, a dis-jointed school and work-day structure and ingrained inequalities between the sexes, who is there to support pregnant women?
The short answer – painfully few.
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.
Why people don’t support women in unexpected pregnancy
The thing I grappled with when I joined Life was the question of why a charity, so warrior-like in its defense of women and compassionate towards the resilient females calling them, is struggling to meet costs and service an enormous need?
I can’t help but conclude that it’s due to a chronic lack of courage in our society. We can’t bring ourselves to support work that many thousands of women a month are crying out for, in case it looks like we are ‘taking sides’.
Conversely, confusingly, the prolifers who you would imagine are getting behind this cause: to offer the practical services that enable women to freely choose motherhood despite the challenges they face; some of them seem to struggle to accept that if they want to see more children being born in today’s increasingly hard world, the best way to do that is to look after the women with the wombs.
Standing with Life
Life Charity has a varied past, but their present and their future has an absolutely solid focus. They defend their ground and their clients as fiercely as any lion or lioness: Pro-woman, and reducing abortions as a natural consequence of the empowering support that every pregnant woman deserves.
The charity is attempting to service a need for hundreds of thousands, with a modest staff pool and a fraction of the share of charitable giving in the UK. They are ferocious in their desire to achieve for their clients, despite a lack of support from most angles. I’ve seen it from the inside.
In a sea of cultural confusion, Life Charity are right in front of us, standing in the gap our political and social fear has opened, planting their flag and urging us to join them in serving our women and children.
I did. Will you?
(For those who were wondering, I experienced three unexpected pregnancies in less than ideal circumstances and was three times urged to have an abortion. It’s with deep gratitude and relief that I’m able to report I have three healthy, beautiful children. If you’d like to donate, here’s the button:
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