DAY 21: Why Marriage is the Key to Ending Abortion

You might ask, “What does marriage have to do with the problem of abortion?”  

My answer: “Just about everything.”

For starters, did you know 85% of abortions take place among unmarried women?  Often unmarried couples feel they lack the emotional, relational, and financial skills necessary to raise a child.  When a relationship is unstable it produces fear and insecurity.  That in turn causes couples to feel they aren’t ready to have a baby.  And that in turn leads to abortion.

Sadly, this instability is part of a dysfunctional generational cycle.  

Take Wendy, for example.  She grew up in a home without a father.  As a young girl, she never had the opportunity to observe what a healthy relationship looks like between a man and a woman.  Healthy marriage was never modeled for her.  On top of that, she never received the protection, provision, affirmation, and affection of a loving father.  So in her teenage years she began to look for that in other men. 

It’s not hard to see how this can become a generational problem.  One study found that girls who grow up in homes without a father are 7 times more likely to become pregnant as teenagers.

So the collapse of marriage in our culture, the high rate of divorce, and the lack of healthy role models are some of the main underlying causes of abortion.

When a couple chooses to keep their baby, the work of the pro-life movement doesn’t end.  It just begins, because the work of raising a child has started.  

In order to rebuild a culture of life in our nation, we must rebuild families on the cornerstone of marriage, and connect sex, motherhood and fatherhood back together again.

Matthew 19:4-6 – “Have you not read that he who created them from the beginning made them male and female, and said, ‘Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh’? So they are no longer two but one flesh. What therefore God has joined together, let not man separate.”

Suggested things to pray for:

• Pray for boys and girls growing up in homes without happily married parents.
• Pray for marriages to be strengthened and healed by the grace of God.

*** This article is based on information at www.care-net.org.