T he pro-life movement and its allies are doing a lot of indispensable policy work now in the wake of Dobbs. Each state is a battleground. Hundreds of thousands of vulnerable mothers and their babies are counting on the outcome of their work.
Pro-life legislation is necessary, but it is not enough. Encouraging marriage should be an essential component of any pro-life conversation. The typical abortion client is an unmarried woman with a low income who already has a child. She needs something that no policy can provide: a loving husband.
The fact is that no social safety net will ever replace a healthy marriage in terms of its benefit to vulnerable women and their children. This reality doesn’t quell our urgency to address the myriad needs of the abortion vulnerable, but it does inform our understanding of what it will take to make abortion unthinkable and unnecessary. America’s mothers deserve happiness, safety, and respect — and marriage has the best overall chance of delivering that to them, especially in the long term.
Marriage is proven to have a protective effect on women even during their pregnancy, before the often grueling work of raising the child has officially begun.
Women who are married, barring situations of abuse or other hardship, statistically tend to have healthier babies and pregnancies. They’re less likely to deliver prematurely, and the babies they deliver are more likely to be a healthy weight. The reasons for the effect’s presence during pregnancy are hotly debated, but the effect remains.
And after pregnancy, the protective effect of marriage becomes straightforward and obvious. A good marriage helps provide a new mom with emotional, physical, and financial security that she could get almost nowhere else.
Consider just how vulnerable a new mother is, how intense and personal her needs are. Any woman who has just given birth is likely in some amount of pain — and she’s exhausted. She also has responsibility for a new, fragile little person who is completely dependent upon her. Her body is undergoing one of the most extreme changes possible in the course of a normal life.
But her needs aren’t the end of it — far from it! After all, babies don’t know night from day when they first arrive. They have to learn how to eat, how to sleep, how to move. Noise, light, hunger, and touch are almost completely foreign to them. Delivering the necessary care requires a nearly superhuman amount of attention and emotional regulation from their parents.
But married women have a partner in delivering this care.
They have someone they know will console them when they’re crying in the kitchen for no particular reason at 3 a.m. They have someone they know can take the baby to let them sleep, shower, or eat. They have someone they can count on to help provide income for the household, and to advocate on their behalf during labor.
Most importantly, they have someone who can join them in the very real joy of welcoming new life. They have someone with whom to share the love and wonder of a child.
And that precious child, as he grows, will also be served well by marriage. Boys grow up to regulate aggression better as adults if they’ve been raised with a father around. Kids of married parents do better professionally, educationally, socially, and even physically. They’re more likely to escape poverty and stay out of prison.
Marriage has the power to bring security and peace to our mothers — and in so doing, to completely transform the lives of our next generation. It has the power to change our whole culture, if we’d let it. We owe our mothers a culture where marriage is the norm, not the exception — a culture where new life is a cause for joy, not for despair.
America’s mothers don’t need abortion. They need love, safety, and support. Their children do, too.