I've been blessed with the opportunity to speak at a number of pregnancy resource center fundraising banquets around the country each year. Typically before each event, I try to visit their actual facility, meet the staff, and see the various features (as well as needs) of the center. I've found that it helps to get to know the people you are speaking on behalf of, to see their heart and dedication to the cause.
A few weeks ago, I found myself in the downtown facility of a center in Pennsylvania, speaking with the executive director. She conveyed to me how difficult it had become for their staff over the course of the last couple years. Besides increased opposition from a state government that continues working to place obstacles in their way of reaching and caring for women in crisis, she pointed to the disastrous prevalence of the abortion pill.
These so-called "chemical abortions" are Planned Parenthood's dream. The overhead costs associated with surgical abortions no longer prohibitive, an abortion pill allows the child-killing industry to quickly disseminate drugs to do the trick remotely, even through "tele-health" consultations. No need for elaborate consultation, no need to let anyone else be aware of what is happening, the pill permits scared women to be manipulated into "discreet" child-killing.
The results? Horrific. Not just in the number of baby's lives lost, but the number of women's lives ruined. The director told me that just days before I arrived, their office had received a call from a panicked young woman in crisis. She had taken the abortion pill, and after experiencing severe abdominal pain, went to the bathroom. When she stood up from the toilet, she turned and saw a tiny human, her dead daughter, in the toilet water.
The teenage mother was astonished to see her daughter's features. She'd been told that all she was carrying at that point was a non-feeling clump of cells. But there, in her toilet, she saw the lie in all its horror. "Do I flush her? Or do I try to fish her out? And what do I do with her then if I get her out of the toilet?" These were the questions this horrified girl was asking the pregnancy center.
I asked the most logical question: "Why did she call you guys? Why didn't she contact the people who provided her the pill?" I knew the answer but wanted to know if I was correct. I was.
"Planned Parenthood will have nothing to do with them if complications arise. They tell them to go seek medical attention if they're having any problems," she said. That's the testimony I've heard more than a few times, both from pregnancy centers that deal with Planned Parenthood's wake of destruction, and from women who have experienced it themselves. One woman from my church who had an abortion several years ago told me the same thing: "I was a customer to them. They got my money and that was it."
That reality coupled with the dedicated love and concern I have seen firsthand from pregnancy centers around the country, make it unconscionable to hear media parrot the abortion lobby's claims that these centers only care about the baby. Nothing could be further from the truth, as this account from Pennsylvania demonstrates. Had it not been for a pair of Christian volunteers at this particular center, that poor young woman would have suffered through that traumatic bathroom scene alone.
Is it anecdotal? Of course. But consider it in light of the news Not the Bee just reported last week:
New Guttmacher Institute research from the Monthly Abortion Provision Study shows that there were approximately 642,700 medication abortions in the United States in 2023, accounting for 63% of all abortions in the formal health care system. This is an increase from 2020, when medication abortions accounted for 53% of all abortions.
642,700 babies were murdered by their own mothers, completely legally. Abortion pill sales are banned in a few states, but with out-of-state purchasing, there are no real blocks on abortion by pill.
The 642,700 number is provided by doctors … so there's no official count on "self-managed abortions." It could be much higher.
Realize that "much higher" number doesn't just mean more dead children.
It also means more traumatized, grieving mothers. It means more devastated families. It means more work for those of us who care for them all.
