Miriam’s story is a good example of JFA’s passion for every human being.

After participating in JFA’s training program multiple times, including multiple seminar and outreach events, Miriam wanted to do something to save unborn children from abortion, so she shared some of what she had learned through her JFA training during her family’s time of devotions.  Her sister’s boyfriend was present that evening.  Much later, in a relationship then with a different woman, he found himself in an abortion clinic waiting for her to have an abortion.  Miriam’s miniature seminar began replaying itself in his head.  You can read the details of what happened next in our report, “Miriam’s Seminar Ends Up in the Abortion Clinic,” but a child is alive today because Miriam treated the unborn and their parents as worth her best efforts to help, and she prepared this young man to care for both his child and that child’s mother in a way that respected both.

A Different Kind of Advocate

So, Justice For All began training Miriam through an “Abortion: From Debate to Dialogue” seminar (“Seat Work”) but continued that training during an outreach event (“Feet Work”) in which Miriam, her colleagues, and their mentors from the JFA team actively sought out people to engage in a different sort of conversation about abortion, one which dignified the abortion advocate with the same sort of respect we believe the unborn deserve.   She then put what she learned into practice in everyday life (“Repeat Work”).

A Different Kind of Conversation

In every moment of every conversation JFA volunteers and staff members create, we’re attempting to balance love and truth.  For us, it’s not that we focus on being loving during one portion of the conversation and then focus on being truthful during another portion.  We’re attempting to balance love for all of the people involved (for the unborn, for the person we’re talking to, and for the women and men struggling with unplanned pregnancies) with the truth regarding each of the people involved.  This means that we’re trying to keep in mind that if the unborn is a human being deserving our best efforts to protect them, then we must also remember that the advocate of abortion choice is a human being deserving our best efforts to understand and respect him or her.  Even if no one who is confronting an unplanned pregnancy is present in the conversation, we urge everyone in the discussion to remember that they are human beings worth our best efforts to give practical help, to sympathize, and engage in respectful dialogue.  And those with abortion in their past?  They also are human beings, and this truth directs how we talk about their actions, how we seek to understand them, and how we prioritize offering opportunities for deeper reflection and healing.

A Different Kind of World

We believe that training thousands of advocates to create thousands of this type of conversation every year is one essential part of bringing into being a different kind of world, one in which abortion is just as unthinkable for a strong majority of Americans as are slavery and sex trafficking.  For us, everything we do at JFA, preparing loving advocates and creating life-changing conversations, is aimed at this goal of loving every human being with such a passion that abortion is unthinkable.  In our flagship training program, our speakers and presentations, our large-scale campus exhibit outreach events, or our “Learn at Home” program, you’ll hear stories of advocates actively creating beautiful conversations that we believe bring a special kind of light into an especially deep darkness.

We long to see, and we long to participate in bringing about, a world in which delighting in every human being is the norm, in which we as individuals and as a community give, sacrifice, and suffer willingly for the good of those in need.