The phrase “pro-life activist” usually brings to mind a toughened Saturday-morning warrior — rosary in one hand, pro-life placard in the other — pacing the sidewalk in front of an abortion clinic and praying aloud for the killing to stop.

Essential as this kind of activism is, for some people — the elderly, the infirm, the mother of small children — it is impossible.

What is a housebound pro-lifer to do? Gifts for the Unborn, based in Austin, Texas, offers some creative answers to that question.

Dick Jacobs founded Gifts for the Unborn in 1995. It began, he told the Register, with this simple thought: If you could put something tangible into the hands of a pregnant woman — something that says baby — you could help steer her away from an abortion.

With that inspiration in mind, Jacobs and his wife, Lorelle, began putting together small gift packs containing a small picture frame, a baby-care product, (such as a washcloth, bib or bottle of baby shampoo) and a pair of baby booties. They delivered the packs to a few local crisis-pregnancy centers.

For Kate Signorelli, director of Birthright in Houston, Texas, these simple gift packs were an effective tool in helping her clients understand that what they're carrying inside isn't a what but a who.

“A woman who finds herself in a crisis-pregnancy situation is feeling very ambivalent about the whole thing,” says Signorelli. “Then you give her the gift pack. You see her eyes soften. A change comes over her.”

It wasn't long before other crisis-pregnancy centers began distributing the gift packs. Today, Gifts for the Unborn distributes about 10,000 packs per year to 371 centers in the United States, Canada, Romania, Ecuador, Latvia and Belarus. And the list is growing.

And here's where the behind-the-scenes pro-life warrior comes in: Somebody's got to make those booties. Out of necessity, some gift packs include store-bought booties or baby socks, but, for the most part, the booties in the gift packs are made by hand. Jacobs provides instructions on how to sew, knit or crochet the booties, enabling anyone to contribute to this genuinely hands-on pro-life work.

“A lot of the people making booties are little old ladies,” says Louise Walters of Natrona Heights, Pa. Louise is Dick Jacobs' sister; she became involved early on as one of the first booty makers.

Walters says Gifts for the Unborn is perfect for pro-lifers who are either unable or disinclined to take their love of life to the streets. “A woman who comes into a crisis-pregnancy center needs all the encouragement she can get,” she says. “We're there for her and her baby.”

Dick Jacobs' army of booty makers includes his 99-year old father, a group of sisters at the University of Notre Dame and a housebound woman who can crochet a pair of baby booties in less than an hour. Several times a year, she donates batches of several hundred booties.

Care on Demand

Cindy Rongey of Wahiawa, Hawaii, has a little army of her own: her four children. Admitting no talent for booty making, Rongey concentrates instead on hand-making the small infant picture frames and assembling gift packs for distribution to crisis-pregnancy centers on the West Coast. Once the frames are made and the materials laid out, she and her children, including her 19-month-old, fill the bags and prepare them for shipment. They supply 54 centers with about 200 gift packs per month.

“Our charity would be nothing without the crisis-pregnancy centers,” says Rongey, and she's right. While the necessarily anonymous nature of crisis-pregnancy center work makes it difficult to assess just how many women turn away from abortion as a direct result of the gift packs, Gifts for the Unborn receives many positive calls from the centers they serve. More importantly they receive plenty of requests for more gift packs.

Small wonder. “Blobs of tissue don't wear booties,” says Rongey. “Babies wear booties.” Crisis-pregnancy centers report that their clients sometimes choose the color of the booties based on whether they are hoping for a boy or a girl.

Sharon Lozano, director of the Gabriel Project Life Center in downtown Austin, uses the gift packs because of the hope they provide. “The [simple gesture] gives the woman the sense that somebody cares about her and the child she's carrying,” she says. “It shows that somebody began caring about her baby before he even came to be.”

In Canada, Europe and Latin America, in order to avoid international customs fees for their eastern European crisis-pregnancy centers, Gifts for the Unborn has “missionary-type” volunteers who carry in batches of gift packs in their luggage.

‘Mom-and-Pop’ Appeal

Financial responsibility is another hallmark of Gifts for the Unborn. “One hundred percent of every donation, money or materials, makes it all the way to the crisis-pregnancy center and into the hands of a troubled pregnant woman,” says Jacobs. All the char-ity's incidental expenses, such as postage, phone calls, transportation and upkeep of its Web site, are out of-pocket from the founders and their associates. Donors also receive a handwritten thank-you note. “We want to keep it at the mom-and-pop level,” says Jacobs.

How does a homespun organization manage to send 10,000 gift packages a year across the country and overseas?

Rongey thinks it is by the hand of God. “Neither Dick, Louise nor I have ever had to say No to a crisis-pregnancy center,” she says. “We've never run out of money. We've never run out of materials.”

Rongey then describes one time when a request for gift packs came in — and she had no booties on hand at all.

In the same batch of that day's mail was a parcel that containing 25 pairs of booties: exactly enough to fill the order. “I wish someone with no faith would join our organization,” she says. “They'd get faith in a hurry.”

Clare Conneely writes from Winfield, Illinois.