Two Parents for Every Newborn

By Frederica Mathewes-Green

A poll conducted by Family Research Council in 1995 asked respondents which course they thought would be best for an unwed, pregnant teen. Twenty-nine percent thought her best choice was to place the child for adoption. A little less, 24 percent, felt she should marry the father of the child. Eleven percent thought single parenting was her best course. Only 8 percent recommended abortion.

Reality turns these numbers upside down. According to FRC’s Monthly Vital Statistics Report (May 25, 1995), in 1991, 46 percent of unwed pregnancies ended in abortion. The bulk of the rest, 44 percent, were carried to term (a 10 percent miscarriage rate makes up the difference). Of those births to unwed moms, only 2 percent were placed for adoption, according to a report by the National Committee for Adoption. The remainder of the unwed moms kept their babies; how many of these also married the babies’ dads is unknown. Pregnancy care workers expect the figure to be quite low.

And how does a single mom support herself? “She probably gets $225 a month on welfare, and there’s food stamps, WIC, and medical assistance. Once they have that baby, how can they find a job that pays enough to buy a car to get to the job and cover day care as well?” Many clients wind up in single-parent households, often on the welfare rolls. Babies’ lives are saved, and women are helped through the difficulties of pregnancy; job training and temporary housing give women a head start after the birth. But no one can solve all the problems they’ll encounter, in the years ahead.

If the CPC movement could find effective ways to encourage women to consider adoption or marriage, they could move toward solutions that give children a two-parent home and allow them and their moms greater security. Counselors can become partners in an emerging project that strengthens the social institutions undergirding a healthy society, and replacing welfare bureaucracy with family-shaped alternatives.

Adoption

Pregnancy center directors agree that adoption is often the ideal solution, but they find the task of presenting it to be fraught with frustration. Although adoption is favored over abortion in nearly every poll, everybody loves adoption except the pregnant woman.

Realizing that pregnancy centers find clients choosing adoption 2 percent of the time, June Ring of the Pro-Life Adoption Network (P.L.A.N.) developed a seminar “Adoption: Making a Plan for Life,” to equip them to present it as an attractive alternative. The first step is to bring the topic up in the first place.

“One study found that in 40 percent of counseling situations, adoption was not even mentioned to the client as an option, even though the majority of counselors felt favorably toward adoption,” Ring says. She proposes that pregnancy workers make it their goal to present adoption 100 percent of the time.

According to the National Council for Adoption, a 1991 study found that teens counseled in a program that mentioned adoption to every client were seven times more likely to choose it. When the teen’s parents were involved, they were six times more likely to choose adoption. Teens asked to compare adoption with single parenting were also six times more likely to choose adoption.

But pregnancy centers are cautious about how they present this option. There have been a couple of lawsuits in which women who placed children for adoption subsequently charged that the center had coerced them.

One problem many centers confront is the one-visit client: a woman comes in for a free pregnancy test, gets a positive result and leaves, never to be seen again. Even then, Ring says, the center can “plant an adoption seed” by mentioning the alternative.

“Emphasize her motherhood,” says Ring. When the test is positive, she’s already the mother of an unborn child. What does she think goes into being a good parent? Might those be things an adoptive couple could do for her child? “Help her see that planning an adoption can accomplish those parenting goals for her.”

Ring’s cool phrasing about helping the woman “accomplish parenting goals avoids a trap some pregnancy workers unwittingly fall into, one which can encourage single-parenting and undermine adoption. If the choice is visualized starkly as aborting the child or giving it life, a factor which can tip the scale toward life is the awakening of the maternal instinct. As the woman falls in love with her unborn baby, the center may help the process by showering her with baby gifts, presenting a handmade quilt or blanket, and introducing her to previous clients who are now cuddling beautiful babies. (The 1991 study cited above found that pregnant teens counseled in programs that introduced them to teen parents were four times less likely to choose adoption.)

Counselors must tread a narrow line: encouraging mothers-to-be to love their babies enough to give them life, and to then go on loving them enough to give them a two-parent home.

Anne Pierson of Loving and Caring has incorporated Ring’s materials into her “A Future and a Hope” seminar for pregnancy centers. “The pregnant woman needs to see that she’s giving the child the gift of a family,” Pierson says, “not that she’s giving the adoptive couple the gift of a child. She is being a very good parent by making a good plan for the child.”

While counselors target the client, Pierson targets the counselors. “We find that one reason counselors are ineffective in presenting adoption is that it’s not settled in their own hearts. They don’t understand what is means to be an adopted child of God; they don’t understand Scripture.” An unconscious resistance can remain in counselors who are raising their own birth children and, deep inside, really can’t understand how another mom could “give up” her own child. Pierson believes that a faith-based understanding of relinquishment and the reality of divine “adoptive” love can free them to embrace adoption more deeply.

“We work with them on key issues: how to bring it up, how to talk about it, the experience of grieving, the mom’s experience of learning new things about herself. The journey of adoption, the entire process, is as important as the decision itself. Pierson would like to see consciousness raised about adoption everywhere, with information spilling out into churches and public schools. “The question is, how do we change the heart of a nation?”

At the LIGHT House Maternity home in Kansas City, Missouri, 10 percent of the clients choose adoption, which is well above the national average. Shirley Gibson, in charge of residential services and adoption, says, “We don’t push one decision or another, but we do help them make an informed decision. We want them to have a realistic view of being a single parent, not only the financial but the emotional cost.”

“We use ‘Baby Jamie,’” Gibson says. “It’s electronic, and it records how long it takes the girl to respond when it cries, how long to feed it, if it’s abused, and so forth.” Girls who think they’d like to parent can take a turn with Baby Jamie, carrying a diaper bag and getting up in the night for “feedings,” while keeping to their regular school schedule. When LIGHT House residents choose parenting, it’s a conscious, informed decision.

“Women who are considering abortion are more open to adoption,” states Gibson. Some people don’t mind being pregnant, all they want is free medical care. Our primary goal is alternatives to abortion.” If the woman is considering abortion because she doesn’t want to raise a baby, adoption can accomplish her goal as well.

In addition to individual counseling, women contemplating adoption participate in a 20-week “Adoption Issues” class, which Gibson terms “intense.” “The scariest is these feelings you’re having,” Gibson says. “You think you’re the only one having them. It’s reassuring to learn that other birth mothers feel the same way.”

An important element, Gibson says, is helping the woman think her decision through clearly, with adequate information. Then she has to find the strength to stick to it. “We tell them: make the decision before giving birth. If you feel like changing your mind before the birth, it’s an intellectual decision. After might be an intellectual decision - or it might be an emotional decision. We ask them to think: are the reasons you initially decided for adoption still valid?”

Marriage

While CPC workers long to encourage adoption, they usually find the “shotgun wedding” route harder to imagine. These counselors have listened as women have spilled out their stories, and too often the father of the child appears as the biggest part of the problem. Perhaps he has abandoned her, rejected her, claims he’s not the father, or is actively insisting that she have an abortion. In some cases, he’s simply unsuitable: a ne’er-do-well, too young, too old, abusive, drug-addicted or possessed of other characteristics that make one wonder what made him so attractive in the first place. Sometimes the fling was so impulsive that there’s no basis for an ongoing relationship; sometimes mom isn’t even sure which playmate is the real dad.

Another category is more poignant: the man who isn’t there, sort of. “Whatever you want to do, dear,” he says. “It’s your decision. Just let me know.” When a woman looks down the years at the multiple stresses of childrearing, this limp handpatting gives her a chill. In a pregnancy that feels like a crisis, she’s looking for a more valiant response: “I love you, I love our baby, I want to marry you and make a family, I’ll do anything to keep us together.” Unfortunately, he’s been drilled with the message that he has no right to make such an offer. If she’s pregnant, it’s her body, her life, her choice, her decision. He’s a man, and as such, has no right to an opinion. The properly sensitive guy keeps his feelings in check, and babies can wind up aborted.

Dorothy Schrage, director of the Pregnancy Support Center in Groton, Connecticut, has a small-scale operation. She trained her staff to bring up the topic of marrying the baby’s father, stocked the library with tapes about marriage, and refers couples for counseling with a pastor even if they’re not engaged - yet. Within months of beginning this program, her small center saw two couples become engaged and a third begin exploring the possibility.

“Teen marriages can work, yes!” Schrage says. “I am proof of that. I was married at age 18.” Indeed, teen marriage was the standard for so many centuries that it can’t be intrinsically unworkable. “We need to say that marriage is good and right, and God-ordained. In the right circumstances, we need to draw out the possibility of marriage, even though there are times it’s not appropriate.”

Shotgun marriages have gotten something of a bad rap; there is an expectation that they will always fail. However, even if the marriage did eventually fail, the child would be better off than if his parents had never married. For those critical early months of a child’s life, she had two parents in the home, and the family bore the same last name. Legal identification as her father’s daughter grounds her in two family trees, with two sets of grandparents, and double the sense of rootedness of a wholly fatherless child. These benefits persist even if a divorce occurs. Divorce does its own damage, of course, but a never-daddy childhood is impoverished in more ways.

The legal tie has a practical effect as well. Only 20 percent of never-married woman actually receive court-ordered child support payments; the figure for divorced women is 64 percent. Having a legal tie to the child’s father, even if it was temporary, still helps a great deal.

But the good news is that these marriages fare much better than popular imagination believes. A 1986 study found that, among white teens, three-quarters of marriages to legitimate a pregnancy were still intact after ten years; among blacks, the figure was a still impressive one-half. With a national divorce rate of about 50 percent, these kids do well.

They might even do better with a little encouragement. A constant cultural message that boys can’t be trusted, are sexually rapacious and abandon their progeny can be expected to self-fulfill. What’s surprising is that up to three-quarters of these young men are sticking around, even in the face of insult and the open expectation that they’ll fail. What might they do with a pat on the back, especially in the bloom of idealistic youth?

“Society has taken away the power from men to make an honorable decision for marriage,” says Schrage. “Welfare makes him feel powerless and detached. We need to show him that marriage is good and honorable and right, and taking that responsibility will make him

The volunteers and professionals who staff pregnancy centers don’t do so for money or glamour, but for the simple reward of helping a woman choose life, helping a child complete the journey to birth. But pregnancy doesn’t happen in a vacuum; it has implications both before and after. The growing interest in abstinence education answers some of the “before” concerns, but we have yet to tackle the immense and intimidating problem of “after” - a period that stretches for 18 years or more. How to help these mothers and children?

These long-term problems are even more difficult than the short-term ones of pregnancy. But we can begin at least by being sure of our goal: two parents for every newborn. Perhaps that will come about through marriage, or perhaps through adoption, but it must be seen as our goal for every baby we help come to birth.

(Reprinted with permission.)

Young Marriages