As parents, we all know that if our children are in pain, we are in pain. If their hearts are breaking, our hearts break right along with theirs. Their struggles are our struggles. Our joy is seeing their joy. It is true that there is no love like the love parents feel for their own child. A child is a gift from God. A treasure.

We sometimes take for granted this privilege and this blessing. We complain about the middle of the evening wake-ups, teething, the “terrible twos” and stepping on Legos after the 100th time in a 24-hour period we’ve asked our kid to clean his room. I get it as I am there now and going through the thick of having a 9 year-old boy. In truth, I would not trade motherhood for anything.

The Center of Medical Progress’ series of videos exposing Planned Parenthood are a lesson in perspective for me. We saw the first video of Dr. Deborah Nucatola sipping a glass of wine while discussing the sale of liver and other body parts of aborted babies. Video number two was not much better as we heard utterances of the sale of baby parts by a doctor who wants to buy a Lamborghini. We’ve seen discussions about dismembering and distributing fetal remains, heard a lab tech at a clinic cry out “Another boy!” as she stared into a pie plate full of tiny body parts and saw more alarming footage in videos five and six that you can find here and here.

We’ve heard talk of “human capital”, demand. “line items” and local facility abortion quotas. All the while, despite the challenges of motherhood, I sit back, watch and realize how fortunate I am to be able to love and appreciate this life my husband and I have been entrusted to care for. The sight of these would-be children-mutilated and spoken of as “specimens” is heartbreaking.

The sad reality is that there are some couples who would love the honor of being called “mommy” and “daddy”. How do these videos impact them? Musician and writer Katie Schuermann, posted this painful account in The Federalist. She writes:

You see, we have never been blessed with the gift of children. No precious child has ever been born or adopted into our little family, and we pine and pray for that miraculous day when our lonely party of two might grow to three or four or more.

We saw them yesterday. We saw them on the screens of our laptops. They were broken, bleeding, even pulverized. They were crushed, mutilated, and dead. They were laid out in a pie pan and then picked over with tweezers. Like a gruesome horror movie come to life, they were abused and dismembered before our very eyes.

Our children. Our precious children.

For that is what they are. They are our children, the dear offspring of our hearts for whom we have prayed, hoped, and waited so long.

We would have adopted them. We would have held them and loved them and nurtured them and raised them. We would have given them our name and all that we have.

You can catch the rest of Scheurmann’s piece here.

While it is painful for those of us who have our happy families to watch this footage, I can not even imagine how gut-wrenching it is for two people, who hoped and prayed with every fiber of their being to hold a little life in their arms one day. To watch their baby, sleeping peacefully and to wake up with sheer joy at every single midnight feeding and diaper change. To cry those tears of joy at that first toothless grin, to cheer on those first steps and to see their eyes sparkle with life.

Life.

We cover those families we know in prayer right now who value these lives. Who long to wrap their loving arms around those little beings who were not given a chance.