She “felt like I was undercover behind enemy lines.” Staunch pro-choicer and California law professor Michelle Oberman had stepped into the kind of place she often criticizes: a pro-life crisis pregnancy center.

She discovered a place of compassion. And a challenge to pro-lifers.

What She Learned

Even though she wasn’t actually undercover, she felt like it, she wrote on The New York Times’ opinion page last week. She traveled to Oklahoma to better understand the pro-life movement, she explained. Birth Choice of Oklahoma invited her for a visit.

Many of Birth Choice’s clients come from abusive situations, addiction and poverty, she learned. The center helps them overcome basic hurdles, like finding prenatal care and registering for Medicaid.

What really impressed Oberman was that Birth Choice goes ever further. How? With Rose Home. The shelter hosts “the most vulnerable of its clients” and their children.

“They have weekly meetings with caseworkers to articulate goals and plan their futures,” Oberman writes. And “they receive counseling, drug abuse treatment and vocational training. They get help making court dates, permitting them to regain custody of their children currently in foster care.”

The Crucial Work of Crisis Pregnancy Centers

Oberman seems to paint Birth Choice of Oklahoma as the exception to the rule of unhelpful, lie-spreading pro-life centers. She cites a 2006 congressional report commissioned by former Democratic Rep. Henry Waxman.

It claims that many federally-funded crisis pregnancy centers spread “misinformation.” For instance, workers told women that abortions could cause breast cancer, infertility and depression. (While some studies have shown a link between abortion and breast cancer, the general medical consensus is that there is none. But multiple abortions can lead to future pregnancy complications. And many post-abortive women suffer from Post Abortion Syndrome.)

While it appears that some centers have cited false statistics to scare women, Birth Choice may not be as much of an exception as Oberman believes. Important crisis pregnancy centers exist all over the country. Many provide resources like counseling services, maternal classes and housing assistance.

But are enough crisis pregnancy centers offering these critical aids? Barbara Chishko, a founder of Birth Choice, doesn’t think so. She suggests that Rose Home is unique. She told Oberman many pro-life centers offer “no shelters, no clinical services.” She said they “just administer pregnancy tests and give out baby clothes. Just persuade women not to abort their babies.”

That’s the point for us. Not to get hung up over whether Oberman has a bad opinion of crisis pregnancy centers. (She already admitted that she does.) We must ask ourselves if we’re doing everything we can to extend practical help to pregnant women who need it most.

Why Many Women Abort

Why? Oberman gives us the answer: “One of the largest research studies on the question of why women choose abortion surveyed about 1,200 abortion patients and found 73 percent said they could not afford a baby at the time.”

On the pro-life side, we often paint the choice to abort as an inherently selfish one. We believe no circumstance, no matter how difficult, justifies one person taking the innocent life of another.

As Oberman points out, abortion is often the result of financial pressure. For women whose lives are falling apart, keeping the baby may actually feel more selfish than abortion. It’s not an option they feel excited about. But it may seem like their only one.

That’s why it’s our job as the pro-life community to show these women otherwise. Not simply by telling them, “you can do it!” But by doing it with them. By providing shelter, education, medical care and other basic needs. Such assistance will help both the woman and her baby survive and even thrive.

Don’t Miss This Opportunity

At the end of her column, Oberman writes that “it will, at some level, always be cheaper for a woman to have an abortion than to have a baby.” She argues pro-lifers should help pregnant women economically. Not pass laws to “drive up the costs of abortion.”

Like most pro-lifers, I would argue that we still need to pass pro-life laws. The legislative victories achieved since Roe v. Wade have saved perhaps millions of lives. They should be celebrated.

But we can’t focus all our efforts on passing the next bill. We also need to focus a lot of our efforts on improving the way our local crisis pregnancy centers can help pregnant women. We can’t place all our hope in the possibility of Roe being overturned rather than investing in more pro-life women’s shelters. If we do, we’ve missed a huge opportunity to save lives — not only the lives of the unborn but the lives of their mothers.