There are times you hear a story and all you can say to yourself is that the grace of God, the sovereignty of God, the providence of God is unmistakable and undeniable. This is one of those stories. It belongs to a good friend and co-worker of ours who lives in Medellín, Colombia, and it began in 1985, before he was born, when someone handed his mother a drink meant to end his life.

I might call this the World Cup, God is great edition, because the story reached the wider world by way of soccer, of all things. But it started long before that, in a poor neighborhood in Medellín, with a frightened seventeen-year-old girl who had no idea she was standing in the middle of something God was writing.

Abortion Survivors Are Real

People who are strong proponents of abortion rights and the expansion of abortion law will tell you there is no such thing as an abortion survivor. That is not true. It is in fact quite common for a child to be born alive after a mother has an abortion, because the abortion fails or is incomplete, and the baby arrives unexpectedly and alive.

There have always been such people. Some survived the old saline abortions that were popular a generation ago, and a number of them have become well known, carrying skin lesions and other lifelong marks from the burning. More commonly now, an abortion survivor is someone whose mother swallowed a pill or some other abortifacient—a substance made to end a pregnancy chemically—and the child lived anyway.

Anderson Ocampo is one of those people.

Anderson works with us at PassionLife as a contractor and teacher in Latin America, and the brief account of his survival has been in his bio on our website for years. That is how a pro-life organization called Faces of Choice found him. Their idea for the FIFA World Cup was to use the stories of actual abortion survivors—faces, names, voices—to bring the personal reality of abortion into the biggest sporting event on earth. They raised millions of dollars to air those stories through social media and television. When they wrote asking permission to approach one of our staff, we sent them straight to Anderson himself, and he agreed to tell it.

Nineteen Eighty-Five

His mother became pregnant at seventeen. His father left to fulfill his duties in the army. She was alone, unmarried, in a shame culture where an unmarried pregnancy was a public disgrace, and she went into crisis.

A relative gave her something to drink. In Colombia in the 1980s abortion was illegal and so were the drugs, but the drink was handed to her all the same, most likely under the best of intentions, as the family’s way of solving an impossible problem. She swallowed it at the back of the house.

Then, as strange and as crazy as it sounds—and this is how Anderson tells it, because it is how his mother has always told it to him—she saw the face of Jesus, and Jesus said to her, I will forgive you.

She vomited immediately.

I have listened to a great many women describe the moment after an abortion, and the first thought is very often some version of I have just killed my baby. In her case, what came first was an outpouring of God’s love toward her. Forgiveness, offered before she had asked for it. That alone is awesome.

But notice the second providence stacked on top of the first. She was panicked, and someone will say the vomiting was simply anxiety. Perhaps. I lean the other way. Whatever the mechanism, the abortifacient she had swallowed to end her son’s life did not have time to work.

She was not a professing Christian then. The family was nominally Catholic, and Anderson believes those inherited values were still at work somewhere in her soul, in her DNA. I have said for years, after nearly four decades in this ministry, that more people who say I believe in God have abortions than people who say they don’t. Most women in crisis will still tell you they believe in God. They simply have not yet calculated him as a factor in their crisis. On that day, in that room, God put himself into the equation.

A Pregnancy Spent in Hiding

What followed was not relief. The rest of the pregnancy was a crisis both psychologically and physically. She was terrified that the abortifacient had already done its damage and that the child would be born with some defect or disability. She withdrew into a room in her house and barely came out.

It helps to know the family she came from. Anderson’s great-grandmother carried twenty-four pregnancies and buried ten children. His grandmother gave birth to ten and lost two or three more. These were women who worked all day, in a culture that often used them badly, with children who received very little attention because their parents were busy simply surviving. Anderson’s mother was among the youngest of those ten siblings. She had not finished high school. The family was very poor.

So she was isolated for nearly the entire pregnancy, and it is hard to hear the account without thinking of a prison. That is a thing no woman should have to experience.

It is also, worldwide, the single most common reason abortion happens at all. Not ideology—poverty. Being alone, unsupported, overwhelmed, and unprepared. That is precisely why building family and church community around a woman in crisis is so effective in rescuing mother and child, because it speaks directly to the thing she is actually afraid of.

Born, and Baptized to Die

The expected delivery date was August 29. Anderson was born on September 22, more than three weeks late, and in that delay he inhaled meconium-contaminated fluid. His lungs were in serious trouble. An emergency intervention was required to stabilize them, and he still carries the scar on the left side of his chest.

About a month later, a doctor told one of his aunts that the baby was not going to survive. A priest was called in quickly to baptize him under the name George.

Then a woman appeared. His mother had never seen her before and never saw her again. She prayed over the child.

And here he is.

They baptized him a second time, this time as Anderson—named, of all things, after Richard Dean Anderson, the actor from MacGyver, a show his parents watched and loved. His full name is Anderson Esteban. So the boy who was baptized George because he was expected to die was renamed after a television character because he lived.

A Voice Nobody Could Hear

For about a year he could not speak, which is unremarkable in a baby. What was remarkable is that when he cried, no one could hear him.

The trouble with his voice did not go away. He grew up playing soccer, as he had since he could remember, three or four years old, on the fields that were everywhere in his neighborhood. And on those fields he was bullied, because his voice was too weak to shout. He knew he could never be captain of the team; he could not call out loudly enough to lead the other players.

When he was about twelve, his mother sat him down and told him the story. She has told it to him many times since, sometimes in tears, and the first time she told it she asked him to forgive her. Anderson thinks she had been carrying the burden on her shoulders all along, and that watching her son struggle with his voice, week after week, is finally what made her speak.

There is a photograph of the two of them from when he was five or six years old. His mother is a beautiful woman—she still is—but she is not smiling in it. She looks like someone carrying something. It is an extraordinary thing that she eventually laid that weight down, both before her son and before the Lord.

Everything Makes Sense Now

Anderson came to faith in Christ at fifteen. His mother, who had visited churches here and there over the years without ever really committing, followed him, and so did his sister. A couple of years after she told him what she had done, the whole family came to Christ together.

As a teenager he began asking the questions that teenagers ask about purpose, and as he learned to navigate the Christian faith he found himself asking a narrower one: why is abortion debated all over the world, and why have I never once heard it addressed in my own church? Does the Bible say anything about the beginning of human life? Can I hold convictions on this that come from Scripture itself?

Those questions sent him into years of research. In 2018 we taught together at a school in Medellín, and that week confirmed much of what he had been working out on his own. It also connected the study to the memory—to the sight of his mother’s face and her tears as she told him the story.

What he concluded is that the church needs to be taught and discipled on this, not merely so that it can defend a position, but so that it can help people in crisis. Both halves. That is the work he does now, in English and in Spanish, training churches across Latin America to hold their convictions about life and to become good Samaritans to the women around them.

And here is the beautiful irony of the whole thing. The lasting injury he carried out of that attempted abortion was a voice too weak to be heard—too weak to cry as an infant, too weak to shout on a soccer field, too weak to lead. He will still tell you his voice is not powerful, that it tires quickly, that he has had to learn how to use it carefully. But the Lord has given him powerful utterance, and today that voice travels across Latin America and beyond as one of the leading voices for protecting the unborn.

His purposes are mysterious, Anderson says, and unimaginable much of the time. But everything makes sense now.

Where the Story Goes Next

You can watch Anderson tell it himself in the Faces of Choice commercial that aired during the World Cup, at facesofchoice.org, and we have put a link to the video alongside his story in his bio on the About Us page at passionlife.org. Share it. It does two things at once: it exposes the evil of child killing, and it displays the amazing grace of God to intervene.

People often ask me what they can say or do to help a mother in a pregnancy-related crisis. Be ready to speak up, and show her the simplest of things—show her what her baby looks like. We make a small model we call the PassionLife Tiny Baby, exactly what a child looks like at nine weeks of age, and you can find it on our website.

The United States accounts for only three percent of the abortions in the world each year, which leaves ninety-seven percent of the crisis in front of us as a world missions challenge. Anderson’s mother lived in that ninety-seven percent. So do the women he now trains churches to reach.

If you want to be part of the rescue movement worldwide, join up with Anderson. Join up with us. And keep watching what God does with a voice that was never supposed to be heard.

This article is adapted from the episode transcript.