I moved to a maternity home, took parenting classes and got tutoring to complete high school. I graduated with my class three weeks after my son was born, and I began taking courses at a community college. When my sister, who was caring for my son, moved out of state, I left school to work full time. I eventually worked my way up the ladder at an investment firm, married and had two more children. While my time as a single parent was not easy, we got by, and today my life is nothing like the one predicted by that chorus of pessimism 29 years ago.

Obviously, not every woman will be as lucky as I was, with a strong network of family and friends to help. But that’s why we as a society have an obligation to help them. For the past 17 years, I have worked at organizations that do just that.

Many of the women I have encountered believe they have no choice but to abort: Many tell me they would rather give birth, but they believe the complex, difficult circumstances of their lives — like joblessness, substance abuse, criminal records or homelessness — leave them with no real way to raise a new child. They want an abortion, as the anti-abortion writer Frederica Mathewes-Green says, “as an animal, caught in a trap, wants to gnaw off its own leg.”

Abortion addresses only a symptom of these women’s problems. An abortion clinic, for a few hundred dollars, ends the life of a child whose upbringing may strain her mother’s resources. Full stop. The woman will leave the clinic still burdened by every single problem she came in with.

There are better solutions; they just require more creativity and more effort. Organizations like mine can help women find jobs, enter substance abuse treatment programs, regain their children from foster care, find housing, pay utility bills and sign up for government benefits.

Such efforts require a community commitment. We recently had a client whose husband needed a car to get to work. A donor sold her car at a steep discount, another donor purchased it for the client, and a third paid for six months of car insurance.

We should all agree, whether anti-abortion or pro-choice, that abortion is not a solution to the host of systemic injustices driving poverty. Progressives cannot continue to claim every effort to reduce abortion is anti-woman and will lead to ruin and disaster. And conservatives must do more than tell abortion-seeking women to “go in peace and keep warm and well fed”; they must sacrifice their time and treasure to serve women in need.

We cannot allow the real, complex needs of abortion-seeking women to get lost in today’s polarized abortion debate. Our society must not settle for leaving women who face unplanned pregnancy no hope but abortion.