Pro-Lifers Mobilize in the Metro Area

By Marie Elena Giossi

By the end of this year, nearly 85,000 boys and girls in the five boroughs will have been aborted by their mothers. Expectant Mother Care-EMC FrontLine Pregnancy Centers is stepping up its efforts to reverse this trend and save more metro area babies than ever before.

EMC recently set into motion a new defense in their crusade: mobile clinics providing free pregnancy tests, sonograms and bi-lingual crisis counseling to abortion-minded women outside local abortion mills. Mobile units began rolling in Queens last month and now EMC is gearing up for the national 40 Days for Life campaign.

John Brick Photo 

On the Frontlines: Expectant Mother Care-EMC FrontLine Pregnancy Centers recently launched three mobile clinics, which provide free pregnancy tests, sonograms and bi-lingual crisis counseling to abortion-minded women right outside metro area abortion mills.

Starting Sept. 26, pro-lifers will provide a continuous presence outside at least 13 major abortion mills, 12 in Queens and one in the South Bronx for 40 days, through Nov. 4. In Queens, peaceful protestors will pray, fast, distribute literature and counsel passersby on the streets of Flushing, Corona and Jackson Heights. At night, they’ll keep vigil outside at least one abortuary but hope to have a round-the-clock presence at more sites.

“You can’t be more on the front lines than sitting in front of the abortion facilities,” said Chris Slattery, founder and director of EMC, the oldest pregnancy resource for local women. Since opening in 1985, EMC has expanded to 15 metro area offices, including 12 in New York City, serving an estimated 4,000 women yearly, and three mobile units.

EMC’s team is on board for this effort and Slattery is devoting his ultrasound-equipped mobile clinics – a renovated, late-model motor home and two minibuses.

Now he’s recruiting high school and college students, white- and blue-collar workers, clergy, homemakers and retirees to be trained as counselors, serve as drivers, translators and outreach coordinators, or just to be witnesses, praying and fasting outside clinics.

“If we’re not out there, we’re part of the problem. We have to show we are outraged by abortion. We can’t do that from the pews alone,” said Slattery, who resides with his wife and four children in Yonkers.

This campaign is the biggest, outdoor, coordinated effort EMC has ever undertaken.

Since the 40 Days for Life campaign began in Texas in 2004, it’s spread nationwide. Groups in over 80 cities in 32 states are part of the 2007 effort.

Perhaps nowhere is this endeavor more urgent than New York State, where around 120,000 babies are aborted annually according to the State Department of Health’s Vital Statistics for 2003 and 2004, the two most recent years for which data are available. The Brooklyn Diocese was the city’s largest abortion market – accounting for over half of 85,585 medically induced abortions occurring in the city’s five boroughs during 2004. The majority took place in Brooklyn with 29,612, followed by Queens with 18,962.

And preborns aren’t getting help in Albany, where Governor Eliot Spitzer is trying to make abortions more accessible, even into the third-trimester. In April, he proposed a bill, called the “Reproductive Health and Privacy Protection Act,” which would update state abortion laws and give women a fundamental right to privacy in reproductive decisions.

“New York is the abortion capital of America,” noted Slattery, who recognizes that New York City’s many crisis pregnancies centers, which are among 2,300 nationwide, are “still being far outreached by the abortion facilities.” Locally, he believes Queens needs the most outreach “because there’s so much growth, so much diversity, so many immigrants and so much poverty.”

As for funding this effort, especially fuel costs, he’s doing what he’s always done, trusting in “God’s graces and provisions.”

Slattery’s faith has propelled his personal pro-life ministry over the past quarter decade and most recently enabled him to implement the mobile clinics, which he calls the “missing piece” in sidewalk counseling.

Known as Operation FrontLine, the vehicles are an extension of the services provided at EMC Centers, except they’re delivered to women at the doorsteps of abortuaries.

With Slattery in the driver’s seat, and an ultrasound technician and crisis counselor in the back, clinics began rolling in the Bronx in late February. Last month, they arrived in Queens, parking outside several abortion providers’ offices along Roosevelt Ave.

Mobile units roll every weekday, starting at 7:30 a.m., on a rotating schedule, with stops in the Bronx, Queens and New Jersey. The route is expected to include Brooklyn one day.

To spread the word, Slattery’s launched aerial, print and subway advertisements as well as broadcasted 30-second spots on MTV, BET and Brooklyn and Queens cable channels.

Julie Beyel, 31, is a trained counselor, fluent in English and Spanish, who’s volunteered with EMC for two-and-a-half years. She’s worked on the vans for the last seven months.

As of mid-August, she said, “We have had 130 girls come into the van (since February). Twenty have had abortions, 40 have had negative pregnancy tests and the rest (70) said they were keeping their babies.”

It all begins outside the clinics, where abortion-minded women, who range in age from teenagers to forty-somethings, are invited into the vans, away from the street noise. Inside, they can talk, receive a free ultrasound and think seriously about their decision.

Women are encouraged to choose motherhood or adoption with the assurance that they’ll receive pre- and post-natal assistance or referrals for themselves and their babies.

Counselors also offer free pregnancy tests, encourage abstinence and natural family planning, and educate women about sexually transmitted diseases.

About 15 women have ultrasounds on the vans each week. Between the vans and the EMC Centers, Slattery said, 12-15 women turnaround each day.

Beyel, a Christian, didn’t see the issue so clearly when she was growing up. She said, “I really didn’t know anything about why abortion was wrong. Friends had abortions in high school. I thought it was a normal part of life.”

Around age 24, she had a conversion of heart, precipitated by several events, and decided she wanted “to follow Jesus and devote my life to Him forever,” she said. In re-discovering Him, she came to understand the sanctity of life.

Beyel admits this is a difficult ministry “if you’re not prepared spiritually. I wake up early, read my Bible and pray. I’m thankful just to be used as an instrument,” she said.

Working on sidewalks, she says, is more challenging than being in the centers, which women enter on their own. On the street, she has to approach women, who may ignore, yell and even curse at her, and also contend with clinic workers.

“If we get them into the van, we’ve made great progress because they get to hear the truth. Even if they decide to go through with it, at least they know the truth,” Beyel said.

“God gives us all free will to decide,” Beyel added. “We give women the truth, we make them aware of what their doing and then we let them decide.”

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