By DEXTER DUGGAN
PHOENIX — As GOP presidential candidate Rick Santorum urged people to make a difference to save this nation, the leader of a pregnancy center here told an audience that the powerful Planned Parenthood videos from the Center for Medical Progress had an instant effect.
Speaking at the annual fund-raising dinner of Phoenix’s First Way Pregnancy Center, Santorum said that if people only make an effort that’s easy for them to help the United States survive, the result is, “No pain, no gain.”
Shortly before the former Pennsylvania senator spoke, Christine Accurso, executive director of the pregnancy center, told the packed dining room on October 2 that the CMP videos immediately made an impact, after they began to be released in mid-July
“These videos have instantaneous results,” Accurso said, unlike pro-life messages that can take years to trickle down through society.
July normally is a slow month for her pregnancy center, in midsummer Phoenix, she said, but this July 496 clients were served. In contrast, the figure for July 2014 was 320 clients.
The dinner with 700 people attending at the Sheraton Hotel in downtown Phoenix was “the biggest…we’ve ever had,” Accurso told The Wanderer. “I think the videos are motivating the pro-life movement.”
As another result of the videos, former Planned Parenthood clinic director Abby Johnson, now a pro-lifer, apologized to the audience through her own video shown on two large screens because she couldn’t join them in person.
She had wanted to be here, Johnson said, but because of her own experience with PP plus the CMP videos, she’s being kept busy speaking to public officials around the country.
A special guest brought up front to the dinner audience was recently born healthy baby Gabrielle, along with her parents. She was the 122nd baby in the nation to be born after her mother successfully went through the abortion-reversal process, Accurso said, even though Planned Parenthood told the mother that nothing could be done to stop the abortion-pill procedure she had begun.
Accurso began the evening by displaying a panel of flooring from the area’s Planned Parenthood headquarters that was torn down recently when its staff moved to a different office.
She wondered why a workman brought her this flooring, Accurso said, then turned it over to reveal to the audience that the bottom side has the famous image of Our Lady of Guadalupe on it.
“We don’t usually expect Our Lady of Guadalupe to be inside Planned Parenthood,” but this shows how close she is to us, Accurso said.
However the image got on the panel, it soon will be hanging in First Way’s chapel, she said.
The First Way Pregnancy Center opened its doors 43 years ago to provide free pro-life services to the community because Arizona women were going to adjacent California for abortions, which had a permissive law.
Only three months later, Accurso told the audience, the U.S. Supreme Court imposed its Roe v. Wade on the nation. This was more permissive than abortion law in California or anywhere else.
In his 38-minute talk, Santorum urged that pro-life pregnancy centers do more to get out the message they exist. When pregnant women have been abandoned by everyone else, he said, “Where are the billboards all over town to let people know someone loves them?”
The breakdown of the family unit has been going on longer than Roe v. Wade, Santorum said, with 40 percent of children in America born out of wedlock.
When he first went to Congress, Santorum said, he never intended to mention abortion, but a personal conversion experience changed his view, making him a leader in the eight-year fight to stop partial-birth abortion.
“I would say without question that America is in a moral crisis, to say the least,” he said, adding that if the nation continues this way, “millions and millions of children are going to grow up without their birthright of a mother and father.”
It’s justified to complain about the speaker of the U.S. House, or the Supreme Court, or the president, Santorum said, but people have to seize the moment themselves.
“We’re still arguably the freest country in the world,” he said, but when Barack Obama recently told Pope Francis in Washington, D.C., that this country upholds religious liberty, “it’s not true. . . .
“Do something. Stop accepting” being told that “you’re on the wrong side of history,” Santorum said.
“You think this country’s going to survive . . . if you give just what’s easy to give?. . . No pain, no gain,” Santorum said.
After his talk, The Wanderer asked Santorum if it seems unjust that he’s low in the presidential polls despite his fidelity to the issues, but someone like Donald Trump jumps into the race and soars to the lead.
Santorum indicated he doesn’t spend his time fretting. “God’s got this. . . . My job is to be faithful. I’m not worried,” he said.
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