My TAC blog colleague Eve Tushnet has a good piece in The Weekly Standard about how her perspective on marriage and pregnancy has changed in the last decade of working as a volunteer at a Washington, DC, crisis pregnancy center. (CPCs, in case you don’t know, are organizations, usually run by Christians, who help women figure out workable alternatives to abortion). Excerpt:

When I started counseling I saw our work as serving the mother-child dyad. I wanted to help the woman and save her unborn baby. Over time I began to see more and more the frayed communal fabric in which these women and children are wrapped. I began to appreciate the connections they lacked—to their own fathers, to their children’s fathers, to happily married couples who could serve as models, to churches where they were nurtured and shown God’s love. Now I see my job primarily as helping women find people in their own communities who can give them support, advice, and most of all the hope that married love is possible.

I really hope you’ll read the whole thing. Bless Eve for her work at this center. One of the stories I’ve done in my career that means the most to me was a little nothing piece about that CPC when it first opened, in the mid-1990s. I wrote something ordinary about it for The Washington Times, where I worked at the time. I found out the next week that a copy of that day’s paper had been mistakenly delivered to the door of a woman, not a subscriber, who was planning to have an abortion that very day. She flipped through the paper, saw the story, had a change of heart, and called the center. She chose to have that baby, not abort her.