Originally published at National Catholic Register
When Dominique White went to a Texas Planned Parenthood after discovering she was pregnant at 17, a staff person told her that she had two options: either abort her child or raise him herself.
Believing that these were her only choices, she decided with the encouragement of her family to raise her eldest son as a single parent.
Several years later, White found herself in another unintended pregnancy, but learned that she had a third option in private adoption, which wasn’t an “undesirable last resort” but a way that gave her power to give her son a good future.
Since she chose to place her birth son from her second unplanned pregnancy in open adoption in 2016, White has been in regular contact with his adoptive family, and he and his older half-brother share a close relationship, said White, now 29, who lives in the Austin, Texas, area.
During both of her unintended pregnancies, abortion initially had seemed like the obvious choice, White said.
“It almost felt like that was what had been taught to us, and I can’t tell you where that had been taught to me,” she said. “It just seemed like that was the norm, like
