What are your plans this week?

What are your plans this week?

This week, I’m planning to go to work, practice waltzing with my fiance, and go to a conference on the weekend. I’m pretty excited.

Also, this week, a little boy or girl is scheduled to die.

I was within 20 feet of him/her, and I didn’t even know.

This past week, I joined a team of high school and university students as they dedicated their week to doing the Toronto Pro-life Bootcamp. For most of them, it was the first time they’d ever done pro-life outreach.

They learned how to have effective conversations with people about abortion, and met strangers on public sidewalks. They made a compelling and compassionate case against abortion, and showed photos of the victims. They changed minds, and left a mark on Toronto.

There are more people in this city who are against abortion and who think more negatively about it than there were a few weeks ago—it was so encouraging. Everyone was inspired, seeing the change in our culture and realizing that change is possible.

On the last day, I was with John, one of the Bootcamp participants, and as we were doing outreach in front of a high school, some students said things like, “Why are you here? This is the nerdiest high school, no one here gets pregnant!”

Moments later, a young girl walked by John and said, “I am having an abortion next week.”

Seeing the pained and troubled look on her face, he gently asked if she wanted to talk about it, but ushered along by her friends, this young mother walked on until she was out of reach. Her baby—safe, for a moment—was carried with her.

After everyone had left and our team packed up to go, he told us about her. We prayed. We tried to console ourselves and each other that we had tried, and that she had seen pictures of what abortion would do to her child—pictures of children  decapitated, dismembered, disembowelled—maybe she would change her mind.

The reality is… we have no idea what will happen—or maybe has already happened—to her child. Did we get there in time? Were we too late? Should we have done more?

I decided a few years ago to work full-time in the pro-life movement, and started that work less than a year ago. Someone told me once that there are more people working full-time to kill babies than there are working full-time to save them, and I was sold.

One of the disadvantages that comes with working full-time in this movement is that you hear stories like this often enough that they become normal. They break my heart for a moment, and then I recover, and press on.

But as the evening rolled around and several hours had passed since this encounter, John was still struggling. He was reacting the way one should react when one hears that a helpless child is scheduled to die—with grief. Every death is a tragedy, and every death should be mourned. If no one else ever mourns this child’s death, I thought, at least John did.

Approximately 100,000 children are killed through abortion every year in Canada, but as the saying goes, “The death of one man is a tragedy. The death of millions is a statistic.”

In order to properly grieve the many, sometimes we need to hear about the one.

Because people cared enough about the individual children who are being killed in this country to do something about it, other mothers and fathers who had the same plan for their children have changed their minds. Lives have been saved because of courageous men and women like John.

What are your plans for this week?

Could you spare the time to be a voice for those who can’t speak for themselves? There are little girls and boys whose plans for this week urgently need to be changed.

The application deadline for our summer internship program is coming up fast — and there are volunteer opportunities, and Crash Courses coming up in Calgary and in Toronto. You can get equipped to have effective conversations about abortion, change hearts and minds, and end the killing of pre-born children in Canada.

If you could be the reason a child has a next week, would you do it?