I wasn’t expecting it, but doing foster care radically changed my views on abortion.

I once rather staunchly opposed abortion on religious grounds—the sanctity and value of human life were of the utmost importance. To me, it seemed like a black-and-white issue. Killing is killing, and killing is wrong, no matter what.

​Life is precious, after all.

But I did not really understand how precious life is until I found out that my husband and I could not create one. When our decision to start a family was hijacked by infertility, abortion seemed so wildly unfair. I could not comprehend such a choice because I had not been given such a choice. Infertility made my opinion stronger—​abortion seemed even crueler after I knew that I would never be pregnant. There were women who were literally having fetuses sucked from their uteruses only to discard them, and I, despite my best efforts, despite my aching desire to be pregnant, would never know the feeling of carrying life inside of me. 

Abortion angered me because it wasted what I could not have.

When we decided to grow our family through foster care, we opened our doors to kids in desperate situations. We called them ours for a time, and we learned about them and their families. The relationships were always complicated—these kids loved their parents, and their parents loved them, too, but that love wasn’t enough to keep them together. Other things kept getting in the way: drugs, sexual abuse, domestic violence, severe mental illness. It was absolutely tragic, watching this kids, these human beings, come to terms with the fact that they had been taken from their homes because their parents were seen as abusive, neglectful, or unfit.

Foster care was a crash course in the value and sanctity of human life.

To value a specific human life outside of your own family, to truly cherish it, is a concept that is absurdly foreign to most. Those who have never been foster parents cannot comprehend the kind of dysfunction that exists within the foster care system. They have never seen a teenager removed from a shoddy trailer illegally parked in front of the home the parents were evicted from, a trailer housing three adults and eight dogs without electricity or running water. They have never seen a mentally ill woman with no teeth stand before a judge in court and vehemently refuse to relinquish her parental rights and then have the audacity to request that her child be placed back into foster care. They have never seen a child waiting at a scheduled visit from their biological parents with hopeful eyes, only to be stood up. They have never had to drive home from these visits with the child sobbing in the back seat because the visit didn’t happen, or because it did happen and it went incomprehensibly poorly.

There are no words to say in these moments.

Shock steals them from your mouth.

If you have not done foster care, you simply cannot understand it.

And there is a shortage of people willing to take on the challenge.

You cannot truly be pro-life if you are not actively involved in the foster care system. I’ll say that one again for the people in the back: you cannot truly be pro-life if you are not actively involved in the foster care system.

Abortion is a desperate act. I don’t think any woman would make such a decision lightly.

But doing foster care has radically changed my views on the sanctity of life. Birth is a miracle, yes, but it’s a small fraction of what constitutes a life. It is easy to speak in sweeping generalities about the sanctity of all life, but it is another thing entirely to examine a specific life and determine its unique value—the sanctity is often forgotten in individual cases.

Foster care confronts this very conundrum.

Something happens during the course of that life when it loses its value to humanity at large, when that life is no longer considered precious, when it is deemed ruined and incapable of redemption. Babies are innocent and precious and helpless, but if they are raised in a desperate situation, they will grow into children who act out, into teenagers who lash out, and suddenly, those lives lose the sparkling, precious value of innocence.

Kids raised in desperate situations are forced to respond to the chaos and turmoil and instability around them by trying to get someone’s—anyone’s—attention. They struggle in school. They misbehave. They are desperate themselves, adrift in a culture of normality they do not understand because they have only ever known dysfunction. Teachers scowl when they enter the room. Principals are well-acquainted with them. They are written off as problems and told they will never amount to anything.

They believe this, and the prophecy fulfills itself: They seek fulfillment in relationships with other desperate people, give birth to another generation of desperate children, and the vicious cycle continues.

People born into desperate situations know only desperation and are often doomed to live what they know—how could they be expected to do anything else?

Life extends all the way to death, and what must be truly valued is everything that happens in between those two points. There is an epidemic of desperation out there. It is a mark of your privilege if you are unaware of it. It’s largely invisible, but it exists nonetheless, a seedy societal underbelly, and there are very few support structures in place that can help those people in need. The foster care system is overwhelmed nationwide, and social work is an undervalued, underfunded, high-burnout, high-turnover field.

Very few people are taking action to remedy this problem.

Until people rise up in mass numbers to value the lives that are already here, regardless of their innocence, until people rise up and act on behalf of these forgotten children, I’m afraid I can no longer consider myself pro-life.

I’m not pro-abortion, but there is nothing wrong with choice.

Life is precious, and there are lives here and now that deserve to be seen as such, and giving those lives—the foster children and their biological families—the attention, support, and care they need to make changes toward restoration and reintegration must become part of the pro-life movement if it is to make any true headway.

Abortions are a last resort for the desperate.

How desperate will we allow people to get?