“And the King will answer them, ‘Truly, I say to you, as you did it to one of the least of these my brothers, you did it to me.’” —Matthew 25:40

Tens of millions of babies will never know a mother’s love. They will never experience childhood milestones. They will never open a present at a birthday party. They will never meet the love of their life. They will never develop their talents and explore their full potential.

They were denied life. Though they had their own human DNA and human identities, they were viewed as the product of a reproductive right, which is a grievous societal wrong.

Our hearts break as we consider the imponderable evil of infanticide. So angry are we at those who would cruelly end a child’s life in such a way that we malign the characters of the mothers who forsook them.

I’ve known women who have ended an “inconvenient” pregnancy in abortion. But many women are victims themselves—victims of abuse, abandonment, and, ultimately, the abortion industry. First abandoned by the people who are supposed to love them, they are ill-informed and manipulated, sometimes even threatened. For them that forever-regretted act is a desperate move, a surrender to the hopelessness of their situations.

As Julie Roys shares, a 2004 study shows 64 percent got abortions under pressure, and 84 percent were inadequately counseled. These women are not monsters; they are broken, frail sinners who feel abandoned by society and who suffer the weight of what they have done for the rest of their lives. They often experience depression and can even become suicidal. Deep inside, they realize they have broken the most sacred of trusts: a child’s utter dependence upon his mother for protection. I believe even those women who deemed their pregnancies inconvenient realize this.

Such women—the women who look for love in all the wrong places and then experience the natural consequences—are often those women who never found love in the right places. They often lacked a stable home life or a nurturing, affirming, present father. Statistically, such women are set up for failure.

If we are to end abortion, we first need stable families. We need strong, grace-filled, Bible-preaching churches. We need men and women to show the love of Jesus to women who doubt their worth, who may even think they’re sparing their child from experiencing the same rejection and hopelessness they have known. This is the fatalistic mindset into which many fall.

We need more Christian counselors on the front lines to counsel women and provide life-affirming options to them. We need more people praying and serving and fewer people judging and condemning. Remember that David and Paul—some of the greatest heroes of our faith—were themselves murderers. Recall Paul’s humble self-description.

The saying is trustworthy and deserving of full acceptance, that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners, of whom I am the foremost.—1 Timothy 1:15

Above all, we need God’s children to be Christ’s ambassadors—as His hands, His feet and His mouthpieces. We must live to know Him and make Him known. We must share the love that no sin can undo. We must love as He loves and forgive as He forgives.

But in all these things we overwhelmingly conquer through Him who loved us. For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor any other created thing, will be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.—Romans 8:37-39