By Susan Ciancio
Imagine my disgust—and sadness—when I saw a meme on Facebook that depicted pro-lifers as uncaring and unsympathetic toward impoverished children who are already born. This meme shows angry people holding a sign with a preborn baby on it while one of the people picketing is pushing aside a small child begging. Next to that child is another one sleeping under some newspapers.
It’s a terrible depiction of something people do not understand. We’ve all heard it before—that pro-lifers don’t care about babies once they’re born and that they don’t care about women. Those statements couldn’t be further from the truth.
Pro-lifers stand outside of abortion clinics to save lives, and not just babies’ lives, but the lives of their mothers too. We know the guilt, the sorrow, and the grief that abortion causes. We’ve seen it with countless women. We hear their stories. We wipe their tears. And we work hard day in and day out to teach others about the sanctity of all human beings—child and mother, elderly and preborn, and the sick and disabled.
Yes, there are women who claim that abortion was a “good” thing for them and that their careers are better now because of it. But we don’t know if they’re telling the truth, if their words are just rhetoric for the populous to hear, or if the mother simply hasn’t come to the realization of her actions yet. So we pray for her and for her deceased babies.
And we pray that our words, our actions, and our teachings convince other expectant mothers that the life they’re carrying has immense value. We pray that they understand that we care about them as mothers.
In this regard, one of the bright spots this past week was the news that Ashley Bratcher, who played Abby Johnson in the movie Unplanned, is partnering with Heartbeat International to establish an educational scholarship fund to help mothers dealing with unexpected pregnancies continue their education.
According to the Daily Wire, HI “will honor these brave women who chose life with a $5,000 annual scholarship to put toward their education. . . . By encouraging positive choices, we can literally transform families and communities.”
“Encourage. Educate. Empower.” Those are the words at the top of Heartbeat International’s website dedicated to raising this scholarship money. And they are words packed with meaning.
Yes, we must encourage. We must teach that these women are strong, that they can handle an unexpected pregnancy, and that every child is a blessing.
We must educate. We must explain that the baby she is carrying is indeed a baby, not a blob of tissue. We must explain that, in every abortion, a baby dies.
And we must empower. Feeling so scared, so stuck, and so confused often leads women to think they have no other choice but abortion. The decision to kill a baby is not empowerment. True empowerment comes in helping mothers understand that they are strong enough, smart enough, and courageous enough to continue being a mother—and in giving them the tools they need to do this.
This scholarship fund is just one more example of how pro-lifers show that we do not fight just for preborn babies, but we fight for their mothers, and we fight for babies once they are born.
So the next time you see a derogatory meme that perpetuates lies, stand up and shout about all the good things pro-lifers do.