Successes We Never Know About
by Sarah Terzo
Being an activist can be discouraging when we don’t seem to have an impact. But sometimes, victories happen – hearts and minds are changed, and lives are saved—but we never know it.
A Fetal Model Saves a Life
In a 2021 article in Newsweek, Jessica Riojas says that in 2017, as a sophomore at Fresno State University, she visited the table of a pro-life student group. The group was handing out little models of 12-week-old preborn babies, small but fully formed.
At the time, Riojas didn’t consider herself “either pro-life or pro-choice,” but she thought the models were cute. She took one of them and hung it from the rearview mirror of her car as a decoration.
Time went by, and Riojas didn’t think about the abortion issue. But then she found herself pregnant.
Riojas says:
Like most other college-age women in my situation, I felt alone, scared, unsure of my future and incredibly underprepared.
I visited a local Planned Parenthood, where a counselor tried to convince me that I was irresponsible, that I wasn’t ready to be a mom, and that abortion was my only option.
Troubled by the Planned Parenthood “counselor’s” words, Riojas went back to her car. While sitting in her car, wondering what to do, she looked at the fetal model hanging from her mirror.
Riojas says:
Its features, so similar to my own, reminded me that the baby in my womb was a fellow human being. After speaking with my boyfriend, I decided to choose life for my child.
Jessica Riojas and daughter Eden
A few months later, Riojas gave birth to her daughter.
Being a new mother didn’t slow Riojas down. The same semester she gave birth, she earned a 4.0 GPA. She graduated and then got her Master’s in Speech Language Pathology. She now works full time as a speech language pathologist.
Riojas told her story in Newsweek to show that women don’t need abortion to succeed. Riojas says, “My daughter motivates me to do my best in every aspect of my life. She is the reason I excelled in college and graduate school, and now in my career.”
As an undergraduate, Riojas joined the pro-life group on campus that had given her the fetal model and told them her story. She eventually took a leadership position in the student group and got involved in helping provide resources to pregnant and parenting students on campus.
The pro-life students at the table who gave Riojas the fetal model did not know that months later, a baby would be saved because of their efforts. Members of the club who hadn’t graduated by the time Riojas joined the group would eventually learn her story.
But there may have been people who were involved in the pro-life outreach who never knew their efforts saved a life.
A Life-Saving License Plate
A pro-life couple wrote about a woman they knew of who decided to have an abortion. But:
On her way to the abortion clinic, she followed a car with a “Choose Life” license plate. As she got closer, she could not bring herself to keep her appointment. The message on the plate spoke so loudly to her. She followed through with her pregnancy and now has a nine-month-old son.1
The owner of the car with the license plate never knew that his or her message saved a life. Because of the simple act of putting a pro-life license plate on a car, a pro-lifer changed the world—every human being this child’s life touches in the future will be directly affected by the unknown pro-lifer’s actions.
This little boy may grow up to have children of his own. Even if not, his impact on the world and the people in it will reverberate through the years. Like ripples in a pond, the pro-lifer’s actions will echo down the generations. This is the case whenever a life is saved.
The pro-life person in this story doesn’t know. By the same token, whenever we share the pro-life message, whether face-to-face, on social media, or through any other type of outreach, we don’t know the impact it has.
This also goes for changing hearts and minds on other life issues.
Initial Anger, a Life Saved Later
In his 2017 book, Seeing Is Believing: Why Our Culture Must Face the Victims of Abortion, Jonathan Van Maren makes the case for the effectiveness of showing pictures of abortion victims. This remains a controversial tactic, and analysis of it is beyond the scope of this article.
Van Maren, along with others, shared photos of aborted babies on college campuses. His observations are also relevant for other forms of outreach.
He discusses how some people, when shown photos of aborted babies, become very hostile and angry. One would think that people who yell and swear at pro-lifers would be the last people to accept the pro-life message.
In fact, one might think that people who are infuriated by pro-life activism would become even more entrenched in their pro-abortion views, hardened and pushed away by a message and tactics they find repulsive.
However, Van Maren has found that this is not necessarily the case.
He tells the story of one woman:
One girl who yelled and swore at us during one campus display came up to us a year later and revealed that when she found herself pregnant several months later, she couldn’t go through with having an abortion – even though she hated us for showing her the pictures, she couldn’t escape the truth those pictures conveyed. Her baby was saved as a result.2
If Van Maren hadn’t returned to the same campus and if the woman who had her baby didn’t run into him when he was there, or hadn’t wanted to share her story, neither Van Maren nor anyone else who took part in activism that day would ever have known they saved a baby’s life.
Another time, a nursing student argued with Van Maren and his fellow pro-lifers for hours on campus, defending the pro-choice position. At the end of the lengthy discussion, she showed no signs of changing her mind.
But three years later, Van Maren ran into her again. She told him:
I remember when you were here about three years ago. And I was like a lot of the angry people out here. I walked by and I was so furious. I was pro-choice . . .
But what it comes down to is very basic: We don’t want anyone to impose feelings on us. And these pictures make you feel guilty and sad and they’re bad feelings, and someone else is putting those on you, and it’s a stranger, but you can’t look at that and really, seriously support it.
I saw these pictures and I went home and looked up a video of an abortion, and I cried until I thought I was going to puke. And I changed, because of this, to pro-life . . .
[Seeing the pictures] changed my life. I support it, and I appreciate it.3
Van Maren says he has had this experience many times, where people who initially showed no sign of accepting the pro-life argument later told him they changed their minds.
The Impact of Dialogue
This phenomenon isn’t limited to the showing of graphic photos. It can also apply to dialogue.
Any time one engages in dialogue on a life issue, whether online or off, they are exposing people to new ideas and new information. Or, perhaps, they are sharing information a person already knows but in a unique, new way.
Even people who argue with you and show no sign of changing their minds might continue to think about the conversation in the days and weeks that follow. Something you say may inspire them to do their own research, as it did in this case. Whether the person gets angry or experiences “bad feelings,” every conversation plants a seed.
People who teach marketing often say that a person needs to see an ad multiple times before they buy a product. One conversation can plant a seed that bears fruit in the future.
Sharing your beliefs respectfully may make a difference even when you don’t witness it.
In my pro-life work, I have emailed back and forth with pregnant women considering abortion, then had them stop writing, leaving me not knowing the outcome. Every once in a while, though, I have gotten an email from someone I spoke to months earlier with a picture of her new baby and a thank you.
You never know what impact you’ve had. Don’t give up when you don’t see results. You might be making more of a difference than you realize.
- From Judy Madsen Johnson Stories from the Frontlines: The Battle against Abortion (Independently Published, 2014) 97
- Jonathan Van Maren Seeing Is Believing: Why Our Culture Must Face the Victims of Abortion (Fort Collins, Colorado: Life Cycle Books, 2017) 89-90
- Ibid.
- Ibid.
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For another take on success we didn’t know about, this time with the peace movement, see:
Documentary Review: The Movement and the Madman
For more of our blog posts on persuasion, see:
Two Practical Dialogue Tips for Changing More Minds about Abortion
Dialog on Life Issues: Avoiding Some Obstacles to Communication
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