The fight is already at your door.
For a few, it’s already come through your shattered window. For others, it’s a barrage of negative, even vile, reviews on your website. For some the fight arrives via the mail being named in a lawsuit by the state’s highest law enforcement officer, the attorney general, for trying to help women change their minds about an abortion they no longer want. Still others are experiencing the fight in the form of so-called consumer protection actions calling the good work of pregnancy help “dangerous” for women.
Wherever your pregnancy help center (PHC) is you are maliciously and persistently being referred to as a “fake clinic” by a government-supported institution.
Pericles, an Athenian statesman, who lived around the time of Esther, Ezra, and Nehemiah, said, “Just because you do not take an interest in politics doesn't mean politics won't take an interest in you.” The increasingly polarized politics of our day is taking a keen interest in pregnancy help. Some of that interest is positive where Life State legislators are standing with you and for you orienting their state programming to help women have alternatives to abortion.
Pregnancy help has been made controversial
Pro-abortion politicians are taking cues from their Big Abortion friends. The most “progressive” Abortion States have already moved to allow every abortion throughout all nine months and are passing laws to protect every abortionist. They’ve leveraged marketing campaigns beyond their state not only to invite but to subsidize abortion tourism. After all, this is what is demanded by radical progressive ideology and also serves the avarice of their Big Abortion profiteers.
But Big Abortion profit still suffers at the hands of its most consistent competitor over the last half-century – the Pregnancy Help Movement.
As our friends at Charlotte Lozier Institute routinely report, U.S. PHCs reach more than a million women each year who might otherwise pursue abortion.
Let me be clear. It’s not that you may be speaking about something controversial, or that a particular practice or procedure in your PHC is clearly controversial. Your very mission to help women have alternatives to abortion is being deemed controversial. Even dangerous.
Just look at the campaign by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts against PHCs. Not to mention consumer alerts published by attorneys general in Arizona, California, Minnesota, and New Jersey. These go beyond the charge of fake clinics to describe your work as a potential health danger to women.
This is propaganda masquerading as politics. These are not politicians for the people, but political operatives serving Big Abortion.
Abortion is on every ballot
This election year is all about abortion. Even if the word doesn’t appear on the ballot in your state it is very much a part of what is being decided by the voters.
Big Abortion is spending big money to get more of its friends into office. This is to keep a stranglehold on Abortion State politics, but also to create beachheads in Life States. It is also to directly, or indirectly, keep advancing abortion through the executive branch.
Biden and Harris are, inarguably, the most strident pro-abortion administration in the history of the U.S. This is not especially surprising. However, what might be surprising to many of your supporters is how Vice President Harris has been both vocal and active in her opposition to PHCs in particular.
We all know that, then California Attorney General Harris was the original name in NIFLA v. Becerra. The California law attempted to force pro-life PHCs to refer for abortions. But too few know that Vice President Harris addressing the Democratic Attorneys General Association Conference said, "You are taking on, rightly, the crisis pregnancy centers; launching public education campaigns… to combat misinformation and disinformation, which often creates a situation that is ripe for predatory practices."
Did you catch that? You are the ones who need to be combatted.
What levers can an anti-PHC president pull to damage our work and favor abortion friends? Maybe it’s not just what levers, but how many? They’ve already tried to use every angle in the executive alphabet soup agencies to override abortion constraints in Life States. Surely they will spare no expense in waging political war against pregnancy help.
Passivity portends persecution
With abortion on every ballot, we fail to engage in this election at our peril.
Our movement was birthed out of those who gravitated away from protesting abortion politics in favor of a compassionate outreach providing loving life-affirming alternatives. Over the decades many in our movement felt the pressure externally and internally to avoid being overtly “political.” Some quickly hoisted the coveted 501c3 IRS designation as a shield against having to get involved in public pro-life activities.
And now politics – especially the progressive abortion agenda – is highly “interested in you.” Abortion politicians are not just engaging in politics for the right to abortion. They are now leveraging their political positions to directly attack pro-life activity. The most striking proof of this is seen in the weight of the Department of Justice against a sidewalk counselor and the egregious sentences against rescuers.
German Lutheran pastor Martin Niemöller’s poem warned us of remaining silent, “First they came.” Is it possible that pregnancy help work will soon be next?
After all, the State of Colorado is already attacking the licenses of those who prescribe Abortion Pill Reversal (APR) for a woman desiring to save her baby from an abortion she no longer consents to. As noted already, other states are promoting inflammatory misinformation about PHCs.
Standing by in the name of being apolitical will only help empower, and perhaps embolden, the politicians who are aligned against us.
Impacting politics without being “political”
Yes, we are 501c3 organizations and, as organizations, would risk our charitable status by directly supporting candidates for elective office.
There are many ways we can, and must, engage this election season (and every other until life is respected in law and cherished in our culture). We can, and must, exercise our voice in this season.
Each PHC has built a network of supporters who value pregnancy help because they recognize how vital the work is for the community and the culture. It’s possible that all of them are not pro-life. But all of them have demonstrated their support for life-affirming pregnancy help in helping women have a choice other than abortion.
Extolling a particular candidate will expose us to IRS scrutiny but also unsettle some supporters. Yet, extolling the importance of pregnancy help and identifying how abortion amendments and policies will only increase the need in the community gets to the very grassroots of the issue. Your supporters should be concerned for how this election could impact your community.
Just ask Minnesota and Pennsylvania where elections resulted in alternatives to abortion funding being slashed. Check in with Michigan and Ohio where abortion amendments are serving to undo every common-sense legislative protection for women and their babies.
Supporters must vote with more than just dollars
We can’t just welcome our donors' dollars without making them aware of the larger threat to the ministry they love and support. It will not do just to tell them another good client story when this election can deeply affect how well, and how many, clients we get to serve in the future.
PHCs can no longer stand apart from the larger pro-life battle. Supporters can’t continue to think that this is, or even can be a non-political ministry. Apolitical, maybe, if that phrase allows for lobbying about and for pregnancy help. But non-political posturing will surely keep us on the sidelines separate from our pro-life colleagues who are battling in the political realm.
They must know what we are facing. They must know what may happen if Big Abortion continues to prevail. They must know that “the only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.”
The very least thing they can do is to vote for our shared value for life. Of course, there is much more they can do politically to encourage others in their sphere. But the easiest of these is to exercise the stewardship of our citizenship in this country by voting for the greatest protections of life we can gain. No, no politician is perfect on this issue. Some, including those at the top of the ticket, are far from it. But some are farther from it than others. Much farther.
While voting is the least of the actions we can take among many, the greatest is prayer.
Prayer is our strongest weapon
We should always look to invite the God of the Universe into our fallen situations. With the issue of abortion, alone, we have turned against God’s authority and invited the culture of death.
That’s why we must remember God’s words from 2 Chronicles 7:14. “If my people who are called by my name humble themselves, and pray and seek my face and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven and will forgive their sin and heal their land.”
Yet, we are not without clarity on who we are and what we are called to. We remain mindful that the good work of pregnancy help has always been a work of the Gospel of Life inspired and anointed by the Holy Spirit.
No one election will undo that calling. Indeed, no political election can undo that calling. God will always champion His creation for His purpose and plan. Just like the Gospel is not just a work confined within the walls of any church, the Gospel of Life is not just what happens within the walls of the PHCs.
A spiritual mentor told me, “If you’re going to pray for potatoes, you should have a hoe in your hand.” In that way we must be like those in Nehemiah’s time who “did their work with one hand and held a weapon in the other” (Nehemiah 4:17).
We must properly position ourselves before God in this critical time. With pregnancy help in the crosshairs, we must appeal to heaven for His mercy. After all, He holds all of these ministries in His hands. Maybe that shattered window also brought a new financial partner, who generously covered the cost of the damage and more. Maybe the lawsuits by the attorneys general spread awareness of Abortion Pill Reversal and resulted in more lives being saved. Maybe the consumer protection alerts are setting the stage for better protections for pregnancy centers, tipping the hands of these state officials just enough to reveal their clearly unlawful viewpoint discrimination. That’s the power of a God whose ways are so much higher than ours (Isaiah 55:8-9).
While politics is increasing its interest in pregnancy help, the Lord has been keenly interested in this life-saving work all along. Let us pray that we may be effective allies in His good work.
Jor-El Godsey
President, Heartbeat International
