Pro-life dilemma: Pregnancy centers and the welfare trap

Policy Review, Jul/Aug 1996 by Mathewes-Green, Frederica

story like this begins perhaps a thousand times every day: A woman's hand trembles as she scans the bigcity Yellow Pages. The ads for abortion -clinics have flowers and birds and slogans about caring, and one shows a pretty couple grinning at each other at the seashore. That makes her start crying again. Her boyfriend never looked at her like that.

But elsewhere on the page she sees an ad showing a woman curled around a baby. The phone number ends with the letters H-O-P-E. She hadn't thought about hope, but she feels like she really needs to talk to someone who has some, right now. She dials the number.

Half a year later, she is stepping out of the Hope Pregnancy Center. It's her first visit since the birth. Her little boy fusses while everyone hugs her. She stands for a moment in the spring sunshine. She's made it through these months after all. It's taken courage, and it's been tough, but this precious child has been brought through safely and given the gift of life. Without the love of the women at the center, this child would have died. She looks down at his wizened face. He is all she has now. Tears prick her eyes again, as she turns and walks to the bus stop.

What happens to mother and child next?

"It horrifies me sometimes," says Pat Evans, the unpaid director of Birthright, a crisis-pregnancy center in Annapolis, Maryland. "She's on the list for public housing, but that housing is invariably in bad sections. But if she turns it down, she's off the list, or put back on at the bottom to wait all over again."

And how does she support herself? "She probably gets $225 a month on welfare, and there's food stamps, WIC [nutrition aid to women, infants, and children], and medical assistance," says Evans, who has counseled thousands of women in her 16 years there. "In all these years, I've seen less than a half-dozen find a way to work. Once they have that baby, how can they find ajob that pays enough to buy a car to get to the job, and cover day care as well?" Evans's center, which assists about 1,200 women a year, can help some with housing for a year after the birth, but can't offer permanent housing or employment. "I don't see any answer to that; it's almost impossible. When she has a child, everything gets very hard."

America's 3,000 pregnancy centers have been rescuing women and their unborn children for 30 years now. When we list the nonbureaucratic, grass-roots organizations that are doing the most to save threatened lives, pregnancy centers must rank near the top.

These privately funded, storefront operations offer women material and emotional support free of charge, and they help hundreds of thousands each year to have their babies. Perhaps more than any other institution, these centers are shaping attitudes about abortion and the unborn-one person at a time-in a decidedly prolife direction. While conservatives debate the wisdom of a pro-life agenda for the 1996 presidential campaign, tens of thousands of volunteers are quietly keeping a candle glowing through the darkest night of many women's lives.

In the old joke, a grandmother peevishly greets the exhausted hero who has just rescued her grandson from a frozen lake: "But where are his mittens?" The pregnancy centers and their staff endure difficult, lifesaving work, little or no pay, and obscurity occasionally alleviated by insult. It hardly seems right for those of us who value these centers' hard work to punctuate our praise with grumbling about lost mittens. But the recent evolution in society's attitudes toward welfare compel a closer look.

For all the good crisis-pregnancy centers do, 80 to 90 percent of their clients-about 200,000 a year-eventually set up single-parent households. Most of these mothers and their children soon find themselves on their own, with no reliable means of financial support. Many end up permanently dependent on government welfare. Some even slip into homelessness. And we all know the eventual outcomes for many of the children born into such households: poverty, low academic achievement, susceptibility to crime. If pregnancy-counseling centers are to serve the best long-term interests of children, many of them will need to think beyond pregnancy and birth-to finding each one a two-parent home.

A Welfare World View

To Evans and others like her, welfare is a necessity. Without it, the young women they serve would grow even more desolate and desperate. "We do put people on welfare," says Evans. "We do create the single-parent homes, but at least the baby is alive. Someone has to help us if this is going to change. As it is, the volunteers are doing it all themselves-counseling, giving supplies, taking women to live in their homes."

But it is important to acknowledge that welfare causes more crisis pregnancies. By making single-parent households possible, welfare dollars remove the stigma of sex and pregnancy outside marriage. Girls who grow up without a father are more than twice as likely to have a baby out of wedlock themselves.