by 
Pregnancy should be the most exciting time in a young woman’s life. It should be the time where you count the days (and sometimes hours) until the new life inside the womb makes an appearance on the world’s stage.
Unfortunately, for many new mothers, pregnancy is accompanied by worry, concern, and shame.
Pregnancy Changes You
There are few milestones in life that are as big as the one where a new life enters the stage. Things like marriage, death of a friend, and perhaps choice of college rank up there.
Unfortunately, many soon to be parents do not think this through until after they are already parents—they’ve engaged in the activity that leads to life, without thought to that life, and now they have entered a new reality from which they can never return. They can never go back to not being a mom. They cannot say they never had a child—that child was created and alive and well in the womb.
It’s at times like these, times of life changing events, that the most solid anchor we can have are those people that will love us no matter what—our spouse, our best friend perhaps, and our parents.
Notice how I did not list the boyfriend, the school nurse or Planned Parenthood. While the boyfriend or father of the child should definitely have some input—it is his child as well—if you’re not married and you’re pregnant you need to talk with your parents.
Parents Are There For You
Ultimately, the parents are responsible for the lives of their children when they live with them. The school is a caretaker and an educator, but should never play the role of the parent. It is the parent’s job to set morals, to teach right and wrong.
Which is what makes the fact that this mother was not even told that her daughter was having an abortion so morally repulsive:
“She took a pregnancy test at school at the teen health center,” she said. “Nowhere in this paperwork does it mention abortion or facilitating abortion.”
Jill says her daughter, a pro-life advocate, was given a pass, put in a taxi and sent off to have an abortion during school hours all without her family knowing.
“We had no idea this was being facilitated on campus,” said Jill. “They just told her that if she concealed it from her family, that it would be free of charge and no financial responsibility.”
Obviously, a pro-life advocate would not want to be found pregnant—as most of them preach abstinence as well. For some reason, it escapes this girl that having an abortion is a bigger hypocrisy.
But besides that, leaving the parents out of the equation was the wrong thing to do.
Permission to Go On A Field Trip
See, I understand the argument that says “if we tell the parents, they could hurt her for getting pregnant, or talk her out of ‘her choice’.” I really get that.
The problem that I have is that they allow a student to go to an abortion clinic, to have major surgery performed on her, to terminate the grandparent’s first child, and yet if it this same girl wanted to leave school early, go on a field trip to the local historical site, or wanted to have someone else pick them up from school there’d have to be a signed note.
Do you see how incongruous this is?
If there was really a fear for the daughter’s life in telling the parents, have a parent/teacher conference, send in a social worker, do something where the parents were notified in a controlled setting, and have the daughter check in at intervals.
Obviously, the school doesn’t really care about the girl—which is worse, the fact that you got pregnant or that you got pregnant, had an abortion, and then lied to your parents? As far as the parents that I have dealt with, the lie is worse than the truth. And even in the case of the hostile parent, which do you think is going to set them off more?
The schools get in between the parent and the child, and think nothing of it. They sever the bond between the two, and figure that’s ok because they are protecting the daughter’s right to choose.
And who is left to pick up the pieces?
