As we pause to honor the high calling of motherhood, we do well to consider how to love our pregnant neighbor.
After 35 years of work as a trainer and practitioner in crisis intervention around the world, this young woman’s call still stands out. She crystallized in just a few words the acute panic and distorted thinking that is common in a pregnancy-related crisis. Based on abortion rates worldwide, it is probable that more people around the world experience crisis from an unexpected pregnancy than any other form of crisis. As we pause to honor the high calling of motherhood, we do well to consider how to love our pregnant neighbor.
To my caller, being pregnant felt like death — the end of her life. True, her pregnancy was not a fatal disease. But it did present a threat to her life as she had projected it. Getting an abortion was, in her mind, a life-saving necessity. This, too, is false, but it feels true.
At the same time, she anticipated that abortion, while resolving one crisis, would create another. Her contemplation of suicide subsequent to her abortion revealed a self-awareness that there was another stakeholder involved — her unborn child. Harming any child was wholly contrary to her self-image as a caring person. She anticipated not being able to live with the subsequent guilt and grief.
Douglas Puryear, in “Helping People in Crisis,” writes that a state of crisis is characterized by symptoms of stress, an attitude of panic, a time of lowered problem-solving efficiency, and a rush to find relief. In a pregnancy-related crisis, panic is always the dominant marker.
She feels pressure, too. For many, pregnancy represents a failure of one’s moral or religious values. They have not found the strength required to live according to their moral code. The guilt is acute. Pregnancy converts this private pain into public shame. For the non-religious, sexual behavior is often reduced to mere recreation. But the human spirit resists such reduction. Sex changes things. It sets up new expectations. Sex resulting in pregnancy places those expectations under extreme pressure. More often than not, women instinctively want their partner to support them. Abortion is something they resort to more than choose.
Frederica Mathewes-Green surveyed reasons women give for having an abortion. The highest percentage (38.2%) reported that they resorted to abortion in response to the external pressure from a husband or a boyfriend. Researcher, David Reardon, provides one woman’s telling account:
"My family would not support my decision to keep the baby. My boyfriend said he would give me no emotional or financial help whatsoever. All the people that mattered told me to abort. When I said I didn’t want to, they started listing reasons why I should. That it would have detrimental effects on my career, and my health, and that I would have no social life and no future with men…I’m so angry at myself for giving in to the pressure of others."
To love your pregnant neighbor, understand that you are talking to someone who is frightened and under pressure, who wants her baby and doesn’t want it, who feels alone and is looking for deliverance. In that moment, the abortionist appears as the Savior who parrots the words of Christ, “Come unto me…” What, then, should you do and say?
Lead with love: Love is its own teacher; it prompts you to listen and sympathize. “I’m sorry to see you in distress. Help me understand why having a baby seems impossible?” Love encourages and breathes hope. “Having a baby is not the end of your life. It’s just an unexpected turn. Let me help you find God’s provision for you and your baby.” This immediately lowers fear and raises hope. Universally, this is how women turn from abortion to a life-affirming solution.
Tell the truth: Find your courage and tell the truth. There is only one reason that abortion is morally wrong — only one! It is morally wrong to intentionally kill an innocent human being. If the unborn is not human, there is nothing wrong with abortion. If it is human, then no circumstances justify it any more than they would justify killing a two-year-old. Help her answer the question, What is the unborn? Use a fetal model, get her an ultrasound at your local pregnancy help clinic, and look up “unborn baby” on your phone. In most cases, you are merely amplifying what her own heart is telling her.
Be her Good Samaritan: You don’t need to stop all abortions; just the one in front of you. The Samaritan was direct and personal. He did one practical thing and then another, including giving his time and money. Go and do likewise.
You are cross-bearing for the childbearing. You are making her problems your problems, just as Christ, through the cross, made our problems his own. After helping communities of churches establish pregnancy help services in hard places like China, Cuba, Uganda and more, I can confidently assert that loving your pregnant neighbor this way is God’s way of turning the despairing woman “into the joyous mother of children” (Ps 113:9).
John Ensor is the author of Pregnancy Crisis Intervention and serves as the President of PassionLife, teaching biblical ethics and pregnancy crisis intervention in countries plagued by abortion and infanticide. He has been recognized in the “Legacy of Life” book as one of the 50 greatest pro-life leaders of the last 50 years.
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