Last week, a college freshman asked me if I was becoming discouraged, even cynical, about working in the pro-life movement. The way he saw it, I had joined the losing side.

It’s not the first time I’ve been asked this, mostly by people who are pro-life but don’t work in the pro-life field. They want to know why I am devoting myself to a movement that, to judge from the latest opinion polls, seems to be losing public support.

 The short answer to this young man’s questions is “no.” I have not become more “cynical” since I began working in the pro-life movement, nor have I become a pessimist about its prospects. Actually, no one I know who works in this field is a pessimist, even those who have been here decades longer than me.

 Now that doesn’t mean that we don’t find ourselves in difficult times. The past two years have been that.

The overturning of Roe v. Wade was a great victory. Being alive to witness that, so early in my career, was amazing.  It was a great joy to see the culmination of decades of work from leaders in the pro-life moment.  I and millions of other pro-lifers celebrated.

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We were not prepared for what came next, however.

Hell hath no fury like the pro-death advocates after they were denied the right to abort children at any stage of pregnancy in any state.  Furiously, they turned to the next battlefield: the fifty states.  Planned Parenthood and its various affiliates poured tens of millions into ballot initiatives in a half-dozen states.

Our losses began later that same summer.

Kansas was the first state to have an abortion-related amendment on the ballot. I was there,  door-knocking in Kansas, with the pro-life group Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America.  Over the course of the summer, we urged tens of thousands of people to vote yes for the “Value Them Both” amendment. Buoyed by the fall of Roe, we were certain that this amendment would mark the beginning of a genuinely new era of victories on the state level; an era in which state legislatures were not only going to limit, but entirely ban, abortions.

Yet, to our surprise and dismay, the Kansas amendment failed.  More losses followed over the next two years as one state after another added pro-abortion amendments to their constitutions.  We were 0-8 in the state referenda wars.

This losing record has been rubbed in our faces by the pro-abortion movement.  The pro-aborts have carried out a sophisticated psy-op against pro-lifers via social media, seeking to capitalize on these losses to demoralize and devalue our movement.

At the same time, our movement was laboring under the most pro-abortion administration that has ever been in the White House.

It’s perhaps not surprising that an eighteen-year-old, seeing our losses celebrated by left-wing social media, asked me if I was cynical or discouraged yet.  Because that’s exactly what the pro-abortion lobby wants us to be: discouraged, even despairing.  It’s a minor-league play on Satan’s chief ploy, namely, to cause us to so lose hope that we question God Himself.

But the pro-life movement is ultimately a movement built on hope. We fight for the preservation and protection of Life itself. The pro-abortion movement may outspend us ten to one—easy to do when you’re funded by corrupt corporations and billionaires—but we do much more with the little we have.

We are always looking forward to the lives we can save, knowing that every life saved is worth the entire material universe. They are always looking down at the blood on their hands.

We are especially hopeful at this moment in time, as we gear up for the election.

We have the chance to turn the tables on the abortion lobby in the nine states where abortion amendments are on the ballot.  PRI is launching a major social media campaign to get the word out about these!

Think of how many victories would be possible with pro-lifers in power in Washington, D.C.  Just imagine, we could:

1. Defund Planned Parenthood once again, preventing millions in government funds from going to its baby-killing industry.
2. Reinstate the Mexico City Policy, preventing federal funds from being funneled overseas for abortions.
3. Increase funding for pregnancy resource centers, which offer real aid to women facing crisis pregnancies.
4. Pass the Born Alive Survivors Act, requiring medical staff across the country to provide medical care to infants who survive abortions.
5. Stop funding the corrupt World Health Organization, an organization that is ambitious to dictate health policies to America, violating our sovereignty.

The above are just a sample of what we may be able to accomplish in the coming years.

But no matter what happens in November, we will not allow the pro-abortion lobby to extinguish our hope the way it hungers to eliminate the unborn.  Win, lose, or draw, we are determined to keep fighting as hard as we can for each and every unborn child.

We will remain the movement of hope.

LifeNews Note: Chiara McKenna writes for the Population Research Institute.