So Women’s Month is here and our thoughts are turned toward ourselves as the “tender gender.” I can already see the hackles rising on some of our suffragette inclined sisters, but I beg you to hear me out and judge after you have heard all I have to say.

I grew up having to be strong. It was, as life led me to believe, a matter of survival. Losing the central male figure in your life at the tender age of three years, leaves a deep wound and a strong survival instinct rooted in independence and self-sufficiency. I became so centred on preserving my own life, I had no time to save anyone else’s. Including my baby’s.

He came into my life when I felt least equipped or prepared. He came when he was least wanted by his father. He came and changed my life irrevocably, simply because he was real. He didn’t live to see the light of day. He didn’t live to see my face, or for me to see his. But he touched my life more than any human being on this planet.

I allowed him to be aborted. Doing that killed more than just “a fetus” inside me. With him died a part of me, and the life I had painstakingly built around childish hopes and dreams. I wanted happiness without any responsibility, bliss without sacrifice. But I ended up sacrificing the one human being who had ever been fully dependent on me.

It cost the life of my child to shake me out of my downward spiral, and it almost cost my own life. They say God moves in mysterious ways, and I can certainly testify to that.

Years later I found a place called Hope Pregnancy Crisis Centre. A haven for women like myself who are pressured either by a husband, a boyfriend, their family or their own fears to end the life growing in their womb. Just as I was, they are pressed into becoming a tomb where futures die, instead of a womb where the future thrives.

Hope. I wondered how things might have been different if I had known about a place such as this in my time of angst. Hope. I learned with heartache that my baby had already had a heartbeat, something the pre-abortion “counselling” at the abortion clinic had failed to reveal. Hope. I burned to spare any and every woman I could from the painful loss I had experienced.

Strong woman, your strength is in being a life-giver. You are not, and were never, meant to be man’s equal. You are meant to be his complement. Just as he is meant to be yours. The power of the womb is being attacked by every conceivable force in the name of “choice” and “equality”.

The question facing us now is: are we going to fall for the deception that we are “equal” to men? Are we happy to be able to “do anything men can do”? Or does our ambition reach higher than that, to do what no man has ever done?

I was privileged to be able to volunteer at Hope Pregnancy Crisis Centre recently. There I met two amazing women who chose to do what no man has done. They chose to give life. They chose to give God a chance to provide a future. They chose dependency. They chose to take responsibility.

The beauty I saw there is unrivalled. There remains something magical in the wonder of a newborn child that is incomparable. It proclaims the power that we women have, not only to produce life, but to nurture and cultivate it. To protect it with the ferocity of a she-bear. To lay down our life for the furtherance of a legacy and a new generation of hope.

It speaks of selflessness that would make Joan of Arc seem egocentric. It illustrates a power and capacity to have a hand in changing the future in a way that no man can. It is the flower power unique to the tender gender that does not mean we are incapable.

It is a dependency that has the power to call forth the hero in a man. To make him more than he even thought possible, and not by nagging and whining. No. By simply being his complement, we can raise him up to a level of manhood that even he never dreamed possible.

Ladies, the power to change the future is in our hands. But we must fight the good fight with the weapons we were born with and not be the egg beater trying to cut the bread. Let’s make meringues, sisters! Let’s be the sweetness of this life today. Let’s be women who don’t need to do “what men do” in order to prove our worth.

Our worth lies in who we are, not who we can equal. Let’s embrace that! Let’s be the life-givers we were created to be. It is not too late. Not for me, not for you. Your life-giving womanhood may be deeply hidden, but it is not lost! Choose to uncover, recover and rediscover the power you were born with.

I am woman. Hear me SING!