By DEXTER DUGGAN
SCOTTSDALE, Ariz. — If the Berlin Wall could fall overnight, the end of abortion could happen as suddenly, said a priest who pressured his girlfriend to abort their twin babies long before he discerned his religious vocation and entered the seminary.
Speaking at the annual fund-raising brunch of Phoenix’s First Way Pregnancy Center on November 9, Fr. Stephen Imbarrato said it was exactly 30 years earlier that the Communist wall came down in 1989, even though many people back then thought such a momentous event never could happen in their lifetimes.
Pointing to comments that President Trump made to a reporter just after the 2018 midterm elections, Imbarrato told the diners here that he could see such an unexpected end to abortion, too. Trump said he was working on a solution, but didn’t provide information about it. Imbarrato said he thinks he knows what it is.
In a talk that lasted exactly a half-hour at a resort here, the priest, candidly describing his own background, said that in 1976 he was responsible for the abortion of his two preborn children, Thomas and Mary, before his own conversion.
In an article posted at the Aleteia website on September 15, 2015, Imbarrato had written, “In the 1970s, long before I became a priest, I encouraged my girlfriend to have an abortion. Guilt followed almost immediately, as did the confession of our sin to a priest. Our healing came much more slowly and we eventually parted ways….
“‘You may ask, ‘How does a man guilty of such a sin become a priest?’ Well, it is because the Church is, as it should be and as Jesus is, merciful,” he added in the Aleteia article.
Ten years after the abortion, Imbarrato told the Scottsdale audience, he became a single father by adopting a baby son, who grew up and blessed Imbarrato with four grandchildren before committing suicide.
In 1999 he began pro-life sidewalk counseling, and was ordained a priest in 2005, Imbarrato said.
He has seen many emotional situations in his life, the priest said, and has been arrested four times for trying to save babies at abortion sites.
Imbarrato is founder and director of LifeMinistriesUS (lifeministriesus.org), which includes the “Protest Child Killing Movement” (protestchildkilling.com), and is active in the Red Rose Rescue movement. He also launched “On the Road for Life,” in which he drives around the country in a camper-trailer that has a chapel.
He told the Scottsdale audience that he stops at local pro-life pregnancy centers to encourage them because, in his opinion, no pro-life work is as important as pregnancy centers’ like First Way.
Near the top of the Protest Child Killing web page is a link to a brief article at The Hill political news site on November 7, 2018, headlined, “Trump says he has ‘solution’ to abortion debate.” This includes a Fox News video of Trump replying to a reporter.
Because Republicans lost their House majority in the midterm elections, the reporter at a news conference said there would be a divided Congress, so “how are you going to push forward with your pro-life agenda?”
“What am I gonna do? I won’t be able to explain that to you. Because it is an issue that is a very divisive, polarizing issue,” the president said. “But there is a solution, I think I have that solution. And nobody else does. We’re going to be, we’re going to be working on that.”
Trump then immediately pointed to a different reporter to ask a question.
Imbarrato told the Scottsdale audience that he thinks Trump will issue a presidential executive order early in his second term to recognize the personhood of the unborn, which could include nullification of the Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade, “which is not settled law.”
The High Court’s action is “an unconstitutional judicial decision” that “has created a constitutional crisis” and causes “daily mass murder of our preborn children,” the priest said.
“My friends, I believe this is a reality,” that Trump could issue such an order, he said, adding that there would continue to be a million crisis pregnancies a year, but there are five times as many pro-life pregnancy centers as Planned Parenthood facilities.
Talking with The Wanderer after the brunch, Imbarrato said that if Trump isn’t re-elected, “the pro-life movement has squandered the greatest opportunity” in 46 years.
If the president wins a second term, either he becomes “the new (Abraham) Lincoln” by issuing the proclamation for unborn babies, or he fails to do so and becomes responsible for the death of every such baby during his administration, Imbarrato told The Wanderer.
Spiritually Challenging
Katie Wing, executive director of the First Way Pregnancy Center, told the brunch that most of the center’s clients are between 18 and 24 years old, but many are younger than 18.
“We care about their personal struggles and listen to their stories,” Wing said, adding that working on these front lines “is emotionally and spiritually challenging.”
She told The Wanderer that about 220 people signed up to attend the brunch.
Thomas Olmsted, bishop of the Catholic Diocese of Phoenix, attending to offer prayer, said that First Way’s top priority “is to save lives and restore families,” but also to let the people who come to it see that God wants to live in them as His temple.
Citing the campaign against births by the elite, Olmsted related that a woman from Nigeria said the most powerful, wealthiest men in the world want to convince the poorest women to kill their own children.
“It’s true,” Olmsted added.
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