“What makes your heart break for a broken world?”
This is a question that every person must address at one time or another in his life. Essentially a question of purpose, Lila Rose pitches this question to her readers at the very beginning of her book, Fighting for Life.
What draws young people into the pro-life movement? I’m often approached with this question from people of all ages. “Why are you here? Why do you devote so much of your life to this?”
The reason I, along with so many others, are committed to ending abortion is expressed best by Rose:
As I came to see, abortion has taken more human lives than any other injustice in our history.” She explains that after her first time sidewalk counseling, “After being so close to so much pain, despair, and death, I knew I’d never be the same.
I couldn’t agree more.
Abortion is a curse on our world: it is the “ultimate exploitation of women,” according to Alice Paul, one of the leading pro-life feminists, and women don’t want abortions. This is indicated by the Guttmacher Institute’s statistic that 73% of women choose abortion because of financial need. The Guttmacher Institute is not even a pro-life research platform. In fact, it is explicitly pro-choice! For this reason, we can trust that what they say is not at all biased in the favor of those who are pro-life.
73% of women go to this horrific, unsafe place because they believe that abortion is the “best” and “safest” option for themselves. As became more and more obvious the farther I read into Rose’s book, abortion clinics are anything but safe.
In her book, Rose explains the many cover-ups she found by going into these clinics. She was a fearless young woman: she would travel across the country, dye her hair different colors to avoid being caught, and for what? She wasn’t escaping some crime, she was entering into the entirely legal, but also eerily secretive, Planned Parenthood facilities.
Why did Lila focus on abortion? There are obviously many other injustices in our world such as sex trafficking, poverty… the list goes on. “Unlike other abuses such as sex trafficking or child abuse, abortion is legal,” Rose says. This is the sole reason she fights so hard against it.
No matter how hard we fight for the cause, and no matter how passionate we are, there is bound to be burnout in the pro-life movement. So, how do we keep our focus? According to Rose,“Ultimately, we remember for whom and for what we are fighting: the principle that needs defending, the injustice that needs exposing, the vulnerable person who cries out for help.”
We need more people like Lila Rose. More compassionate young women who see the horrors and vulnerability their sisters are exposed to and vow to combat them.
As Lila came to find out in her own life, “Nothing held me back from helping at least one young woman who struggled with an abortion decision. Nothing held me back from trying to save at least one life. How many other causes allow an ordinary individual to directly help save a life?”
The more young women speak out against this cause, the more the world will realize that we don’t want abortion, unsafe medical facilities, or the many other horrors and injustices that surround the abortion industry. What young women really want are real, personal connections that encourage and remind us that we are strong enough and brave enough to choose life for our children.