Our culture believes women are too weak to overcome adversity. Feminism has convinced many women they are not strong enough to overcome unwanted pregnancies.
Feminism doesn’t empower women, it oppresses them—and it especially oppresses their babies. Misogynists cannot create a more repressive ideology for women than feminism.
Feminism, after all, suggests women—unlike men—cannot be successful unless they have the “right” to kill their unwanted babies. How is that empowering?
Women are strong enough to overcome adversity. Women are strong enough to overcome unwanted pregnancies—every woman can be just as strong as my mom.
One of my favourite stories about mom is that many years ago, she helped me move a stove from the kitchen to the basement. I was in my late-teens and she was in her mid-forties. But mom held her own—and half the weight of the stove—through every step.
I was shocked by her strength. That stove was heavy. But through sweat and pain, mom moved it with me.
But that shouldn’t have surprised me. I knew better than that—I knew mom better than that. She’s carried much heavier things in her life.
My father abandoned mom and my older brother while she was still pregnant with me, and he never returned home. He couldn’t bear the weight of an unwanted pregnancy in an unendingly bad economy in Ghana.
Unwanted pregnancies usually end in abortions in Ghana. The abortion rate in Ghana is almost 4 times higher than the abortion rate in America and Canada. Abortion is a tempting option for poor Ghanaian women who are fearful of making themselves poorer by having children. And it’s significantly more difficult for poor parents and poor children to climb out of poverty in Ghana than it is in America and Canada.
My father couldn’t bear the weight of that adversity—but mom could. She’s stronger than my father. She’s always been the strongest person I know.
Single motherhood is challenging anywhere, especially in African nations like Ghana. But mom was a single mother with a triune God. She knew God had strengthened her to overcome all adversity.
In extreme poverty in Ghana, mom remained extremely strong in God. She worked several low-income jobs, and she carried the weight of the unwanted pregnancy—me—to full-term.
Life didn’t get any easier after I was born. But mom didn’t get any weaker either. Mom was a breadwinner and a breadmaker. She balanced two jobs and two kids, and she managed to enrol us into private school. Most two-parent households in Ghana cannot afford to place their children in private school. But mom worked tirelessly and starved herself to do that for us.
Years later, when mom remarried after she moved to Montreal, Canada—she was forced to overcome another familiar adversity.
Mom’s husband—my stepfather—at the time pressured her to get an abortion after mom became pregnant within weeks after marriage. My stepfather convinced an apparent abortionist to pressure her to get an abortion: but mom refused. He also convinced friends—male and female—to harass mom into getting an abortion: still, mom refused.
Mom tells me she said to them: “I was able to raise two small children on my own through poverty in Ghana. Why wouldn’t I be able to raise another child in Canada?”
That marriage didn’t survive—but the child did. The child is now 25 years old, and he’s my younger brother.
Mom isn’t weak. God didn’t create her to make her weak. God didn’t create women to make them weak.
Not everyone woman can be as strong as mom—not every man can be as strong as mom. But every person—every woman can overcome their own challenges. Not every woman can carry the weight of a stove from the kitchen to the basement, but every woman—by the grace of God—can carry the weight of an unwanted pregnancy to full-term.
After all, unwanted pregnancies are much more than adversities, anyway. They are blessings from God. We shouldn’t kill our blessings. We shouldn’t kill babies.
Every woman can overcome an unwanted pregnancy. Though feminists disagree, God has made women strong to do that.