Gianna’s seventeen-year-old mother was seven and one-half months pregnant when she decided to have an abortion by saline injection. In a saline abortion, the womb is injected with a saline solution and the mother is expected to deliver a dead baby within twenty-four hours. However, Gianna miraculously survived eighteen hours in the saline solution before being delivered alive. Upon delivery, EMS rushed the two-pound baby to the hospital, where after three-months of touch-and-go existence, she survived. At seventeen months, Gianna was diagnosed with cerebral palsy due to oxygen starvation caused by the attempted termination. The prognosis was grim: she would never be able to lift her head, sit up straight, or walk.

Many influenced by the common thinking of today’s culture would think Gianna better off if her abortion had succeeded rather than leaving her to face such a diminished life. Surely she had no future and no hope.

But the love of a diligent foster mother proved these predictions wrong. After four surgeries, leg braces, and grueling physical therapy, Gianna not only walks; she has run in several marathons. She has written and recorded several songs and has become an effective advocate for life, speaking against abortion before state legislatures, parliaments of nations, and even the U.S. Congress.15

Even before Gianna Jessen’s conception, God had a legacy planned for her—a future and a hope! He took what others meant for evil and used it for good. Gianna’s life is no accident, nor is her work.

Sadly, hundreds of millions of individuals will never fulfill their legacy this side of heaven. Consider:

The first babies aborted in 1973, when abortion became legal in the U.S. would have been thirty-nine in 2012—in the prime of their lives. We will never know what would have become of the 52 million American babies aborted since then. As newspaper writer Sally Jenkins says, “Abortion doesn’t just involve serious issues of life, but of potential lives—Heisman trophy winners, scientists, doctors, artists, inventors. Little-Leaguers who would never come to be if their birth mothers had not wrestled with the stakes and chosen to carry those lives to term.”16

For those 52 million aborted babies, the grand possibilities God had in store for them will never be realized.

If God sees all of time from beginning to end—and He does—then He sees what we cannot. He sees beyond our difficulties and limitations to the eternal impact we will have on others. Although our vision of the future is worse than hazy, we can cling to the illusion that we have life figured out. We tend to think it will be just like the past and the present, but it never is. Several events of recent years have taken the world by surprise, from the World Trade Center attacks and Hurricane Katrina to the economic collapse and Japan’s tsunami.