What every adult should know about abortion, starting with the one considering it ...

NOT alone. She is not alone. She needs to know someone supports her and her pregnancy, especially a man in her life. She needs to know there is someone there who will come alongside her. Someone cares and someone is listening. She needs to know her child will be loved.

Help available. There is help available, so that every mother can carry her baby to birth. Pregnancy care centers, modern adoption agencies, churches, discount thrift stores, … there are so many people and places ready to help a pregnant mother through overwhelming challenges while pregnant and to help once her children are born.

Financially, most pregnancies in Colorado are covered by Medicaid and through the first year following birth. Pregnancy care centers are available to help with diapers, baby clothes, baby items, and parenting classes. Most communities have thrift stores that can cut costs as the child grows. Modern adoption agencies can help with expenses during pregnancy, including professional counseling, and she doesn't have to give any money back, regardless what she decides.

Vision. “Without vision my people perish.” She needs to be able to visualize her child. She needs to visualize herself being a good mother to her child, or her child being in a happy family of her choosing, whether extended family or by getting to know potential adoptive parents.

Every church needs to plan how to help a mother in crisis. Who are the women in the church where she can confidentially share her struggles and needs? Does she know that she will not be publicly humiliated? Will her child be celebrated through a baby shower while her private sins are confronted only privately?

Have you ever wanted to be a mother? What do you want that to look like? What kind of mother would you like to be? What if your dream of becoming a mother is coming just a little earlier? An investment of nine months rewards you in years to come.

Her baby will be loved, even if she is not the one to do the loving. Choosing a loving home for her baby is a selfless choice of putting her baby’s needs with her own, which is the first sign of maturity. She can give her child a better home. Through modern adoption, she can choose the parents and how involved she'd like to be in her child’s life. She can plan to place her baby in a loving home through adoption and change her mind before signing the paperwork. She can try to parent and choose loving parents later, or get help parenting for a short time, if needed.

Adoption is free for the biological mom. There are approximately 36 families wanting to adopt for every one child available to adopt. These families go through a lot of screening, and she can get to know the parents and choose which couple is right for her baby. She can then watch as her child grows up and be a part of her child’s life, if she likes.

There is enough love to welcome these children into our world. We don't just care about children until they are born. We care about children at every stage of development and we're doing something about it - from fostering, adoption, parenting classes, baby clothes, helping moms get on their feet, offering childcare in our churches, ....

NOT a blob of tissue. Her baby is not a blob of tissue any more than any of us are. Her child is made up of the same complex cells and organized systems that all of us have and that these children will have the rest of their lives. On day one, the child is already male or female with hair and eye color. At 21 days, the baby has a heartbeat that will last his or her lifetime, by six weeks the baby has detectable brainwaves, and by seven weeks the baby will move away from touch to their face. Babies feel pain and joy and play in the womb. The baby develops memories and preferences in the womb and can feel stress. The baby develops attachment and love for their mother.

It is a biological and spiritual fact that we are living human beings from the moment we are conceived. We are already living in the world from the first moment our first cell is created. It is only a question of what experiences we will have in the world.

God’s poet talked about God knitting us together in our mother’s womb 3,000 years ago – scientists only recently discovered DNA which is “like knitting” in the first cell of our body that replicates into every cell of our body. Scientists have just recently discovered our life begins in light, just as 1 John 1 alluded to two thousand years ago. Her baby is somebody. He or she is her daughter or son, her child to protect. Her child to love.

Every woman should have bodily autonomy and choice that doesn’t include killing a child. She should have the reproductive choice of where, when, and with whom to engage in activities that could lead to the creation of a child. Once she is pregnant, she is pregnant with a child.

It's not her body, so it's not her choice. Her baby has his or her own body, complete with their own separate and unique DNA, blood type, heartbeat, face, fingerprints, brain, gender, hair and eye color, personality, feelings, and future of possibilities ahead of them. These infants have faces, fingers, and toes, and we can feel pain and move away from touch to our face even before we enter fetal development.

Preborn children are human beings. It's extremely important to humanize the child, because the child is human. We don’t call each other “it”. This is the mother's daughter or son (regardless who the father is). We must challenge ourselves to rethink how we speak using concrete, humanizing terms.

"Life" is abstract, but an "infant" is concrete, and these are concrete infants mothers are carrying and the abortionists are killing, and we’re allowing to be killed. These are “preborn” children or "infants"; they are not "unborn", because every child will be born, living or dead.

Have you ever held a newborn in your arms? That's who we are talking about protecting. Children in the womb are the same children they will be out of the womb.

We can show others what we look like as human beings prior to birth. We can talk about these children as one of us, part of our human race. We all go through the stages of embryonic and fetal development, toddler, teenage, and if we live long enough, old age.

Her baby wants to live. Her baby can feel pain and joy in the womb. Her baby loves her. And she has an opportunity to be a loving mother.

If she aborts, her child will only know rejection, pain, and death. How frantic these children must feel struggling to live while feeling their only life being taken from them!

If given birth, her child can see their mother’s face who they already love, be held in a warm blanket, be comforted, and feel loved. Her child can look into her mother’s eyes for the very first time. There is nothing like that beautiful feeling.

NOT just a woman.

Once pregnant, always a mother. If she’s pregnant, she is already a mother to her son or daughter. She will have always been a mother. It’s just a question what type of mother she will be, and what kind of life her child will get to live.

A mother protects and nourishes her children. It’s never a choice for a mother to kill her own child, regardless how dependent the child is on her to feed, protect, and nurture. In fact, the more dependent and trusting the child, the more cruel the betrayal and abuse.

Nothing is more important than our children, than our being their mother. Relationships are more important than a paycheck or title behind our name. And God promises that when we seek Him first and His righteousness (how He defines right living), all these things will be added for us anyway. He gives really good gifts. God doesn't withhold any good thing. When God gives us a child, He is giving us a good thing. And I've never seen the righteous forsaken or their children begging for bread. (Psalm 37:25) We just need to believe God that He's telling us the truth, that He only makes promises He intends to keep. We just need to trust Him.

Children are a gift. Children are a gift from the Lord. As a culture, we’ve forgotten what a gift a child is - what unconditional love and joy a child can bring that makes life more fulfilling and worth living than a career or education. Anyone can have a career or get an education any time. But there is a limited window of when a mother can have children. And not everyone can have children. And let's face it, even doing what we love for a boss or a bottom line is nowhere even close to the giggles and innocence and wonder and playfulness of a child that we get to share our lives with and introduce to the world and see through their eyes and leave to the world when we're gone.

Surprises are never planned. We don’t plan falling in love, or seeing a rainbow, or a butterfly landing on our shoulder, or a loved one being particularly kind or generous or surprising us with a party or a present. We cannot plan what God will do. We cannot control what others do. We don’t "plan" beautiful babies, either, even when we want them and are able to have them.

Children are special gifts, and sometimes the only good that comes from an otherwise difficult or unloving relationship. Scripture tells us that when Leah was unloved by her husband, God felt sorry for her and gave her children as a consolation. Children are born loving us and needing our love.

Having children is the most impact we can have on the world. There is a very limited time women can have children, if ever. For women seeking love in all the wrong places, if God chooses to bless her with a child, God is blessing her with love.

NOT Healthcare. Abortion is not healthcare. While abortionists claim that ending a healthy pregnancy by unhealthy means through abortion is healthcare, or that it is a "reproductive right" for women to end the lives of their children, abortion is not healthy and it's not caring for either the child abortion intentionally kills, nor the mother being pressured into it. Nor does abortion have anything to do with one reproducing except to hurt and end the process, causing potential infertility and making her reproductive process produce nothing.

We are not talking about women in general, either. Abortion only applies to mothers who are already pregnant, who are already capable and healthy in reproducing. Anything interfering with her ability to continue to complete that task is not healthy, not natural, and harmful to her health.

Healthcare involves informed consent, explaining the risks, benefits, indications, and alternatives to an invasive medical procedure. Abortionists do not provide informed consent to the women trafficked through their abortion business. Abortion facilities do not provide the same healthcare standards or abide by the same health regulations as legitimate medical facilities. They also violate the first rule of medical practice by killing their patient. There are no benefits to the pregnant mother, or indications, for a medical doctor to cause a pregnant mother to abort her child. And there are many alternatives for her that are non-violent, non-invasive, and healthier for the mother while allowing her child to continue living. Abortionists depend on the public's misplaced and misinformed compassion for pregnant mothers to divert attention away from the child they are killing.

Abortion is never needed to save a mother’s life. Killing a child doesn't save a mother's life. Poisoning, starving, stabbing, scalding, or dismembering a child cannot save a mother’s life. It would be malpractice to do so. Every elective abortion is medically unnecessary. We don't have to sacrifice children for career, or education, or health.

There is confusion between a miscarriage of a child no longer living or where labor cannot be stopped, and a child being intentionally and unnecessarily killed. It is the difference between a man being told he has six months to live versus someone breaking into his home and stabbing him to death. Dying of natural causes is very different from being murdered.

Even if unsuccessful, doctors can try to save all lives, rather than intentionally destroying them. Even in an ectopic pregnancy, some infants have been successfully relocated since the 1980's, and some children survive where they are.

Childbirth and c-section are safer than abortion for the mother, too. C-section can happen in twenty minutes to save all lives; whereas an abortion is intended to kill the child and can take up to three days of hard labor for the mother. A living child helps position their head and body to help their mother with labor; a dead child cannot help. Instead of killing the child, the mother can have easier labor to give birth and then place her baby with loving parents through modern adoption.

Abortion causes unnecessary pain and suffering and death.

That child will never get another chance to live. And the only life they will have is of pain and suffering. They will never see their mother's face who they already love, or feel her arms around them, or hear her say she loves them, or be kissed on the cheek, or learn to ride a bike, or fall in love, and have children of their own. These children need only time and protection as they peacefully enjoy their time cradled in their mother.

Through abortion, parents not only lose a child, but also lose grandchildren, and great grandchildren. They are losing their greatest impact in the world - their heritage from the Lord and their legacy to the world.

Mothers do not ever have to feel the physical and emotional pain of electively terminating a pregnancy. We never need to stretch a mother's cervix unnaturally to torture her child to death. If it is advisable to put a mother into preterm labor, the child can be cared for rather than poisoned. We must protect the vulnerable.

Healthcare implies making people healthier. It involves research, safety and health regulations, least invasive procedures, looking at all options, informed consent, a doctor's best judgement, and reporting the results. Elective abortion involves none of that.

In cases of rape and incest, bring justice, not violence. Abortion further violates the woman to molest and harm her child. That child is innocent of any crime. We don't even kill fathers for rape. Why would we kill a child? If every rapist knew he would be paying child support for eighteen years, he might reconsider.

Abortion opens the door to the demonic. Abortion is child sacrifice. An abortionist is invading the sacred and protective space of a mother's womb where her child is growing peacefully inside her to pull the infant apart piece by piece while the child frantically tries to get away and is feeling it. These mothers have no idea what is happening to their babies. Children still alive may have their hearts or livers cut out or may be gasping for breath on a table somewhere.

Just because a child is dependent on a parent or a doctor doesn't give the parent or doctor the right to kill them. 

Every innocent human being has the God-given right to continue living. The same US Constitution that protects our right to live, also protects theirs.

As long as there is God, there is hope. With every temptation of abortion, God promises a way out, we only need to look for it. God will take care of us and make a way if we reach out and ask Him. He tells us not to worry, He knows what we need even before we do.

If she's a Christian, her own body isn't even her own, as Scripture says she's been bought with a price, and she is a temple to God's Holy Spirit living within her. Her choices are to be God-honoring. Taking the life of an innocent child is not God-honoring.

He knows when we - and the world out there - is going to need this little person He’s entrusted to us to care for and be blessed by. He promises that all things will work together for good for those who love Him and are called according to His purpose.

Miscarriage is painful, the pain of choosing to lose a child compounds over time. There is healing available for those who have participated in electively losing a child through Christ-centered support groups with others who have also made that heart-breaking decision to lose a child.

We show our love for God through our faith and obedience to Him. We confess and repent of what we’ve done wrong, and He promises to forgive us. Then we make positive God-honoring choices moving forward. We cannot change the past, but we can sew into the future what we’d like to reap in consequences later.

Every child is a gift to their mother and the world. We need them, and they need us. Every child deserves a birthday, every child deserves a chance, and every child is worth saving. Their mothers are worth saving from abortion, too.

Let's Protect children and the mothers who carry them.

How long will you judge unjustly

and show partiality to the wicked? Selah.

Defend the cause of the weak and fatherless;

uphold the rights of the afflicted and oppressed.

Rescue the weak and needy;

save them from the hand of the wicked.

(Psalm 82:2-4)