Ed Vitagliano

AFA Journal news editor

January 2015 – It was 1973, and Sandy Rios was 21 years old, living in Berlin, Germany, where her husband was serving in the U.S. Army. She was substitute teaching in the American schools there and also singing with the U.S. Army Band.

One day she was sitting at someone else’s desk on base, trying to get some work done, and opened a drawer to find some paper. What she saw changed her life.

In the desk drawer were pro-life brochures. “They contained photos of babies after they had been aborted, their tiny little bodies and limbs dismembered,” she told AFA Journal.

It was about the time of the Roe v Wade decision, when the U.S. Supreme Court legalized abortion in America. Rios said while growing up, abortion had been a dirty word, and no one she knew talked about it. She didn’t really know what it was. The concept was so vague to her.

The pamphlets changed all that. “The pictures hurt me,” she said. “They burned in my soul.”

She would never be the same. While she did not get involved in cultural issues immediately – she wasn’t even in the U.S. at the time – a passion for involvement was born. Rios had seen for the first time that moral issues often bleed over into and intersect with public policy.

When she returned to the U.S., Rios was pregnant with her first child, Sasha. But soon after she was born, she began to experience frightening seizures. Sometimes they grew so severe and violent that Sasha would turn blue, and the seizures were taking a terrible toll on the little girl’s body.

“When she was born, Sasha was severely disabled,” Rios said. “That took me on a journey that lasted 20 years, because we cared for her that whole time, until she became so very sick and required more care than we could give her at home.”

Rios said she surrendered to God’s will for her daughter, and that put her in the right place to receive God’s grace – but it was never easy. One Sunday afternoon, when Sasha was eight years old and lay very sick in her bed, Rios said she herself was very nearly in despair.

“I sat in the living room and wrote the song that was later to be the title of my first album,” she said. “It was important to me to be honest, to not write trite, simplistic platitudes claiming strength and faith [that I didn’t have]. In that moment, I wasn’t sure I could endure another moment, much less the years ahead.”

The song was titled “Sasha’s Song,” and it is a powerful testament to the grace God gives Christians during the extraordinary pain many of them endure. Moreover, the song speaks to the wonder and sanctity of human life, regardless of how broken it may be when it comes our way.

Despite the weight of responsibility that came from caring for her daughter, Rios said Sasha “was a delight. She was beautiful and effervescent. She could say a few words, [and] match pitches. She loved music and people.”

Sasha died in 2009, but the lessons Rios learned from caring for her daughter drove Rios to a lifetime of political and cultural involvement in the defense of human life, among other things.

It was a passion that was first kindled by the images she saw in an open desk drawer in an Army base office.  

Premier life groups
Priests for Life
priestsforlife.org
718-980-4400 

Students for Life
studentsforlife.org
571-379-7261

National Right to Life
nrlc.org
202-626-8800

American Life League
all.org
540-659-4171

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Sandy Rios is vice president of Family-Pac Federal, a FOX News Contributor, a conservative columnist, and host of Sandy Rios in the Morning on AFR Talk. You can hear “Sasha’s Song” on her web site, sandyrios.com.