On two separate evenings this past week, I found myself roped into moving a massive pile of boxes across town. Moving in and of itself wasn’t at all a new experience for me, but moving what was in those boxes was.

The cardboard crates in question contained hundreds of pounds of diapers and blankets and car seats and toys. I and the other volunteers—most of whom I’d never met before—loaded the tender cargo into the backs of trailers, pickup trucks, and mini-vans, and then proceeded across town as part of a caravan to deposit it at its new, larger home.

When a friend had asked me a few days earlier if I might be available to help the local Options for Women clinic move to a new location in town, I’d given my standard reply that I’d check my calendar and get back to him. As I’m sure is true with most people, moving is not one of my all-time favorite things to do, and so I was a little disappointed to see that I had both the evenings wide open.

When my younger brother and I arrived at the appropriate time, we were happy to find that most of the packing had already been done, and that the boxes merely needed to be loaded onto the trucks and then driven across town and unloaded. Clearly someone else had already put in a lot more time and effort than was being asked of us. Better yet, there was a spread of food put out for the volunteers, even for those who had just arrived.

As we were eating, I made my usual jokes about having come there mostly for the free food, but as I looked around at the faces in that room, my mind kept wandering to more serious thoughts. A wide variety of ages was represented there—older people, middle-aged adults, and a large number of college students. Some were professional staffers, but most were volunteers like myself, probably recruited by their friends.

What struck me most of all was the sense of joy that I could see in that room. It wasn’t a namby-pamby, rainbows-and-butterflies sort of glibness, but rather a genuine sense of being involved in something incredibly important. The people I saw around me, while probably as initially hesitant as I had been, were happy with the knowledge that they were working to help disadvantaged mothers keep and raise their babies.

Across town, after what seemed like a thousand trips carrying boxes into the new building, I stopped to get a sip of water and to admire the growing stack of ‘merchandise.’

“How does this work?” I asked one of the women in charge. “Can expectant mothers purchase this stuff at a discounted rate?”

“No,” she replied. “We don’t charge anything. Moms earn points by taking the free classes we offer on topics like nutrition and newborn care and potty training. They can then use those points to ‘purchase’ the items in our store here.”

I stared at the mound of baby paraphernalia, and I thought back to several previous conversations I’d had on the topic of unplanned pregnancies. During those talks, without fail, the advocates of abortion would say something like the following: “Sure, these people claim they’re pro-life, but once the babies are actually born, they stop caring about them.”

I’d heard this statement many times, and I’d never really believed it, but that pile of toys, baby clothes, and car seats helped me recognize just how blatant a lie it really is. I couldn’t help but wonder how many teething rings and boxes of diapers were stockpiled at the local Planned Parenthood branch. To ask the question was to answer it.

By contrast, the people there in that room— the ones working hard all around me as I polished off my bottle of water—were there because they truly did care about babies and their mothers, and not just up to the point of birth, as their detractors love to claim.

They were there because they are really, genuinely, 100% pro-life.