Inside a Crisis Pregnancy Center
TUSHNET, EVE
Inside a Crisis Pregnancy Center Lessons learned about bad fathers, young mothers,desspair, and hope BY EVE TUSHNET The Capitol Hill Pregnancy Center in Washington, D.C., where I've been working...
...Combine these problems with the wishful belief that pregnancy happens to other people, a deep ambivalence about the man you're dating, conflicted desires about having a child, and most of all a fatalistic desire to forget about the future and go with the flow—and you have a recipe for unwanted pregnancy...
...They're the ones who sound brave and determined even in their frightening situation...
...What does the client's father want her to do if she's pregnant...
...How can hope be provided...
...The women we counsel say they want to get married, just as the men Hamer interviewed want to be good fathers, but they have little sense of how to get what they want...
...Too often, women heave a sigh of relief at the results, but don't change their habits—and are back in six months with the old anxious stare and a double load of guilt...
...The women we counsel generally know about birth control...
...In general, they report that abstinence improved their relationships, but the allure of sex got the better of them one night...
...Sex education curricula, then, should emphasize chastity and good marriages...
...Men flit in and out of women's lives, exotic but untrustworthy creatures, exciting but ultimately irrelevant to the formation of a family...
...Pro-life pregnancy centers can focus not solely on discouraging abortion, but also on helping men and women orient their romantic lives toward marriage...
...women who speak with their fathers now and then...
...Our observations coincide with the findings of Jennifer F. Hamer, author of a study of the attitudes of black non-custodial fathers published under the title What It Means to Be Daddy (though not with her policy prescriptions...
...It isn't realistic for Clients whose pregnancy tests come out negative also need to be counseled...
...Instead, they sound profoundly disempowered...
...Our little center is nestled in a half-gentrified residential neighborhood of Northeast Washington, 15 minutes' walk from the Capitol...
...Mentoring can...
...What are your goals for this relationship...
...My experience suggests a few possibilities...
...WERE YOU USING ANY KIND OF BIRTH CONTROL...
...They're unromantic...
...Because they didn't marry the mothers of their children, they didn't refrain from fathering children by different women (thus splitting their resources and attention, and creating "drama"), or become stable fixtures in their children's homes...
...Marriage is postponed when couples can't scrounge up the money for a big wedding—confirming Miss Manners' observation that weddings become more and more elaborate as marriage becomes less and less meaningful...
...These few come to the center because they've slipped up after deciding to stop having sex for a while...
...Because they have already struggled to practice chastity, they believe it is possible...
...But half of all unintended pregnancies in the United States occur when the woman is not using birth control...
...This might come through a Big Brother or Big Sister relationship, or through marriage mentoring...
...Our experience belies this...
...We see a lot of those women...
...CHPC is one of about 3,000 pro-life pregnancy centers in the United States, and one of some 600 in North America affiliated with the umbrella group CareNet...
...A fatherless neighborhood quickly becomes a neighborhood of pregnancy scares...
...In my experience, mothers are also at least as likely as boyfriends to pressure their unmarried pregnant daughters to have abortions...
...Even women who want children generally view adult men as a fleeting part of the household...
...It also provides a childbirth class and a parenting class, and runs abstinence programs in nearby schools...
...For our clients, having sex is the default setting...
...When responsibility is almost unknown, where would a man acquire the notion that the best thing he can do for his girlfriend is stop having sex with her...
...Inside a Crisis Pregnancy Center Lessons learned about bad fathers, young mothers,desspair, and hope BY EVE TUSHNET The Capitol Hill Pregnancy Center in Washington, D.C., where I've been working as a volunteer for over a year, is a pro-life Christian ministry to pregnant women and poor families...
...Both "safe sex" and "abstinence-only" curricula tend to fall into the trap of trying to scare teens with statistics on pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases...
...In 2001, 33.5 percent of U.S...
...Instead of attitudes conducive to marriage, fatherlessness fosters the second huge problem, fatalism...
...What's needed more than anything is realistic hope...
...Sometimes I can't ask this question...
...adults or for kids...
...WHAT LED YOU TWO TO BEGIN HAVING SEX...
...Having sex with "this great guy who hangs around my high school all day, he's 22, he makes me laugh" is generally not a route to marriage...
...Public officials' tweaking a regulation here or funding an initiative there won't untangle the emotional roots of out-of-wedlock pregnancy...
...Men and women need models of chastity, marriage, and fatherhood...
...Fatherlessness warps women's views of marriage, but broader cultural trends do at least as much harm...
...We were so conditioned to view pregnancy centers as baby-savers, we'd failed to notice that virtually every negative test is also a sign that something is going wrong in a woman's life...
...I've counseled one or two teenagers who live with their fathers, and a handful of teens and adult Eve Tushnet a freelance journalist in Washington, D.C...
...all contraceptive options have drawbacks...
...I've been surprised at how many women respond with interest and enthusiasm when they hear a brief, clear explanation of the essential Christian truths...
...If their tests come back positive, these women's lives swerve onto paths they have not planned, but they still sound more self-possessed and self-aware than most of our clients...
...Growing up fatherless affects how women view their own relationships and their pregnancies...
...Chastity is an "alternative lifestyle" so alien as to be nearly inconceivable...
...We see about 1,000 clients a year, most of them under 25, virtually all of them unmarried, so our accumulated counseling experience gives us a certain perspective on the matter of why women get pregnant out of wedlock—as a record number of American women now do...
...We've seen that there is hope for women who want to try again...
...and many have unpleasant side effects...
...Unless they change their habits, we see them back in six months with the old anxious stare...
...There's a line on our counseling form for the answer to that question...
...I think I've filled it out once...
...The women we counsel don't speak the language of empowered young women taking control of their sexuality...
...They know about condoms, the Pill, Depo-Provera...
...The Patchen approach pushes hopelessness under the guise of realism...
...They have the usual reasons...
...We see the real women behind slogans like, "It's never too late for abstinence...
...They need to be able to imagine themselves as abstinent singles or married parents, and they need to know how to make realistic plans to move toward those goals...
...In women's responses, I've noticed four main themes: fatherlessness, fatalism, an attenuated concept of marriage, and the intermittent use of contraception...
...We conduct extended interviews with most of our clients and usually cover a number of standard questions...
...But when I do ask, there's no real answer...
...Nor does sleeping with every woman he dates prepare a man to be a reliable father...
...they're hard to use correctly...
...A few of the young women we counsel buck this trend...
...When marriage is a chimera, there's nothing to wait for, no reason to be chaste...
...Almost all the women we see were raised as Christians and consider themselves Christians, but feel profoundly alienated from the heart of their faith...
...Not having good fathers themselves has left our clients more likely to fail in their ambition to make good marriages...
...Such understanding is the best weapon of all against fatalism...
...The views expressed here are her own and not those of the Capitol Hill Pregnancy Center...
...But teens are not very interested in reducing risk, and they're certainly not good at it...
...they speak as if their sexuality were not in their control at all...
...Like most pro-life pregnancy centers, it offers free pregnancy tests, confidential counseling, referrals to outside services like child care, job banks, and housing, and basic material aid like diapers, formula, cribs, and clothes for mother and child...
...it's not having sex that would take a conscious decision...
...Hamer believes that marriage is not a necessary or even a superior way to harness men's desires for fatherhood...
...We just can't afford it," is the excuse by which many cohabiting couples disguise their ambivalence about the idea of marrying...
...or, if she conceives, that the best thing he can do for his child is marry and love the mother...
...births were to unmarried women...
...There's nothing for a woman to demand from men, no reason for her to put "responsible" above "fun" on the checklist of qualities to look for in a potential boyfriend...
...It's not that their boyfriends bully them: They simply have no sense that a dating relationship without sex is possible...
...Women didn't demand this—and the women's mothers sometimes even shooed the men away, viewing them as threats, rather than encouraging men who wanted to take responsibility to do so...
...Many of us were startled in our training for our work at Capitol Hill Pregnancy Center to learn that clients whose pregnancy tests came out negative also need to be counseled...
...Unfortunately, when the cohabiting woman misses a period, she realizes that her relationship is much less stable than she'd imagined—much shakier than a marriage...
...But even the men she studied who tried to be more than "absent fathers"—more than statistics—didn't do many of the things that distinguish reliable fathers...
...WHAT WOULD HAVE TO CHANGE IN YOUR LIFE TO MAKE YOU FEEL GOOD ABOUT HAVING THIS BABY...
...Like so many Americans, the women we counsel view marriage not as a sacred vow, or a promise that can strengthen a relationship and help it last, but as an expensive ceremony validating but not changing a relationship...
...Finally, since Capitol Hill Pregnancy Center is a Christian ministry, I should touch on religion...
...Loral Patchen, director of the Teen Alliance for Prepared Parenting (TAPP) at Washington Hospital Center, recently told the Washington City Paper, "The idea that you're going to tell anyone who's already sexually active to abstain usually isn't realistic...
...But men too suffer from the lack of strong models of paternal and spousal responsibility...
...Not every counseling session builds enough intimacy and trust to broach it...
...We see some boyfriends who want to be responsible...
...Personal relationships are crucial, and neither government nor bureaucratic charities can supply them...
...Because so few of our clients have known men who consistently met their family responsibilities, they rarely demand responsibility from the men they date...
...That makes a lot more sense," one teen said ruefully, than the confused and diluted notions she had brought with her...
...They are interested in romance, taking control of their relationships, and preparing for the future...
...Because marriage is not viewed as significantly different from cohabitation, there's no reason to prefer marriage and postpone sex...
...Most of them use condoms intermittently and have used hormonal birth control at some time...
...Chastity counseling is what I do most often at the center...
...But for most of our clients, fathers are just not there...
...Some churches in well-off areas have found "sister congregations" in poor areas, holding joint celebrations and building relationships based on friendship and reciprocity rather than on one-way charity...
Vol. 8 • February 2003 • No. 21
