How You Can Join the Pro-Life Movement

You know, a lot of times the church will say they're pro-life and, yes, keep your baby, but then sometimes when a girl chooses life, they may shame them or condemn them or shut their doors and say they're not welcome here. So we want it to be a safe place.

Well, we want to be a safe place. That's a call from Amy Ford. She's urging all of us in the Christian community to live out our pro-life beliefs in very real and tangible ways. Today on Focus on the Family, we'll learn how you and I can take a more active role in the pro-life movement, and you might be surprised about how simple it is to get involved.

Your host is Focus President and author Jim Daly, and I'm John Fuller. John, Focus on the Family has always been unashamedly pro-life, and it's one of our foundational principles. And over the years, we've taken every opportunity to promote this message, and I pray that Focus for however long the Lord allows it to live and breathe, that it will be staunchly pro-life. We do want to remind our national leaders and today's culture about the sanctity of human life created in the image of God, right? We stand firmly there. Every life is precious, whether it's in the womb or in the last days of this life and everything in between, those who may suffer from abnormalities.

Whatever it might be, we stand for life. And we invite you to stand with us in this fight to become a pro-life advocate through activities like the March for Life or volunteering at a pregnancy center near you or partnering with ministries like Focus on the Family or Embrace Grace, and we're going to hear from the leader of Embrace Grace today. That's Amy Ford, and she started Embrace Grace in order to help churches provide spiritual encouragement and support to younger single pregnant women who are vulnerable to having an abortion because they think they're just out of options.

This is it. I have to have an abortion. Amy's an author, a speaker, a podcast host, and a pro-life advocate, and has written two books about saving moms and their preborn babies. One is called A Bump in Life, and the latest one we're going to be talking about today is called Help Her Be Brave, Discover Your Place in the Pro-Life Movement.

And you can learn more about that in the episode notes. Amy, welcome back to Focus on the Family. Hi, thank you so much for having me.

Good to have you. Listen, you're active every day in this arena of life, and you're counseling women and you're helping teen girls think through what is in front of them and the difficult choices that they face. You have said, and I agree with this, that the church isn't quite ready. If the Supreme Court were to reverse Roe v. Wade, would we be ready to step up and be there? And I think we would have a challenge in that area.

Explain what you're seeing at the ground level. Yeah, well, and it's not even just teen girls. I mean, the unplanned pregnancies can go all the way up into the 30s, but we're just seeing a lot of times the big issue is the girl doesn't actually feel like it's a safe place to go to. When she has an unexpected pregnancy, the church is not the first thing that crosses her mind of like, I need help.

Let me go to the church and ask if they'll help me. I even talked to a girl the other day that was telling me her story. And she said that she had called three churches and left messages. It was over a weekend and only saying she was pregnant, scared. She didn't know what to do. I need help. And only one called her back. And so we can't just vote for life and then say, Good luck.

Hope it works out for you. We have to be able to be ready physically, spiritually and emotionally to walk alongside the pregnancy. And we can't you I can just see girls being homeless or or not having being able to afford childcare or things like that.

And we can't just let them go figure it out on their own when they're asking and pleading for help to know how to do this if they don't have access to an abortion. And Amy, you're coming from a place of experience. I mean, you're not just someone who wants to do good, which is, you know, on its face, that's good, too. But you're coming from a place of brokenness. What was your story? Well, I had an unplanned pregnancy when I was 19. And I went to a Christian private school knew abortion was wrong my entire life. knew who God was, but I really didn't have a relationship with him. So when I found out when I was unexpectedly expecting, I was so terrified.

I really my biggest thing was I was terrified to tell my parents and looking back at feel like that silly because they they were upset, but it wasn't as bad as what fear makes you think in what the enemy lies to you in that situation. And so me and the father of the baby felt like abortion, we could just have an abortion and we'll deal with the consequences of a broken heart later, this will be a quick fix, even though I grew up knowing abortion was wrong. And so I went to the abortion clinic, we paid for it. And I went in to have the procedure done. And as they were explaining to me what they were going to do, all of those emotions that I had suppressed really just erupted in that moment. And I ended up hyperventilating and passing out in the abortion room. And when I came to the nurse was fanning me trying to give me a drink of water. And she said, you're too emotionally distraught to make this decision today, you can come back another day, but you're not getting an abortion today.

And so I give her credit, right? I know, because I've talked to so many women that have experienced an abortion, and they're like, that is not what happened with me. But I went back out into the waiting room, and I told the father of the baby, and we just were like, okay, like, let's just deal with the consequences of what's going to happen.

And let's just figure it out together. And so we told her parents, it wasn't as bad as we thought it was going to be. And we ended up getting married, we had been high school sweethearts for a long time, we ended up getting married when I was 16 weeks pregnant. And we had gone to the pastor that had led my husband to the Lord years before, we asked him if he would marry us. And he said, No, I can't and won't marry you. I can't bless this marriage because of your sin.

Yeah. And we were like, we're such horrible people, we can't even get married, right? I mean, it felt like a scarlet letter on our wedding day, we found someone else would marry us. But the shame was so intense.

But one thing that's really cool, though, is that pastor that wouldn't marry us a couple of years later, he ended up asking for forgiveness, he called my husband and said that I felt like it was my worst mistake in pastoring history that I'd ever made, will you please forgive me? And, but even just that season before that, and even after, it's kind of like the elephant in the room, and people don't know whether to say congratulations, or I'm sorry. So they just don't say anything.

And so you just feel alone in a crowd of people. Sure, Amy, I want to dig into a couple of components of what you've told us one, your parents, you've mentioned that it wasn't as bad as what I thought it would be with my parents. There are parents maybe today who are listening right now that later are going to get a call from their pregnant teen daughter, or they're going to see them at dinner, and this discussion is going to happen. What kind of counsel do you give to parents about how to react if this happens? Well, I just believe that God is the creator of all life. And so he knew what he was doing when he...