With buzz cuts and matching outfits, three 4-year-old boys romped around the front of a small conference room—peering into a projector, peeking behind curtains, and cartwheeling on the carpeted floor. Nearby, their mother fielded questions from an audience of about 40 on her experience raising five children, including triplet boys.

In Beijing, where most families have only one child, the idea of having five children is unfathomable.

The 33-year-old mother, Li Yaping, demurred as audience members gawked, snapped photos, and muttered “Liaobuqi!” (“Unbelievable!”) Smiling, she responded: “The boys are as easy to take care of as if we only had one child. We never regretted keeping them.”

Here, at the first national pro-life conference in China, held in Beijing over two days this past May, the rambunctious boys represented the fruits of China’s growing pro-life movement.

Five years ago, when Li was pregnant with the triplets, her mother-in-law pressured her to abort, arguing Li and her husband already had two daughters and wouldn’t be able to afford three more mouths to feed. Having additional children would also violate China’s family planning laws and could lead to fines or children without official registration.

Li’s pastor connected her with Tang Feixiang, president of the Chinese pro-life group Good Neighbors Center for Pregnancy Help. Tang encouraged the couple to keep the babies and promised to help them find a Christian couple to adopt the boys if they were unable to care for them. Li and her husband agreed not to abort the babies and decided they wanted to keep one boy and place the other two for adoption.

Once Tang sent out a message about Li’s situation on the social media site WeChat, a dozen people responded, offering to adopt the boys or give money to support the family. Li contacted Tang a month later to say she had changed her mind and wanted to keep two of the boys and only place one for adoption. Then she called again to say, “We want to keep all three.”

At the recent Beijing conference, activists from across China gathered to celebrate the tangible successes of the pro-life movement in the Communist nation: babies saved from abortion, church members educated on the sanctity of life, pregnancy care centers established inside hospitals, an annual “Don’t Abort on Children’s Day” campaign, a safe home for mothers, and a hotline to help women with unplanned pregnancies.

The pro-life momentum coincides with a significant shift in Chinese family planning policy: After enforcing a long-standing one-child policy, then expanding it to a two-child policy nearly three years ago, Chinese officials recently signaled they may drop the birth limits altogether. (Their concerns appear less about the sanctity of life and more about a potential demographic implosion.)

Still, in a country that aborts 23 million babies each year, cultural views do not change overnight. Most people in Chinese society—including many Christians—see abortion as another form of birth control and see having more children as expensive and impractical.

Despite their celebrations, pro-life trailblazers in China have no illusions about the daunting task they face. Many already have their own stories of victories and losses to share.