How Unplanned’s Ashley Bratcher just amplified her message

“It’s been a little crazy because with this role in particular, I think that people almost see me like Abby,” she said over the phone. “It’s hard for people to create the distinction that I’m an actress playing Abby. They see me as someone who is Abby, who’s out doing all this work to change things, and I’ve never had that platform before. And I wanted to because my heart was in the role.”

One day, a woman, who was a junior in college, reached out to Bratcher to tell her that she’d decided to keep her baby, after simply seeing the trailer for Unplanned.

“It was literally just the trailer that got her because she said she’d never thought about a child’s beating heart. It just didn’t hit her until then. When she had that moment, she said to me, ‘I’m going to have to give up everything,'” Bratcher said. “I said to her, ‘That’s not the way that this has to go.'”

She helped the woman get connected with a local pregnancy resource center. What struck Bratcher, who had her own unplanned pregnancy almost 10 years ago, is that many women feel like they have to choose between their children and their careers.

“Society makes us believe that you can’t have a baby and have a successful career or go to school,” she said. “That’s exactly what we don’t need to hear. That’s exactly the opposite of female empowerment.”

So last week, Bratcher announced that she was partnering with Heartbeat International, the most expansive anti-abortion pregnancy resource network around the world, according to its website. Through the organization, she will be raising funds to provide scholarships to mothers with unplanned pregnancies. The funds will offer $5,000 a year so women can continue their education to provide better lives for themselves, and their babies.

Bratcher says she hopes the scholarship will “raise awareness that just because you have an unplanned pregnancy, that doesn’t mean that your life is over. And on top of that, that there are organizations around the world that are there to help you.”

Less than a week after its creation, the scholarship has already raised nearly $10,000. Bratcher hopes to expand the funds before the program starts accepting applications next year. Eventually, she’d love to provide funds to single fathers and even students pursuing medicine from an anti-abortion perspective. “This is just the beginning,” Bratcher said.

The cultural narrative about abortion often says that women need the ability to terminate their pregnancies in order to succeed. Actress Alyssa Milano recently said that she’s had two abortions, without which her “life would be completely lacking all its great joys.” In an article for the New Yorker, after abortion bans passed in Alabama and Georgia, author Katha Pollitt wrote, “Legal abortion means that the law recognizes a woman as a person. It says that she belongs to herself.”

But feminism doesn’t need abortion, and women don’t either. When society says unplanned pregnancies mean that women can’t pursue their dreams, “what I want to make sure women know is, they can,” Bratcher says.

Bratcher is now married to her high school sweetheart, and her son, whom she had while she was still unmarried, is nine years old. She says she can’t imagine her life without him.

“All of my dreams are coming true. I can’t imagine having lived a better life so far, and he is an essential part of that. So many people want to say that female empowerment is making the choice to do it on your own, but the truth of the matter is, my child empowered me because for the first time in my life, I had to live for someone other than myself,” she said. “You can’t predict the future, but I can tell you from experience that most of the women I know that decide to carry their babies to term are the ones who are just overwhelmed with joy that they have this tiny little person that they love so much.”