Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg drew national ire for his recent statement that “men are . . . more free in a country where we have a president who stands up for things like access to abortion care.” Perhaps so, if you define freedom as the ability to shirk one’s responsibilities. After all, in a world where “access” to abortion is easy, men can avoid obligations like child support and parenting.
But where does that leave women? For women, abortion is not quite so simple. A 2023 study found that only one third of women described their abortions as “wanted.” In contrast, nearly half described their abortion as “inconsistent with their values and preferences” and another quarter said that their abortion was “unwanted or coerced.” And 60% of women surveyed said that they would have preferred to give birth if they had received more emotional or financial support. Such a “choice” hardly seems free. True freedom for women (and men) lies not in abortion facilities but in pregnancy centers.
Just ask Jean Marie Davis. From the time she was a young child, Jean Marie was abused, raped, and trafficked by the men in her life. As an adult, she had been trafficked across 33 states by various pimps who tried to control her. But everything changed when Jean Marie learned that she was pregnant. After her trafficker threatened her life, she knew she had to get out. A domestic violence shelter in New Hampshire offered to pay for her to fly across the country to escape her traffickers. The shelter connected her with a local pregnancy center. Jean Marie planned to abort her baby but decided to visit the center anyway. After seeing an ultrasound of her unborn son, she changed her mind.
Today, Jean Marie has a healthy nine-year-old son and serves as executive director of Branches Pregnancy Resource Center in Brattleboro, Vermont. Like many pregnancy centers, Branches serves both mothers and fathers by locating and providing resources that new families might need—pregnancy tests, baby and maternity clothing, diapers, baby toys, baby furniture, parenting classes, and support groups for addicts, victims of domestic violence, and survivors of trafficking.
Unfortunately, pregnancy centers like Branches are under attack. I met Jean Marie about a year ago when Vermont passed a law that explicitly targets pro-life pregnancy centers by restricting their ability to advertise their services. Branches, along with another Vermont pregnancy center and a national organization of pregnancy centers, decided to challenge that law in federal court. Unfortunately, Vermont is not the only state cracking down on pregnancy centers. My organization—Alliance Defending Freedom—represents pregnancy centers in Illinois, New York, New Jersey, and Washington, along with a pro-life nurse practitioner in Colorado, that are all facing similar government censorship.
Contrast Jean Marie’s story with the story of Elizabeth Gillette. Elizabeth became pregnant unexpectedly at age 24. Her boyfriend urged her to seek an abortion because he wasn’t ready to be a father. She went to an abortion facility, hoping that they might be able to offer the information and support she needed to carry her baby to term. Instead, the facility, too, urged her to abort the baby, telling her that she would feel relieved. No one told her that hours later she would be sitting on her bathroom floor alone holding her dead baby. I met Elizabeth years later when she volunteered to testify about her abortion in an Indiana case concerning an abortion facility that wished to operate without a license in Secretary Buttigieg’s hometown of South Bend, Indiana. Unsurprisingly, then-Mayor Buttigieg vetoed a zoning decision that would have allowed a pregnancy center to open next door to the abortion facility.
Frederica Mathewes-Green, a pro-life feminist, once wrote, “No one wants an abortion as she wants an ice cream cone or a Porsche. She wants an abortion as an animal, caught in a trap, wants to gnaw off its own leg.” What if rather than focusing on the freedom of the animal to gnaw its leg off, we focused on getting rid of the traps in the first place? In the abortion context, that would mean supporting women who wish to continue their pregnancies and supporting organizations, like pregnancy centers, who do just that. I would encourage Secretary Buttigieg to consider not just the freedom of men, but the freedom of women, and I would encourage all leaders—whether federal, state, or local—to support pregnancy centers that offer true freedom to women.
Julia Payne Koon is legal counsel with Alliance Defending Freedom (@ADFLegal).