By Grace Henry
How did you first become involved in the pro-life movement?
I first got involved by helping at a pregnancy resource center when I was sixteen years old. I had been talking with a woman about how I was pro-life, and I lived in Michigan at the time. We had a discouraging couple legislative runs for abortion, and I was venting to this lady. She told me about my local pregnancy resource center, so I took a couple training sessions there. I worked in their boutique for 2 years, and then I worked as a receptionist for the other 2 years that I was in Michigan.
What has been the most meaningful experience for you in this work?
The most meaningful thing for me has been the overall experience of being face to face. When you go to an abortion or referral facility and you see the faces of the people talking to you, it is a whole other level of care. I remember a couple months ago I was doing sidewalk counseling, and my younger brother was going on a first date with someone that day. At the abortion clinic the same day, a young teenage couple came in, and I talked to them for a while. I remember driving home feeling devastated but impacted by seeing someone who was the same age as my brother. I am very passionate about how the unborn are victims of abortion, but when you also see the people who are going in to get them, you really connect with them. You really care about them in a way that was impossible for me to do before.
What challenges have you faced in doing this work? What has kept you going?
The biggest challenge for me is dealing with the public scrutiny of myself as a person. It hurts me when people take my story and what I am so deeply passionate about, and then they just dismiss it or assign it to this horrible motive that has nothing to do with who I am as a person. I feel sad when people seem to have the opposite impression of me, where it is like they do not really see me as a person. What gets me through is support from Voices for Life people, my family, and also understanding how the hate is usually coming from a place of hurt. At the end of the day, people do not know me enough to hate me. They hate my ideals, so being able to separate how people treat me with understanding they do not know me personally is important.
What advice would you give to someone interested in getting involved with pro-life work?
My biggest advice is to spend so much time in prayer asking God to give you that opportunity and that pleasure because that is something I did from a really young age. I knew I wanted to do something like this, so I just prayed all the time about it. I did not know how my dream was going to play out, so I just prayed a lot. In the harder moments of doing this, I look back on it, and I remember that I have prayed for so long to get to do this. It makes me feel like God gave this to me as a blessing and a gift. I prayed to him, and he guided me in ways that I would not have been able to find myself.
Leave a Reply