Once a year, I travel to my nation’s capital and join tens of thousands of people to take a stand for women and the unborn. One of my favorite parts about participating in the March for Life is deciding what to put on my poster. This year, one side read, “Pro-Life because I’m Pro-Woman.” To me it summed up what my job is all about. We empower women to face their unplanned pregnancies without fear, and in doing so, two lives are saved.
At the Care Center, we meet women every day from various ethnic, cultural and educational backgrounds, but they all have this in common: they’re pregnant and afraid.
Women are afraid of the financial strain, not having support from friends and family, and not accomplishing their goals. Rather than equipping women with the resources they need or stepping up to help, the world tells women they don’t have what it takes to be a mom. Women are told they can’t be a mom and finish their degrees, they can’t be a mom and have careers, and they certainly can’t be a mom and find fulfillment staying at home. Women have to choose, and the only choice is abortion.
Abortion promises to be the solution to their problems. Abortion claims it will make everything go back to the way it was. Abortion sells itself as a quick fix.
But after four years of meeting countless women who have had abortions, I know these are lies. I know abortion doesn’t solve problems, it creates them. Abortion doesn’t help women, it hurts them. Abortion can’t reverse time.
Abortion cannot hold the weight of a woman’s worries, anxieties, fears, dreams and greatest desires. It cannot fulfill its promises.
And that’s why I march—because women deserve better than abortion. I march because when women stop believing the lies of abortion, the innocent lives they carry will be saved, too. I march because abortion can’t offer freedom, only a relationship with Jesus can.
Deanna Jewell
Deanna is the Senior Director of Health & Client Services at the Care Center.