Persuasive Pro Life: How to Talk about Our Culture's Toughest Issue

by Trent Horn

Aside from being irrelevant, this argument assumes incorrectly that pro-life advocates don’t care about born children. Many pro-life pregnancy centers provide parenting classes and baby supplies, and some have medical staff that can perform prenatal care. Pro-life advocates also operate maternity homes where poor or homeless pregnant women can stay for free, sometimes up to a year after the baby is born. As pro-life advocate Helen Alvaré points out: Pregnancy resource centers devote significant resources to supporting women who have already decided to have an abortion, but abortion advocates offer no similar support to women who wish to continue their pregnancies. Indeed, they often devote their resources to shutting down the services provided by pro-lifers. NARAL Pro-Choice America reports spending $20,000 on “crisis pregnancy centers” in Maryland in order to “investigate” and publicly smear such centers for demonstrating a bias for life. 265 These smear campaigns are ironic, because abortion clinics often rely on pro-life centers to do the work they won’t do. At a pregnancy center in Arizona I met a young woman who had just come from Planned Parenthood. She told me that she went there saying she wanted to keep her baby and asked them what resources they could provide her. Planned Parenthood personnel said they didn’t have any and sent her instead to the local pro-life pregnancy resource center.