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This is my eighth in the series, highlighting key aspects from each chapter of my new book, While We Were Sleeping: A Wake-up Call For All Christians (2025). (Check out my YouTube channel, where I am posting a reflection on each chapter, to complement this post.)

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Jodie Pickard is the Founding Director of Love Australia, a leading prolife organisation that first began as Love Adelaide. Love Australia’s latest endeavour is the introduction of the House of Refuge ministry to Australia, in partnership with Love Life America. This mission is to equip churches across Australia to be safe havens—where those experiencing an unplanned or crisis pregnancy have no need to seek an abortion clinic and where those who have been hurt by abortion can find healing.

Now that’s a novel approach. Like many of my readers, no doubt, I have felt increasingly frustrated, powerless and angry that the agenda to kill unwanted life has gained acceptance in our so-called civilised society.

Here’s a short extract from Jodie’s story:

Love Life invited me to go out with one of their teams to the abortion clinic in Charlotte, North Carolina. I was there to pray and watch what was going on. These sidewalk counsellors were offering hope and help—calling out, ‘Young mum, anything you need right now, we are here to help you. Please know you don’t have to walk into that clinic.’

Very occasionally, somebody would turn away, choosing life for their baby. I saw three women change their minds that day! Two of them drove away in their cars, letting the sidewalk counsellors know of their decision, and one entered the counselling RV bus.

Onboard was an ultrasound machine and a private lounge area to counsel, run by a pregnancy help centre. The young woman I saw go on the bus was offered a free ultrasound, and she chose life! What an impact this had on my involvement!

Back home in Australia, I started going to our abortion clinic and offering help. Unfortunately, it was short-lived. Less than a year later (in 2020), the South Australian Parliament legislated a 150-metre exclusion zone, which outlawed any communication related to abortion around a facility that performs them. It also prohibited praying. What has become of our nation when praying is made illegal? (Love Life)

Jodie’s Houses of Refuge ministry presents the church with a tool they can employ with no government restriction, while at the same time giving church leadership a positive platform from which they can address the elephant of abortion in society.

What Can We Do?

Every year in Australia, 88,000 babies are lost to abortion. As Proverbs 31:8-9 urges us, we must speak up for those who cannot speak for themselves. Unborn babies are the most vulnerable in our society.

Love Life began in Charlotte, North Carolina, in 2016, and has now spread across the whole of the USA. They celebrate this testimony on their website:

Because of supporters like you, in 2023, Love Life was able to be present at 44 abortion centers across the nation with over 1000 partnering Churches and 306 House of Refuge Churches poised and equipped to help the moms that chose life. A watershed moment occurred in 2023 when we saw the 5,000th baby saved from abortion.

Let that number sink in. 5,000 babies who were scheduled to die, with the permission of their own parents, are alive today. God used you to help bring about this miracle. Because of you responding to God’s call to be a voice for the voiceless, Love Life was able to have trained people interceding at the darkest places in our cities.

United Kingdom Votes to Effectively Legalise Abortion to Birth

We are deeply concerned that on the evening of March 18 2026, the House of Lords voted to remove women from the criminal law related to abortion when acting in relation to their own pregnancy. — Dawn McAvoy, Both Lives UK

The British Medical Journal (24 March 2026) reported on what they believe was driving parliament to decriminalise abortion to birth:

Some 277, 970 abortions were carried out in 2023 (the most recent year for which figures are available), an 11% increase from 251 377 in 2022. Controlling for population growth, this represents an abortion rate of 23.0 in every 1000 women aged 15-44 in 2023—up from 21.1 in 1000 the year before.

Rates of abortion have notably risen in women over 35 in the past decade, at 12.3 in 1000 women in 2023, up from 7.1 in 1000 in 2013. However, rates remain highest among 20-24 year olds, at 39.4 in 1000 women in 2023.
— BMJ 2026;392:s562

As of 25 March 2026, Dame Sarah Mullally became the new Archbishop of Canterbury and the head of the Church of England. She is proudly pro-choice and not pro-life. Sarah, along with all the other bishops in the House of Lords, could have blocked this amendment to decriminalise abortion to birth, but they didn’t. It’s devastating when church leaders stay silent and effectively become complicit in this barbaric method of birth control (cf. Chris Wickland, below).

What the Bible says

Back in my school days, I remember debates about abortion. ‘What about the victims of rape?’ my opponents would say. Whatever happened to adoption, I would reply.

For You formed my inward parts; you covered me in my mother’s womb. I will praise You, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made; marvellous are Your works, and that my soul knows very well. My frame was not hidden from You, when I was made in secret… — Psalm 139:13-15a

God has created every one of us and, for Him, there is no suggestion that life begins at birth; it is much earlier, at the point of fertilisation of the egg by the sperm.

In Bible times, the Lord was clearly grieved by His children’s idolatry in their adoption of the ways and customs of the surrounding nations (Canaanites, Moabites in particular).

The people of Judah have done evil in my eyes, declares the Lord. They have set up their detestable idols in the house that bears my Name and have defiled it. They have built the high places of Topheth in the Valley of Ben Hinnom to burn their sons and daughters in the fire—something I did not command, nor did it enter my mind.
— Jeremiah 7:30-31

Parents brought their sons and daughters to be burnt in the Valley of Ben Hinnom, immediately south of the walls of Jerusalem, seeking to gain a blessing from their false gods. Our one true God declared: it had never entered His mind!

In a video, Aline and Rodrigo take us on a tour of the Valley of Ben Hinnom (transliterated as Geenna or Gehenna in Greek). They unpack the scriptures while we admire the peaceful parkland where children play.

It is telling that this valley has not been built on, in contrast with the Cedrom Valley, just around the corner, between the old city and the Mount of Olives, which is filled with gravestones and a number of churches.

It is said that the Valley of Ben Hinnom has been cursed for all time on account of these child sacrifices. In many ways, I see this valley as a monument to the atrocity dating back thousands of years.

Abortion is our society’s sacrifice for “the good life“. We dress it up with justification, but in the end, it’s murder.

What about the doctors and nurses who violate their hierocratic oath to keep their jobs? Most of us will never see an abortion, but they handle them on a regular basis.

I will never harm my suffering friend, because life is sacred, from the tender fruit that he once was in his mother’s womb to that first sight he gave out between her legs when he opened his eyes to the world.
— Extract from Hippocratic Oath (translated by Amelia Arenas)

Let’s ask God to show us how we can take a stand against abortion.

If My people, which are called by My name, shall humble themselves, and pray, and seek My face, and turn from their wicked ways; then will I hear from heaven, and will forgive their sin, and will heal their land.
— 2 Chronicles 7:14

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Image courtesy of Adobe.