Dear Sir and/or Madam:
I am a social worker, and I am pro-choice. Let me be clear… I am pro-CHOICE and NOT pro-abortion. There is a very, very big difference. In fact, I can’t think of a single person that I know who is pro-abortion.
“Hey, Sandy. How are you? Oh? You’re having an abortion?? That’s so WONDERFUL!! Good for you!!” or
“You’re pregnant?? Oh, I really think you should have an abortion. It’s the best thing ever!”
Yeah… no one says that. However, I do know a lot of people who believe that a woman should be the person responsible for making decisions about her healthcare and her body.
Apparently, you aren’t one of those people. In fact, you want a law that prohibits a woman from having an abortion pretty much as soon as she is aware that she is pregnant. This essentially means that women have no choice anymore. There are no exceptions to the rule… such as in order to save the life of the mother or in the case of rape or incest. Fine.
But let’s be honest. It’s not these special cases that really stick in your craw, right? It’s the healthy teenager who gets pregnant that you have a beef with. She really should have heeded that “abstinence only” advice. She should have kept her boyfriend (or father/uncle/grandpa/school teacher/etc) out of her pants, so this is what she gets. It’s the twenty-something woman who doesn’t feel ready to be a mother for whatever reason – she’s not yet married, she is still in college, or whatever. She has no right to terminate a pregnancy just because it’s inconvenient for her to have a baby right now. And it’s the battered wife who is thinking about leaving her husband, but she doesn’t have the guts to do it if she has another child to care for – she doesn’t know how she can possibly make it on her own as it is. Too bad for her that she did her “wifely duty” in order to avoid getting beaten again.
These are just a few examples of situations that I can imagine in which a woman may consider having an abortion, and I am sure there are countless other situations of which I cannot possibly conceive. No matter what she chooses, this woman is in a terrible position. Your solution? Take the decision off of her plate entirely. Ok… but you need to understand that this presents us with a whole host of different problems.
As a mental health social worker, I’m going to need a pay raise - like NOW – because I expect my caseload will increase. The number of women experiencing a mental health crisis is going to increase substantially. And I’m probably going to need to help more chemically dependent women safely abstain from using drugs and alcohol during their pregnancies. I know I won’t always be successful because relapse is a part of recovery. I’m also going to need to spend more time learning about resources out-of-state so that I can properly refer the woman who isn’t going to let you dictate how she lives her life.
And while you are at it, you may as well increase the budget for social services across the board. I mean… let’s call a spade a spade. No matter what the situation is, these pregnancies are unwanted. So social workers are going to need to be hired to make sure that the unwanted babies and children who are born are adequately cared for. Child welfare workers are already tapped out, and you are increasing their workload. Foster parents and staffed foster homes are going to be needed both for children who are removed from unsuitable conditions and for those who were put up for adoption but haven’t yet been connected with their new families. Oh right… adoption. The optimal solution! We are going to need an increased budget to deal with both the administrative and clinical burden of placing children in adoptive homes.
And let’s be honest… the face of poverty is a single mother. Medicaid and food stamp funding will need to be increased as well as WIC. I know we have already established that you don’t care about the health of the mother, but what’s the point of insisting a baby be born if we aren’t going to make sure the baby receives adequate nutrition and healthcare?
Oh? And that no exception thing? This means that some children will be born with special needs, and some of those situations will be worse than others (example: the child born to the mother who couldn’t stop drinking). Medical care is important, and it sure does get expensive quickly! And as the child gets older, we need to think about providing his/her education. So make sure to include funding for school social workers in each school district.
Oh… and let’s not forget the medical social workers. We are going to need more of them, too. Let’s not be so naïve as to think that some women won’t seek out a back alley solution to the problem.
All of this is to say: if you really want to stop abortions from happening (which will be about as successful as the War on Drugs has been on stopping drug abuse), then you can’t keep cutting funding for social services. You just can’t have it both ways.
Sincerely,
Christine Barnes, LISW-S
Clinical Social Worker
