Life Articles
14 Ways to Help Unborn Babies
By: Randy Alcorn
There are many excellent prolife organizations across the country and around the world. They specialize in a wide variety of activities that include abstinence education, fetal development education, counseling pregnant women, influencing legislation, offering adoptions, confronting our culture about the prenatal holocaust, picketing abortion clinics, disseminating scientific and psychological studies, praying, sidewalk counseling outside abortion clinics, and helping post-aborted women and men. There are trained consultants offering counseling and answering toll-free phone calls and email twenty-four hours a day.
Look for the best organizations to fit your background, personality, gifting, and sense of God’s calling. Contact information is available for a wide variety of fine prolife organizations—national, regional, and local.
Resist the notion that “I’m just one person, we’re just one small church, we can’t make a difference.” You can’t eliminate need, but you can be used of God to meet needs in exciting ways. How do you help millions of needy people? One at a time. The following are not things everyone should do, but merely a menu from which to choose what best suits your gifting and your resources:
1. Open your home. Help a pregnant girl or welcome an “unwanted” child for foster care or adoption. Or devote one day a week to watching the children of single mothers. This is a prolife ministry to them and to their children.
2. Volunteer your time, talents, and services. Give personal care to pregnant women, newborns, drug babies, orphans, the handicapped, the elderly, street people, and others in need. Donate time, equipment, furniture, clothes, professional skills, and money to pregnancy centers, adoption ministries, women’s homes, abstinence agencies, and right-to-life educational and political organizations and other prolife groups. Mow their lawn, do their cleaning or plumbing, design a website for them, fix their computers.
3. Be an initiator. If there’s not a prolife ministry nearby, consider starting one. Build a coalition. Rent space next to an abortion clinic or Planned Parenthood office. Establish a pregnancy counseling clinic or prolife information center. Start a sidewalk counseling ministry; plan a prayer vigil or a protest. Develop a beautiful memorial to the unborn on your church property or in your community. Many powerful prolife outreaches have been established on college campuses. Consider starting one on your campus, whether secular or Christian. Make literature and videos freely available.
4. Become thoroughly informed. Know the facts so you can rehearse in advance the best responses to the prochoice arguments. Many fine books, tapes, and videos are available, as well as excellent (and usually free) prolife newsletters. There are many outstanding prolife websites, such as www.Abort73.com and www.standupgirl.com. While surgical abortions have somewhat decreased, chemical abortions are increasing. Become informed about RU-486, the abortion pill. Investigate Norplant, Depo-Provera, the Mini-Pill, and even the birth control pill. Though primarily contraceptives, they sometimes permit conception, and may prevent the newly conceived person from implanting in the endometrium, thereby causing early abortions. Become informed enough to draw your own conclusions.
5. Talk to your friends, neighbors, coworkers and teachers. Graciously challenge others to rethink their assumptions. Students can write papers or give speeches on abortion. Encourage post-abortive women (and men) to attend a post-abortion recovery ministry through their local Pregnancy Resource Center. Give others a copy of the little book Why Pro-Life?, perhaps with some pages marked for their attention. Study the issues in more detail in the larger book, Pro-Life Answers to Pro-Choice Arguments. Give away novels with a prolife theme, such as The Atonement Child by Francine Rivers, and my book Deadline, or The Ishbane Conspiracy, which my daughters and I wrote together, telling the story of four high school and college students.
6. Promote discussions of abortion. Go to Internet chat rooms, bringing prolife perspectives. Consider establishing your own prolife website. Give regular visibility to the issue via Facebook, blogs, and Twitter. Call in and speak up on talk shows. Ask for equal time on television and radio stations that present the prochoice position. Order and distribute prolife literature. Speak up so the prochoice bandwagon doesn’t go unchallenged. It’s vitally important that we approach subjects such as abortion in a Christlike manner. Jesus came full of grace and truth (John 1:14). If people are to see Jesus in us, we must offer the truth with grace.
7. Write letters. Be courteous, concise, accurate, and memorable. Quote brief references cited in Why Pro-Life? and the more comprehensive Pro-Life Answers. Letters to the editor in a national magazine or larger newspaper may be read by hundreds of thousands.
8. Encourage business boycotts of abortion clinics. Contact influential people, including landlords, businesses, insurance providers, medical providers, and various service providers, graciously stating that you cannot in good conscience patronize those who lend their services to the killing of children.
9. Be politically active. Meet with your representatives and share your views on abortion. Draft, circulate, and sign petitions for prolife ballot measures. Run for political office, school board, or precinct chairperson. Stand by prolife candidates with your time and money. Vote.
10. Join or organize a prolife task force in your church. Ask your leaders for guidance. Give them literature, ask them to watch a video. Recruit positive people who are supportive of the church’s other ministries to help you formulate and implement a plan of education and mobilization. Request periodic special offerings for prolife ministries. Provide bulletin inserts and literature for your church to distribute during Sanctity of Human Life week in January. Acquire Why Pro-Life? from www.epm.org at bulk rates and distribute a copy to everyone in your church. (None of the royalties from the sale of my books are retained by myself or the ministry, but given to worthy Christian organizations.) If your church leaders want ideas for preparing their messages, offer to provide them with some of the many fine resources available.
11. Utilize excellent prolife resources. Use prolife videos in church services or classes, e.g., “Life Is Sacred.” Consider showing a video depicting abortion. (Prepare people and warn in advance it’s not for children.) Distribute contact information for a variety of prolife groups in your community. Place a bench ad or a billboard with an 800 number for pregnant women to call. Contact the prolife groups in your area. They know a lot you don’t, and they’ll be glad to serve as a resource.
12. Pray regularly for prolife ministries, churches, church leaders, mothers, and babies. Organize your own prayer group either in your home or on site at an abortion clinic. If the darkness of child-killing is to be overcome with the light of truth and compassion, it will require spiritual warfare, fought with humble and persistent prayer (Ephesians 6:10–20).
13. Give to prolife organizations. I’ve seen close-up a wide variety of prolife ministries. In nearly every case I’ve walked away impressed with the difference that’s being made. I encourage you and your church to find a few prolife organizations in your area, or one of the national or international prolife ministries, and give generously to them.
14. Ask yourself, “Five minutes after I die, what will I wish I would have given on behalf of the helpless while I still had the chance?” Why not spend the rest of our lives closing the gap between what we’ll wish we would have given and what we are giving?
We have a brief opportunity—a lifetime on earth—to use our resources of time and money to make an eternal difference. Picture the moment in Heaven, and think how you’ll feel when someone smiles broadly and says, “Thank you! Your gifts helped save my life and my child’s.”
Randy Alcorn is the founder and director of Eternal Perspective Ministries (EPM), a nonprofit organization dedicated to teaching biblical truth and drawing attention to the needy and how to help them. Before starting EPM in 1990, Alcorn for 13 years co-pastored Good Shepherd Community Church outside Gresham, Oregon. He has ministered in many countries, including China, and is a popular teacher and conference speaker. Randy is a best-selling author of over 30 books including Heaven, The Treasure Principle, and the 2002 Gold Medallion winner, Safely Home. If you need help finding a prolife group in your area, contact our Eternal Perspective Ministries office for assistance (503-668-5200, info@epm.org).
