I’ve noticed how excited many of my pro-life friends become when I talk about “empowering” women facing unexpected pregnancies.
That word, empower, just sounds great, even if we’re not sure exactly what it means.
If I asked you what you think it means to empower a woman facing an unexpected pregnancy, what would you say?
You probably wouldn’t say things that are too abstract, and would more likely go right to offering up practical real world options.
And that is one of many things I like about the word empower.
It carries a sense of doing something for someone in the real world of the day to day rather than getting caught up in philosophical platitudes and niceties.
So how do we, practically speaking, empower women facing unexpected pregnancies?
I like to frame my answer to that question using Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, a framework that I’ve written about extensively.
Here are some practical existing options that match well the different levels in the hierarchy:
1) Physiological Needs + Safety and Security
Lack of basic material and safety/security needs is the number one obstacle that prevents abortion-seeking women from considering choosing life for their preborn babies.
If you take care of those needs many women will change their minds about abortion and choose life.
An organization that has proven this to be the case is Let Them Live. Please check them out at https://letthemlive.org
2) Love and Belonging + Self-esteem
Connection to others and knowing you have a purpose in the world that serves others can move a woman’s mindset from self-centered to other-centered.
With that in place, she is much more likely to choose life for her preborn baby.
An organization that has a proven model for assisting women in this regard is Along the Way. Check out their work here: https://www.alongthewaypa.org/
3) Self-actualization
Finally, it is critical that women know before they ever face an unexpected pregnancy that there is at least one organization that loves them and seeks to serve them and empower them to become everything they can be.
Planned Parenthood is currently the brand that most young women believe fills this role.
Of course, that is tragic because Planned Parenthood teaches young women that they should kill their preborn children in order to have an opportunity to reach self-actualization.
It is an insidious lie.
A life-empowering national counter brand to Planned Parenthood is needed to move women away from that lie.
ThriVe Express Women’s Healthcare is one organization that has a proven life-empowering healthcare model that has made great strides against the Planned Parenthood brand.
Heroic Media has partnered with ThriVe to expand a new national telehealth brand called ThriVe+ across the country. You can learn more about this initiative here: https://heroicmedia.org/thrive/
Taken together, I believe these three initiatives – Let Them Live, Along the Way, and ThriVe+ – provide a model for how to empower young women in such a way that many more will choose life instead of abortion.
Brett