By DEXTER DUGGAN
SAN FRANCISCO — Pro-lifers trying to save mothers and their unborn babies outside abortion clinics need to be approachable and personable, an official with one of the nation’s sidewalk outreach programs told a daylong student conference here.
If the pregnant woman “feels you are judging her, she will shut down on you” and not listen, Lauren Muzyka, executive director of Sidewalk Advocates for Life (sidewalkadvocates.org), told the West Coast national conference of Students for Life of America (SFLA) here on January 25.
About 420 students attended the conference the day after the Walk for Life West Coast marched through downtown San Francisco. Two days earlier, the conference registration desk told The Wanderer, about 2,300 students were at the companion SFLA East Coast conference following the larger national March for Life in Washington, D.C.
If someone shoved a sign in a pregnant woman’s face outside an abortion clinic or told her she’s going to Hell, that would push her right into Planned Parenthood’s arms, a video said during Muzyka’s remarks.
Mentioning one abortion protester who kept coming back to a clinic dressed as the Grim Reaper, Muzyka asked if a pregnant woman would pour her heart out to such an offensively costumed character.
Wear what’s approachable and be personable, asking women, “Where are you right now? What’s going on?” Hand out literature and offer help, not being timid but saying, “This is for you,” Muzyka said. Just a colorful, inviting item to read, not a sack of material, she added.
“We want to empower them” by starting with the mother then expanding the focus, she said: “Your child has a face and a name and is known and loved by God.”
Another conference speaker, Cheryl Sullenger, senior policy adviser to the activist Operation Rescue (operationrescue.org), said, “A well-filled out medical-board complaint form” is the most frightening document to an abortionist.
There may be good laws on the books, Sullenger said, but oversight agencies with jurisdiction may not be aware of what’s going on.
She told of an Oklahoma abortionist who recently was taken away in handcuffs, and a Michigan abortionist whose filthy office was shut down immediately by “appalled” investigators.
“We can end abortion, and we can do it by closing one abortion clinic at a time,” Sullenger said.
Former Texas Planned Parenthood clinic director Abby Johnson was at a table along two long corridors of pro-life groups’ materials and information at the SFLA San Francisco conference. With all this activity bustling around her, The Wanderer asked Johnson what she’d thought about large pro-life demonstrations when she worked for Planned Parenthood.
“I guess I knew that, but it wasn’t something I paid attention to. I didn’t know it was as big as it was. It wasn’t on our radar,” she replied. “. . . The abortion industry is focused more on what [it is] doing. . . .
“All these people coming together for the same cause” at large pro-life events “shows there is a lot more support for the pro-life cause than the media ever portrays,” she said.
Realizing the horror of abortion in 2009, Johnson walked away from her Planned Parenthood job and went on to found “And Then There Were None” (attwn.org) two years ago, a ministry to assist abortion workers to leave that industry.
Speaking at the conference earlier in the day, Johnson said that when she was in a clinic room where the aborted babies’ mangled bodies were reassembled, she saw that even the walls were spattered with blood. It’s not a clean procedure, she said.
The pro-life “movement is about conversion,” she told the conference, adding that if workers within abortion clinic walls are being converted, it’s certainly possible outside those walls, too.
International speaker Stephanie Gray said she asks questions of people when they take the pro-abortion side, to see what’s behind their thinking.
If they say abortion is a way to avoid suffering, she said, it’s worth remembering that people who inspire others had suffered instead of running away from problems. This is a truth that people naturally recognize.
“The truth is written on our hearts. That’s the advantage we as pro-lifers have,” Gray said.
Gray has an upcoming book, Love Unleashes Life: Abortion and the Art of Communicating Truth.
The book is described at stephaniegray.info as “a practical book designed to train readers how to have compelling and compassionate encounters when discussing abortion. Applying the tactics of asking questions and telling stories, it engages and equips readers to provide a strong intellectual case for the pro-life message, as well as to reach those who have wounded hearts.”
Another speaker said that on the sidewalk, “You don’t have to be an expert. You just have to be yourself. . . . The best alternative to abortion is another person.”
Turn The World Upside Down
Fr. Frank Pavone, national director of the New York-based Priests for Life, told the conference that in the current culture of death, the attitude is that “death sometimes is the answer to our problems. . . . In order to change that, you have to have something that jars the culture. . . . In order to start transforming culture, people are going to have to stand up.”
People need concrete examples, not abstractions, Pavone said, asking the audience why they marched through San Francisco the previous day. Did they march for “sanctity of life”? For “the right to life”? The best response, he said, is, “We’re standing up for specific children . . . who right now are in danger.”
He asked, what’s the last thing that promoters of abortion want to talk about? Abortion.
They want to talk about “rights” and “women’s health,” he said, not the actual facts including decapitation.
If you don’t want to change anything, Pavone said, “try not to upset anybody.”
However, the early Christians “were turning the world upside down. Not only are we rocking the boat, we’re turning the world upside down,” he said.
Pavone recalled that Terri Schiavo, a disabled Florida woman, intentionally was painfully starved and dehydrated to death almost ten full years ago, in March 2005. Pavone actually saw her in her room.
Although her prolonged death was being represented as compassionate, Pavone said he told news cameras, “She’s not dying peacefully in there. . . . I explained the horror in her eyes. . . . We stood up to an anti-life establishment. We spoke the truth. . . . You don’t do so with abstractions.”
Janet Morana, executive director of Priests for Life, said that abortion sends shockwaves through the whole family group instead of being a private matter.
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