The Pro-Life Movement Needs Men

F or a lot of men, speaking out in defense of life can seem impossible. How could we possibly presume to know better than a woman what pregnancy means?

But you don’t have to be a woman to know that pregnancy means a new life. And you don’t have to be a woman to know that women deserve our love, respect and protection.

Knowing the truth is important. But so is the way you carry and share the truth. And compassion is the best on-ramp to pro-life advocacy. It centers the person or people you’re working to protect, rather than yourself.

This is how to avoid the false compassion of young male pro-abortion activists. They pose as advocates for women, advocates for “choice.” And most of them probably believe themselves to be just that. But they’ve been deceived, all of them — or they’ve deceived themselves.

The men advocating abortion have a wide range of reasons for doing so. NBA star Steph Curry described it as part of “women’s rights.” Our current transportation secretary says it will make men “more free.”

But men featured recently by the Washington Post specifically changed their stance from pro-life to pro-abortion. They did so because of complicated circumstances close to them, not from moral principle or medical insight. Yet the women pro-abortion men think they’re protecting don’t need more abortions. They need better medical care, present and loving partners, and a community that will support them and their preborn child. To believe otherwise isn’t compassion. It’s abandonment.

Of course, it can be difficult for a man to make this case in public. It’s important to be willing to accept that you won’t — and can’t — know everything, especially not about pregnancy. Humility about your own role in advocacy helps you do your work better.

But you don’t need to know everything about pregnancy to know that preborn life deserves protection, or that vulnerable women deserve the same. There are things any person can know, thanks to medical insight. We know that a heartbeat can be detected as early as six weeks of gestational age. We know that babies begin generating a neurotransmitter specific to pain response before the first trimester even ends at twelve weeks. That means they are alive, and can both die and suffer.

So you can, in fact, reject wholeheartedly the lie that preborn life is just a matter of “choice.” There are no choices to make about whether a preborn child lives or dies. There are only needs to meet: the mother’s needs, the child’s needs, the needs of those closest to them both. So if you want to help, find the felt need, whether it be those of the mother or the child. Find those needs, and then meet them.

It’s also the case that men play a unique role in the work of protecting women and preborn children. Men are an irreplaceable part of every child’s life. After all, every child has a father — whether he’s around or not. And every child needs his or her father.

Research abundantly documents the fact that men sticking around in kids’ lives makes them more resilient. Kids with a strong, consistent, loving male presence in their lives are more confident and better emotionally regulated. They’re less likely to have a child early, more likely to achieve secondary education, and less likely to experience incarceration or major depression.

Men cannot and must not wash their hands of the most important and earliest decision-making in a child’s life. Leaving women alone at their most vulnerable time, left to fend for themselves in a culture dominated by the pro-abortion industry, is an unconscionable moral failure. And it results in a tragic and horrifically large-scale loss of life.

The pro-life movement needs men. So here’s a message for them: Educate yourselves, humble yourselves, and never lose sight of the goal — namely, protecting women and their preborn children.