Women who change their mind tell them: you saved my baby.
40daysforlife.com/splash.cfm
As edwest implied, tammy, the figures come from them; participating in the campaign, they would regularly send out stories about women who’d changed their minds. They also have some training for the leaders of the events at the various abortion facilities – I’ve never been one, so I don’t know what the training is like – so hopefully they don’t miscount a woman who’s simply rescheduled her murdering (and thus walks back out of the clinic still carrying the child, only to return later).
So the numbers come from the 40 Days for Life people, however they get it; I checked an email, I think, and they have the emails’ content hosted on their website somewhere, although I don’t know if they keep regular archives.
I personally did not assume anywhere in this thread that the number was greater than 580. I was rather critical, actually, and conjectured that even if you were to double the number of those saved, it still wouldn’t compare with the vast numbers being murdered. But the reason
they choose to be optimistic is simple: The feedback they get from people driving by suggests that other, more shy people experience similar emotion but do not stop and talk about it.
They would send out stories about encounters with people driving by: police, on and off duty; women who’d had abortions, or almost had them; I remember reading one story of a woman with a toddler in the passenger seat who said that, thanks to a previous rally they had, she decided to keep her son (whom she now loves dearly), and began crying as she recounted that, if it wasn’t for them, she would have had him killed.
So basically, the people who are outside the abortion facility serve as a witness for those driving by, and when one sees a car drive up, pause, and keep driving, one can only wonder, “What was that all about?” And, since these people tend to be fairly cheerful people, since Christianity has perhaps the best system in the world of positive philosophy (namely, one positing that love, justice and mercy are personified and are the foundation of the universe), they tend to be optimistic and hope for the best.
And all that says nothing about the effects of prayer, which I myself know essentially nothing about; priests have mentioned that the drive behind the abortion industry and abortion media is demonic, and that prayer is more powerful than anything else we can do. So people who simply wake up one morning and
realize that the swelling inside of them is a person, not a parasitic lump of tissue, could have been directly affected by the 40 Days for Life prayers. So when they say that “only 580 saved that we know about,” what they are saying is true, precisely that: They know of 580 because the mothers told them they had changed their minds, etc., but it is fair to argue that the number is higher, due to the positive influence (and, if God is real, then positive
power) these people exerted.
I say
positive influence because they typically – from what I read, appearances – do more than simply pray and hold up signs. They give counsel, provide resources for many women – I keep hearing that no woman wants her pregnancy to be destroyed, even if she isn’t aware that it’s a person – rather, she goes because she feels pressured and helpless: She’s still in school, she can’t afford him, she’s all alone.
I’ve heard it is not uncommon for a student health insurance plan to become invalid should the student become pregnant (or a mother), for example, so these factors are often related. Or, something will pay for the abortion, but will not pay to help raise the child.
So it is a positive influence in that these people enable her to choose to keep the child, when she previously felt unable to make that choice.
Hope this answers your question, tammy57!
