Tools You Can Use to Support a Mom in Choosing Life

Lauren Loboda of CrisisPregnancySupport.com offers advice for women who want to help other women in crisis pregnancies.

We are now living in a post-Roe world. You might have questions about what this means for you. What does the pro-life movement look like now? How do I talk about abortion? How do I help a friend or family member in a crisis pregnancy? If I live in a state where the abortion has been banned, wont there be more women in unplanned pregnancies? If I live in a state where abortion is accessible and there are little restrictions, has the conversation changed since Roe was overruled? Might women be more open to choosing life?

What is my role in this post-Roe world?

No matter where you live, or what your background, you can have a great impact in helping a mom with an unintended pregnancy. I would like to share with you some life coaching tools that you can use to support a mom in choosing life.

Even though I would love to outline all the topics we cover in our 12-week program and explain everything about life coaching, but for brevity’s sake I will highlight just one topic here. We begin our course discussing stress. If someone is in a crisis, to ask her to decide what she is going to do right away doesn’t make much sense. Instead, we want to help her calm down, consider the reality and the truth of her situation, reflect, and find healing before we even start to talk about making plans. So, the first step I would suggest to you is to talk to the mom experiencing an unplanned pregnancy about stress responses.

The human body has 4 trauma responses: Fight, Flight, Freeze, and Fawn.

The fight or flight response, or stress response, is triggered by a release of hormones either prompting us to stay and fight or run away and flee. During the response, all bodily systems are working to keep us alive in what we’ve perceived as a dangerous situation.” (Carolyn Fisher, PhD, Health.ClevelandClinic.org)

The Fight and Flight response are the most basic. There are also the Freeze and Fawn responses. 

When we experience any kind of trauma, we can respond to the threat in various ways to cope. We are all familiar with the fight or flight response, but there are actually four main trauma responses. (Dr. Caroline Leaf)

Your Fight response causes your body to respond angrily and aggressively, and you feel the desire to get up and fight. Your Flight response causes your body to respond with feelings of restlessness and anxiety. Your Freeze response exhibits feelings of dread, numbness, and stiffness. Your Fawn response looks to make others happy, is overly agreeable and sometimes fails to set good boundaries.

The brain is made to react to stress. Whether it is reacting to a physical danger or a psychological danger, you can experience physical responses such as tension in the body, headaches, increased heart rate, increased blood pressure, flushed skin, sweating, and crying. Tell her that the good news is she can find ways to reduce stress! She can learn how to calm down, think, and feel differently. The first step is recognizing how she feels. After that, she wants to pause and take a few deep breaths. Those steps will make a big impact on decreasing the physical symptoms.

Once she has taken a break and some deep breaths, she can use a variety of techniques to calm her body. Some people exercise, talk to a friend, journal, or listen to music. Depending on where she is and what is possible in the moment, she might not have many options available to her to help calm her body. At the very least, she can say positive thoughts to herself. She can write them down and place them around her home, in her purse, or in the notes section of her phone and practice saying them to herself, even if she is in a relaxed state.

Now, this is just the tip of the iceberg. Yes, pregnant moms need doctor appointments, diapers, and formula, but they also need self-love, attention, encouragement, and a positive atmosphere. As our Catholic faith teaches us, we are more than just bodies. We have emotional, mental, and spiritual needs too. How can you support moms in crisis pregnancies in new ways? How can you journey with, pray for, or teach a mom in this situation? We can all donate more money or more onesies, but how can we give of ourselves? Let’s be open to praying for these moms more and loving them more and in different ways in our post-Roe world.

Copyright 2022 Lauren Loboda for CrisisPregnancySupport.com
Images courtesy of Lauren Loboda

About CrisisPregnancySupport.com:

We are 7 life coaches and 1 licensed counselor. Our 12-week Life Coaching Program is all online via Zoom. This program is open to any woman in a crisis pregnancy in any location in the world. However, we do meet from 7-8pm Eastern Standard Time and currently we have only English-speaking coaches. The topics of our program include stress, anxiety, regulating emotions, self-confidence, self-worth, self-care, forgiveness, cognitive distortions, mindset management, making decisions and making plans.

Since we formed in July of 2022, we have been contacting pregnancy centers, pro-life groups, churches, and college campuses around the country. Our first online coaching program started in August. We will begin a new 12-week course on January 10, 2023.