Focus on the Family

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John Fuller: This is John Fuller, and please remember to let us know how you're listening to these programs: on a podcast, app, or website.

Sarah Zagorski: And through that suffering, that's when I encountered the Savior of Isaiah 53, the suffering Savior who reached out to me in a radical way in that suffering. And that changed the course of my very life. In that place of vulnerability, in that place of pain, I learned He really, Jesus, His humanity understands this suffering. He knows it.

John Fuller: That's Sarah Zagorski, and she has an amazing, inspiring story about God's hand in her life through very difficult circumstances. You'll hear about God's redemption in her life and her family's life on today's episode of Focus on the Family with Jim Daly, and I'm John Fuller.

Jim Daly: Today we're going to talk about one of the most difficult issues in the culture: abortion. But what we're approaching this through is a deeply personal story of survival, compassion, and redemption. Our guest is Sarah, and I'm looking forward to the unfolding of her story. It's going to inspire you and hopefully give you hope, especially moms who are thinking about abortion or whether or not having this child is going to be the right thing to do. I think she'll make a powerful case for why the answer is life.

John Fuller: Sarah serves as the senior director of public relations and communication at Americans United for Life and frequently speaks and even testifies before Congress and in state legislatures about Born Alive Infant Protections. She's contributed to a book that includes her story. It's called *Choose Life: Answering Key Claims of Abortion Defenders with Compassion*. You can learn more about Sarah and this very powerful book when you call 800-A-FAMILY or stop by focusonthefamily.com/broadcast.

Jim Daly: Sarah, it is a privilege to have you with us here on Focus on the Family. Thanks for coming.

Sarah Zagorski: I'm very delighted to be here. Thank you so much, Jim.

Jim Daly: Now, I've got a big smile on my face because you were an intern here at Focus on the Family in 2010, right?

Sarah Zagorski: 2010.

Jim Daly: How amazing. Now all these years later, you're out there telling your story, participating in writing this great book, and you're standing up for life. I'm proud of you. Way to go. And I think people are going to hear why that is such a big deal as we unfold your story. Let's bring your mom into this. Before you're born, what kind of environment is she in? Let's make sure people understand what trouble some of these women are truly in.

Sarah Zagorski: My mother was a beautiful person, and she immigrated to America from Honduras fleeing an abusive father, actually, with her sister. Upon arrival here, she quickly married her first husband, who was abusive to her. Then they divorced, and she got involved with another, unfortunately, predatory-type individual in her life.

She had very little education. She was diagnosed in her life with paranoid schizophrenia, and she was really marginalized because of her race and because of her poverty. Both things together. So she was a woman who suffered greatly, not just because of her mental illness, but because of the individuals in her life that abused her, that took advantage of her.

That preceded before I was even here. So that was what her life looked like before I even arrived. When I look at my story today, I have such compassion for her and more context and understanding what led her to the abortion decision with me.

Jim Daly: Which again is so good for all of us to hear, because we are all in to save that baby's life, but we don't always recognize the difficulty that women are in financially and emotionally. So it does paint that picture in a way that gives empathy to what she was facing. So she becomes pregnant with you. Paint that picture. How many siblings do you have? You're in her womb, but how many siblings were there?

Sarah Zagorski: At that time, she already had seven pregnancies, with a set of twins included. Her pregnancy with me was the result of an affair with a prominent member of the Greater New Orleans community who seemed to have provided her some kind of relief from her suffering, some kind of security from her suffering. But upon learning that she was pregnant, he was out of the picture. That was my conception, and that was what I learned from her directly about my conception.

Jim Daly: And again, that context to fill in some of that. You've got seven siblings?

Sarah Zagorski: I have 11. But seven ahead of me.

Jim Daly: So you're coming into that world, she's alone, there's no husband or father.

Sarah Zagorski: She returned to her husband at that time, my stepfather at the time.

Jim Daly: So she's thinking abortion. Describe that decision process for her and then we'll get into what actually happened.

Sarah Zagorski: She was a woman familiar with abortion. She had two previous abortions in her past, and those abortions she regretted. She had a lot of grief over them. But she felt she had no other choice. She couldn't afford the children she already had.

Jim Daly: They were living in poverty.

Sarah Zagorski: They were living below the federal poverty level, dire poverty. And not only that, but she had abusive individuals in her house. So when someone is in that kind of position, we have to consider that scenario very specifically because that woman is weighing, "I have a dangerous home here. I have a place where I can't even feed my children."

So it's very easy to believe the lie and be deceived that abortion is the choice to make, the only choice to make. We can talk about coercion; we can talk about a lot of things in that. But for me, what I understand is oppression can lead someone to sin. It doesn't justify sin, it doesn't justify abortion, but those things were the realities of her very life every single day.

Jim Daly: So she goes in for this abortion. What takes place?

Sarah Zagorski: She went to an abortionist—his name is Dr. Akpalabi—and he was known for helping low-income women and minority women. That was his reputation in the city of New Orleans. She went to him, and he performed what's called an induction-style abortion with me, which is a kind of abortion where they induce the child early in order to ensure fetal demise.

Thankfully, at that time in his career, he was under review in 1989 for performing a botched abortion procedure where he left a woman with a partial hysterectomy. So he was already under review by Louisiana's medical board. Upon my delivery from that induction, I wasn't breathing, and he told my mother, "She's going to be a mental vegetable. You should leave her to die. She hasn't had oxygen. Just leave her to die."

In that moment, the most improbable heroine, my mother, said, "I'm going to sue you if you don't get her life-sustaining care."

Jim Daly: This is right there in the abortion. You're on the table. Where were you at in development, gestation?

Sarah Zagorski: 26 and a half weeks.

Jim Daly: So you were just in that viable category at about 22 weeks. Wow. So she convinced the doctor; begrudgingly, the doctor responded.

Sarah Zagorski: She threatened and said, "I'm going to sue you if you don't get her medical care." I believe that threat was a life-saving one in his case because he was already under review with Louisiana's medical board. Then from there, I was sent to—he obliged—Children's Hospital's trauma birth ward in New Orleans, and that's where I recovered from that.

Jim Daly: Most of us don't have that story where you're just out of the womb early and someone's trying to kill you. So you do come into the world, they do revive you, they take care of you at the hospital, you go home with your mom into what kind of environment?

Sarah Zagorski: I describe it typically as a familial war zone for me. Inside my childhood home, there was no safety or security or peace. We were constantly at war with each other, warring for our mother's attention, warring for food, hiding food in bathrooms, eating bugs off the floor, being abused by older, predatory members in the household.

Oftentimes my mother—again, believing she was trying to keep us safe—would put myself and the siblings under me in a cage-like area of the home to keep us from the predators in our house. So it was nothing of any beauty or safety or what a childhood should look like. It was incredibly painful.

Jim Daly: Hearing that, some people might go, "Wow, maybe I understand that abortion may have been a better thing." As Christians, we should never go there, and that's early church tradition. Christians fought for life from the very beginning, and we believe that everybody's created in the image of God regardless of your financial status or anything else. But again, a person would go, "Was it better that you not be born?"

Sarah Zagorski: Absolutely not. Absolutely not.

Jim Daly: I know it seems so obvious, but people have been conditioned to an extent to say difficulty and trouble of that nature, where you're scrounging for your food, being put in a cage-like thing to protect you from older siblings who might hurt you—wow, that's not much of a life.

Sarah Zagorski: It was temporary, though. And through that suffering, that's when I encountered the Savior of Isaiah 53, the suffering Savior who reached out to me in a radical way in that suffering. And that changed the course of my very life. In that place of vulnerability, in that place of pain, I learned He really, Jesus, His humanity understands this suffering. He knows it.

Jim Daly: Were you even aware of what this was? "This is not healthy," or was this, "Okay, this is just what life is, it's survival time"?

Sarah Zagorski: After my entrance into foster care—

Jim Daly: And you're how old at that point?

Sarah Zagorski: 16 months. After my introduction into foster care, I definitely knew that during my foster care journey, which in time span was about seven and a half years, I knew that that was abnormal and dangerous. I really did believe and I knew that I would not survive inside the four walls of my childhood home. I knew it was going to end badly for me if I was going to stay.

Jim Daly: So now at a very young age, the adult awareness is occurring. You're having to grow up very fast to understand safety and what I need to do to survive. That's really something.

John Fuller: My goodness, what a story today from Sarah Zagorski. You can read more about her story and other really inspiring and insightful perspectives about the power of choosing life in a compilation of stories. It's called *Choose Life: Answering Key Claims of Abortion Defenders with Compassion*. We have that here at the ministry. Call 800-A-FAMILY or stop by focusonthefamily.com/broadcast.

Sarah, it's amazing what the body remembers and what you internalize, but you found a really different kind of thing going on with your foster care providers. There was one couple in particular that really stood out.

Sarah Zagorski: Bobby and Ronald Jones. They were already in their 50s at that time. They were an older couple, and they actually met my birth mother before I was even conceived. They met her at church. My adopted mother has been in my life and my adopted father have been in my life to this day. I'm very thankful for them. But in their house, I was introduced to the Gospel of Jesus Christ, and that changed everything. It gave so much clarity and to really learn from them in a discipleship kind of way what it is like to know the Savior.

Also, of course, they provided for me physical needs. I came to them in a torn-up nightgown and a bottle that had Coke in it. That's what I came to them with. Actually, in my case, social workers warned them and said, "This family has extensive trauma. This family has mental health complications, and that could happen to Sarah."

Yet they did not blink. They said, "We're devoted to Sarah." And not just to Sarah, but they loved my birth mother, which was really a beautiful thing. And they loved my siblings also. Beautiful. So when I look at that, I see so much of God's grace in that and also the reality that they were in it for the long haul regardless of if they would get to adopt me one day from the very beginning.

Jim Daly: We'll unfold that today and tomorrow, but I want to ask you about a proclamation that you have, which is to say there are no unwanted children. This is a mantra of the pro-abortion side. These children are unwanted; therefore, you're bringing them into a total difficult situation full of disarray, rejection, all the things they're going to suffer from. Why do you say every child is a wanted child?

Sarah Zagorski: Because every child is created in the image of God and that is first and foremost. Then we have the reality that in the US today, there are one to two million couples waiting to adopt a child. That just shows that there are people that want to take in a child and care for a child. I believe even children like me, children that have brokenness in their past.

Jim Daly: I'm thinking one of the things that we're working on here at Focus on the Family—and it's taking time, but we're working toward that goal—is where we could have a national database of waiting adoptive parents, because it doesn't exist today. It kind of exists at the community level with adoption agencies. They all have their separate list of local folks that have said, "Yeah, we'd be willing to adopt," but there's no national database where we could really match those million abortions every year—those women getting those abortions—with a million or so couples that are willing to adopt.

It's kind of like we have enough food in the world to feed the world; we just can't get the food there logistically. But we create enough food. It's the same kind of thing in this space. It's how do we connect people that would like to adopt and transform this preconceived notion of guilt? Maybe it's less shaming if I just have the abortion versus giving my child up for adoption. But logistically, it's there. It's possible. We're going to keep working toward that goal with our Wait No More program and try to continue to encourage Christian couples particularly to adopt out of foster care.

Sarah Zagorski: Right. Also on the birth mother side, there's a lot of misconceptions about the adoption decision. Studies show that women who are weighing decisions between abortion and adoption, they see adoption as abandoning their child. They believe if they place their child for adoption, they'll never see their child again. They are confused between the differences between foster care and adoption, infant adoption versus foster care, which I know we'll get into more. So there's a lot of education for the birth mother, too.

Jim Daly: Speak to the damaging effect abortion has on women physically, psychologically, and spiritually.

Sarah Zagorski: My birth mother, it only furthered her mental decline. Her abortions only furthered her mental decline, and I saw that in real time. The guilt and the shame from that was—I don't want to say unredeemable, but it was very challenging for her to come to peace with that. At the end of her life, she did turn back to Christ, which is a beautiful thing, but she suffered with that guilt the entire time.

Jim Daly: And she had an abortion before you as well.

Sarah Zagorski: Two before me. So she had all that.

Jim Daly: What do you say to that? You're testifying in front of Congress. I'm sure you had a few nasty questions from some who would totally reject who you are. It's almost like they don't want you to exist. I've seen those hearings. I know how they treat you. And yet at the same time, I think this idea of the impact on women is ignored by them, that women carry this for the rest of their lives, that guilt, that shame. Hopefully they find redemption in Christ, which in my mind is the only way out. But speak to that impact for that woman that carries that burden forever. They don't seem to talk about that.

Sarah Zagorski: Right. It's also because the shame that accompanies that abortion is so seeped still in our culture today. It is, of course, it is against one's conscience. Regardless of what they might say they believe about abortion, it is against their conscience to end the life of their own child.

So there is an automatic guilt and shame that comes from that. The only relief, in my opinion, and healing comes through post-abortion counseling with the Gospel presented as: Jesus died for your sin, Jesus can heal you.

Jim Daly: Because they need forgiveness. They need to feel that they're forgiven, and only the Lord can deliver that in the soul. I can only imagine they can't even think that it's forgivable. And I've witnessed those who have experienced that freedom. It's so good.

We don't want to end today without talking about the other part of this, which are the boyfriends or the husbands that may even be encouraging that woman to get the abortion because they don't want the responsibility. I'll tell you what—I mean, you know this—but their financial status doesn't matter. They just don't want that child in some cases and they want independence from being able to do the sexual act without having to be responsible for the child that that could create. So again, men are involved in this obviously. So what do we do with that? How do we address that component of this so women aren't out there on an island, like they didn't get pregnant on their own?

Sarah Zagorski: Right, absolutely. I think there are two parts of this. There are just individuals who don't feel they have a responsibility to the woman, and they have not come to Christ, they don't see any kind of adult responsibility in that, they don't have maturity. But then we have something a little bit more serious, which I know is known as coercion.

Coercion can be subtle; it can be also direct. I've published about this topic. And the most recent peer-reviewed studies on coercion indicate that nearly 70% of abortions are classified as unwanted abortions, with only about 30% saying they actually wanted that abortion.

I believe coercion often is what compels women to have an abortion from their male partners. And that's very sad and very scary. It shows also that women aren't actually in line with their own belief about abortion. They actually, if they had the support of their partners, of their community, of these specific individuals, they would choose life if that were the situation.

Jim Daly: And that number holds. Our research is 70% of abortion-minded women said if they had one person in their life that was there to be with them and help them and just be present, that they would have chosen life. Isn't that amazing? And that's again, where's the church? How do we get engaged in that community so that they have one person that will be there to help them?

Sarah Zagorski: It's really the church's responsibility to continue raising young men into maturity. And that would solve a lot of—be part of the solution to a lot of these issues we have. And you know women in the church are having abortions too, sadly.

Jim Daly: It's so true. We're coming into the end here. We've been doing something for years, about 20 years now: Option Ultrasound. I think we're somewhere around 550,000 babies saved. That's a lot. It's a big effort. I think it's the biggest pro-life effort in terms of saving a baby's life.

We work with pregnancy resource centers. I mean, we do not deserve the pat on the back. I'm grateful to the donors who make that happen, but we orchestrate and help facilitate those pregnancy resource centers to get into a position to be medically ready to get the ultrasound, to have the sonographers trained to be able to do that. We provide grants for extra hours for nurses to be there on Friday nights, Saturday, which is the high-volume time. The clinics typically would be closed Friday night, Saturday, but that's when a lot of women are seeking input about an abortion.

So all that stuff that we do in conjunction with the pregnancy resource center is terrific. But again, what we have found is when an abortion-minded woman sees that ultrasound—and we have some crazy stories where women will see the baby sucking its thumb, and they think it's just a blob of tissue because that's what they've been told. But it's not. It's a developing human being. It's right there to see. And when they see it, they're going, "Whoa."

Sarah Zagorski: Yeah, in fact, the data shows that—and this is 100% true—it's close to 90% of women who view an ultrasound of their unborn child are then inclined not to have an abortion. And today with technology's advanced as it is, we can see babies in 3D and 4D ultrasound. There is no way—the abortion industry still does this—but there is no way to say that that child is not a member of the human family, that that child isn't human. The science doesn't line up with that anymore.

Jim Daly: And we'll pick up on that tomorrow because it's so critical. But the word "fetus," the trick here is to try to disassociate the baby from humanity, that it's not really a baby. Hey guys, "fetus" means human being. It's Latin for human being. It is a human being, and we've got to start with that and stop recharacterizing that child as something other than a human being.

Let's end here because this is the core of it all: your mom. We danced around it a little bit, but at the end of her life, she did make a commitment to Christ. How engaged were you with her at that time, at the end of her life? How did you feel with that redemption for her that she confessed to the Lord, she embraced the Lord, and according to our theology, you'll be with her in heaven? I mean, that's a mind-blower.

Sarah Zagorski: Yes, absolutely. I have great peace about that. I have great peace that she is free from the suffering of this life. I took a long journey down forgiveness, and I know we'll probably talk about that more, but I'm so thrilled that I'll join her one day again, and that she is not suffering anymore here. But that was a long process for her, a very painful process for her. But the Lord is always faithful to accept anyone who cries out to Him.

Jim Daly: It is so good and it's such the right note to end on because I just think the Lord has a heart for women who go through deep trouble. My mom was in that same boat, so we have that similarity. She came to Christ day before she died. She also considered aborting me in California when she was 42, and women could have an abortion if you were over 40 because of the complications, all the fear.

And thankfully, my dad talked her out of it and said, "No, we're going to have this child." And that's me. And that's you. So thank you. Let's come back next time and continue to talk in hopeful tones about why we should be here and why God loves the woman and the baby and the man. Can we do it?

Sarah Zagorski: Yes, absolutely.

Jim Daly: You heard me mention Option Ultrasound. Jean and I support Focus every month. We give $60 to Focus on the Family, which helps save a baby's life. $60 will save a baby's life. And yes, we do other stuff with Focus, but that's one that we're committed to: to give at least $60, $120 a month to. And I would hope that you could spare that $60 to save a baby's life. It's probably one of the best investments at Focus on the Family.

Dramatic impact results are there. We measure it; we work with the clinics, etc. We know it's $60 after saving 550,000 babies' lives. We've got the metrics down. Why not step in and do that? If you can only make that $60 gift one time in this year, okay, let's do that. Let's save a child's life together. And again, that accrues to your benefit. We're just here—we're the machine that gets it done with the pregnancy resource center. If we have no gas in that tank from you, called financial resources, it doesn't happen. So fill the tank, let's give it the gas, and save more babies in 2026.

John Fuller: Donate today when you call 800-A-FAMILY. 800-232-6459. Or stop by focusonthefamily.com/broadcast. And when you give to the Option Ultrasound project to save a baby, we'll send a copy of the book that Sarah contributed to called *Choose Life: Answering Key Claims of Abortion Defenders with Compassion*.

There's a lot of inspiration and practical help for you as you make a compassionate stand for life. And even if you're not able to give $60 today, we're going to send that book to you for a one-time gift or a monthly pledge of any amount. So call today: 800-A-FAMILY. And thanks for joining us today for Focus on the Family with Jim Daly. I'm John Fuller, inviting you back as we continue the conversation and once again help you and your family thrive in Christ.