My grandma was born in early August of 1950 in Vevey, Switzerland, a poor village high in the Alps, and her birth mother gave her up for adoption. For the first two years of her life, she lived in the Le Providence orphanage, cared for by the woman I am named after, Gabrielle, until a middle-aged American couple brought her to Kansas City. Twenty-one years later, she had my mom, and 27 years later, my mom had me. I think all the time about what would have happened if my grandma’s birth mother had not chosen life. And that’s just one life from a little town in Switzerland on the north shore of Lake Geneva.

There’s no easy way to write this. There’s never an easy way to talk about this. But I know in my heart that I have to be a voice for the voiceless.

I feel like it’s necessary to begin with a disclaimer: I am not condemning women who have had abortions. I’m not fit to cast any stones. It’s so important to help women who’ve conceived an unwanted child. There are thousands of pregnancy centers around the country whose only goal is to help a woman through an unwanted pregnancy, to give her support and a place to stay, to let her know that she is loved unconditionally, and show her that she is strong enough to bring the life inside of her into the world. That’s what the pro-life movement is about.

A woman considering an abortion is never taking that situation lightly. I truly don’t believe that a mother would ever want to kill her child. Whatever is leading her toward that decision is purely awful– be it rape, familial pressure, homelessness, poverty, medical complications. But to me, the silent holocaust of 60 million unborn children– an annual death toll roughly equal to the number of United States military deaths in all U.S. wars combined– since Roe vs. Wade legalized abortion in the United States in 1973 is unacceptable.

Why hasn’t cancer been cured? It might be because the person intended to discover it never discovered life outside of the womb. Why is depression increasingly prevalent in our society? It might be because their best friend or soul mate or brother or sister was never there to love them. 60 million is a lot of people to be missing. What if your best friend had never been born? Martin Luther King, Jr., Nelson Mandela, Ghandi, Mother Teresa? Where would we be as a nation and as a world? We’re so desperately looking for leaders today to solve our problems, and sadly, I think I might know where those leaders are, rejected before they could take their first breaths.

Every human life serves a distinct purpose. It’s like George Bailey (Jimmy Stewart) in Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life, saved by his guardian angel, Clarence, as he contemplates suicide on Christmas Eve. A deeply depressed George wishes he had never been born and God grants him that wish. The angel, Clarence, guides him through a day in his town of Bedford Falls as though he had never been born. He cries at the grave of his little brother, Harry, who died at age nine because George wasn’t alive to save his life. A transport of naval soldiers was blown up in World War II and hundreds lost their lives because Harry was never alive to earn the Medal of Honor for saving them. Removing just one life alters our society. Behind every potential life is a macro history that we can’t ignore.

If we can’t agree on the sanctity of human life in the most basic, innocent form, it’s no wonder our nation is so divided. I think there’s no better way to put it than in the words of St. Teresa of Calcutta as she delivered her Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech in 1979: “The greatest destroyer of peace is abortion because if a mother can kill her own child, what is left? For me to kill you and you to kill me? There is nothing between.”