Posts

High Five ✋  My coworker and I stand outside of Planned Parenthood almost daily. We truly are trying to save a life or two. Actually when it comes down to it we are  trying to save families. When you do this day in and day out and it gets difficult because we measure our accomplishments the same way we measure any accomplishment. We look for results. If nobody changes their mind then we feel like we are failures. There are a lot of feelings of failure because we dont always get to know the outcome of our presence. . Fortunately there are two of us working so we keep each other from going too far down the path of doubt. We also remind each other how much Satan is involved in this.  The flip side is that when someone does change their mind it feels like you hit a home run. We  even do funny things like high five when someone leaves after telling us they are changing their mind and keeping the baby. Last week we talked to two women in a row who chose life. One seemed to be on the fence. T
Turn Away😊 One of the goals of a pro life advocate is encourage someone intending to walk into an abortion center to turn away and get back in their car to go to a health care clinic or pregnancy care center instead. Logic says that this should happen anytime someone stops to talk to one of us. The truth is that it rarely happens. In fact when it does it is almost shocking. Today a couple, a woman who was with a male partner walked up to talk to me and took the flier with the information about all of the other resources and walked back to her partner. They started to walk towards the clinic and turned around to walk back to the car and drove out of the parking lot. The man shouted “we are keeping it”. I can't say for sure if he was serious but I do know that this turn away bought the mother in crisis time to think. I don't know where they were planning to go or even if they were bluffing and planning to go back to the wbortion center. None of this matters because she seemed st
  The way things go 👍👊💗 We met over a year ago. She was 20 and pregnant. I am a pro life advocate. She is now a young mom. I offered her a flower to encourage her to come talk to me. I could see she was upset and I wanted to see if I could help her. I'm told the flowers make me look more inviting. She walked over to tell me about her circumstances. We spent several hours at our outreach building talking about all of her options and finally inviting the baby's father to come in to also talk. During our conversations I could see her changing the way she thought about her crisis pregnancy. She went from feeling overwhelmed and burdened to feeling like she could go through with the choice of life for her baby. Once she understood she was indeed carrying a life she began to express a feeling of desire to protect and love her baby . We made plans for her to get a sonogram at Obria Medical Center. We met there a few weeks later. I was allowed in during the sonogram. She says that w
  The Pass 🙌 I met Anna at the Fresno Fair where Right to Life was hosting a booth. She was working there and stopped at our booth. She was looking around. She lingered, in my opinion, just a little too long. She was asking lots of curious questions. My pro life advocate intuition started to work so I asked her what was going on and if she was pregnant. Anna said she was. She thought she might be about four months pregnant. I invited her to sit and talk. She told me her story as it stood. She is a mother of two already and the father of the children is involved. He's leaving the military for medical reasons and looking for his next venture. He doesn't think this is a good time to have another baby because they already have one that is only seven months old. She knows she wants to keep the baby because she believes in choosing life but she is nervous and feels unsupported. We talked about all of the resources that are available to her and all the things Right to Life will do to
Broken 💔 Some circumstances shock me more than others. This is one. Last week I stood outside of Planned Parenthood, a car pulled up and I asked the driver, a woman in her late teens, if she needed a pregnancy test. She responded that she did not. I asked if she was pregnant and she said that she was not but her thirteen year old baby sister was.  The elder sister just dropped off the baby sister to get a surgical abortion. I explained to the elder sister the abortion-related increased risk of maternal suicide, depression, anxiey, drug addiction and alcholism. She responded that she already knew this. I begged the elder sister to enter the facility and pull out the baby sister so that I could fully apprise the latter of her options. The elder sister refused. I said, “This must be killing you.” She responded, “No, not really.”  To all of this I ask, “what have we done?”. What has happened in this world to cause big sisters to feel no remorse, fear or sorrow about taking their ba
⻍ The Journey ⻌ Watching “our” new mom, Aleyda has been so inspiring. For all of the horrible things going on in the world she has shown us hope. She has shown us her hope and she has given us hope and encouragement to carry on in this fight for life. She has been brave, humble and gracious all at the same time. We have been amazed, humbled and honored to participate in her journey. We stand in awe of this young gregarious and joyful ,beautiful young lady. Aleyda entered our outreach building about eight months ago after I encouraged her to come talk to me. I reached out with the promise of a flower and some information and she trusted me enough to come talk to me. It has been such a joy getting to know the tiger inside this person who was so scared at that moment. She has gone from not knowing what to do or how to do it to I WILL do this. As she said, she has gone from abortion minded to “pro life” without even having a full understanding of what that means. It has appeared as if it i
 Meeting Halfway  💖💖💖 A Story of a Mother I saw her from a distance on the other side of the parking lot. I called out to her asking if she'd like a free flower. It's amazing what a flower will do. She declined while looking a little frazzled. She walked around almost in circles and then towards another part of the building where there is a walkway down the back parking lot of Planned Parenthood. I walked to the other end of that walkway.   I only have a few moments to convince her that I have support that might really help her. So I just watched and then said casually that I thought “ it might be less intimidating if I wasn’t with a group of happy volunteers.”  We laughed together about that. I asked her if she was okay. She clearly was not. I questioned whether she'd just had a pregnancy test. She replied that she had and that it was positive. I waited a minute and then asked if she was planning to keep the baby. She said she wasn't sure and that she was thinking a