A Little Help for Moms Everywhere
By Katie Fogleman, January 11, 2018
This piece was originally published in the Global Moms Challenge blog. Check it out here.
Let’s be honest: being a mom is hard.
Take traveling with your kid, for example. I recently flew alone for the first time with my baby Lila. Just making it inside the airport felt like a triumph.
Then, at security, I encountered a problem: I could not figure out how to collapse the dang stroller to get it onto the conveyor belt. Beads of sweat formed on my upper lip as I struggled with the contraption, a line of impatient travelers forming behind me.
Suddenly, from the line emerged an angel clad in a leather jacket. “Let me help you with that,” he said. He took the stroller, collapsed it into its friendly travel size, loaded it onto the conveyor belt, and helped me set it up again on the other end. Such a tiny gesture, but in that moment, it felt like the nicest favor I’d ever received.
As a new mom, every little bit of help is amazing and appreciated. And right now, millions of moms around the world need our help.
You may have heard of the expanded Global Gag Rule—a policy here in the United States that cuts federal funding of family planning services for moms and other women globally. Contraceptives and family planning allow women to choose when and whether to have children, so they can control their futures and take care of the children they already have.
Here’s a very cool example of family planning in action—it’s the story of outreach teams from Marie Stopes International, who travel to remote locations to provide much-needed counseling and contraception to women:
Without access to basic health tools and services—think pregnancy checkups, breast cancer screenings, and access to contraceptives—we are putting millions of women worldwide at risk of unsafe pregnancies and deliveries, which is bad not just for women but for entire families and communities.
Being a mom is incredible, but it is hard; the Global Gag Rule makes it much, much harder.
We should be helping, not hurting, moms.
Head over to mariestopes-us.org/donate to see how you can help.
