Nonprofit organization is a safe haven for young pregnant Missourians
If you’re a teenager discovering that you are pregnant in Missouri, your options are limited: With parental consent or the approval of a judge, you could get a surgical abortion at the only clinic in the state; that is, if you have the time for a long waiting period and manage to get on the list. Alternatively, you could drive to another state to get a medical abortion with pills, which is outlawed in Missouri but allowed in certain states like Illinois. That option, however, is only doable if you have a car or if someone is willing to drive you. Perhaps you could attempt to stay in school through a nine-month pregnancy and then give the baby up for adoption.
If you choose to keep the baby, you’d need to spend your pregnancy searching for and finding resources – TANF funds, medical help, pre-birth classes, the dizzying variety of supplies required to take care of a baby, and so on – all while staying in school or continuing to work, if you can.
Not one of these options is easy. All are complicated. With the new Right By You text line, however, a group of activists plans to make sure that young pregnant people in Missouri can at least be equipped to meet these challenges with correct, unbiased information on what exactly their reproductive options are.
Right by You is a service that allows young people to text trained staffers their questions about reproductive health and connect with the necessary resources for their decision. Founder Stephanie Kraft Sheley was inspired to launch the project by two similar text lines: Jane’s Due Process in Texas, and TextAbby in the Carolinas. Each of these organizations answer questions about reproductive health that are texted to them for free. Sheley saw an opportunity to create something like that for Missouri teens.
Right By You is staffed by volunteers who answer all incoming texts every weekday evening. There are currently seven volunteers who have trained to handle the text line. One of these volunteers, Allison Klinghammer, was inspired to get involved by the chance to connect directly with young people and offer them pregnancy information that includes all options – information that might otherwise be hard to find.
“We don’t just offer information about how you can get an abortion. We educate on how you can parent to the best of your ability, should that be the decision you want to make,” she explained. A lot of Klinghammer’s job as a volunteer at Right by You also involves figuring out how to best talk to kids about sensitive subjects such as this one. For her, that often means going off-script and speaking (or texting) to people in an informal, nonjudgmental way.
“We’re speaking person to person. It’s an incredibly difficult and challenging time, especially for young folks dealing with big decisions. So, I have found that […] when I can speak a little more informally, but be very reassuring and judgement-free […] that is the best tone to use with folks.”
Founder Stephanie Kraft Sheley has worked for years as a judicial bypass attorney in Illinois, helping young people in that state secure abortion procedures if their parents are not willing to approve them. Now, she wants to help empower young people across the border in Missouri, too.
“As I’ve been doing this work, it’s become clear to me that young people do need more and better information about abortion and how to access it,” she said. But that’s not all: often, young people don’t have proper information about what being a young parent would look like, either. “They are targeted with misinformation about limited options that include continuing their pregnancy and parenting, or placing a child up for adoption.”
Right By You uses texting to communicate with kids because, as Sheley put it, this can often be a more natural, less nerve-wracking way to communicate than via phone call or video call, particularly for teens. “It kind of overcomes that initial barrier to reaching out,” she said. “It’s how a lot of young people prefer to communicate nowadays.”
As of 2017, just over 26 out of every 1,000 teen girls in Missouri became pregnant – a number that was significantly lower than the state’s peak in 1991, but which became higher when isolating the data for the city of St. Louis (34.28). Missouri, one of the states most hostile to abortion rights, also fails to provide much in the way of resources for young people who want to go through with their pregnancies.
In 2020, only 39 abortions were recorded in the state – a sharp drop from 2017, in large part due to the implementation of stricter laws and continuous attempts to shut down the one clinic in the state that will perform the procedure. There are, by contrast, about 70 “crisis pregnancy centers” in the state, which are in fact anti-abortion facilities, often religious in nature, and provide pregnancy tests and baby supplies to uncertain young people. These centers, which are often funded by taxpayers, are not medically regulated.
Navigating this climate as a young person is daunting. That’s why Right By You hopes to let pregnant young people in Missouri know they aren’t alone – no matter what they choose to do about their pregnancies.
“If we’re pro-choice advocates and we tell them, ‘we support you, whatever you decide,’ I also think there needs to be some resource that is supportive of abortion that can additionally assist people materially, and guide them to find out what their options look like,” Sheley said.
“What we’re able to do is ask: ‘what is it that you need to know in order to find out what the right decision is for you?’ I think a lot of times what it comes down to is a bigger question: what is my life going to look like if I go down one path versus another?”