Latest Pro-Life News

In this episode, host Eva Cooley welcomes Chuck Donovan, a veteran pro-life advocate with over five decades of experience, including roles at the National Right to Life Committee, the Reagan administration, and as founder of the Charlotte Lozier Institute. Chuck shares his journey in the pro-life movement, his reaction to the Dobbs decision overturning Roe v. Wade, and a detailed history of Planned Parenthood.

From Margaret Sanger’s eugenics-driven origins to the organization’s modern political influence and controversies, Chuck unpacks Planned Parenthood’s evolution and its impact on society. Tune in for an insightful discussion on the past, present, and future of the pro-life cause.

Episode 17 is on the following platforms:

Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/exposed-abortion-in-america/id1769630555?i=1000700146443

Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/episode/4QFUXYYqKdxmHH57RH8yzg?si=6c0a893ae1c6489c

Transcript

0:00: So I’m here today with Chuck Donovan on our podcast, and Chuck, just as some background, served as a legislative director for the National Right to Life Committee, from 1978 to 1981.
0:14: Chuck worked as a senior writer for President Reagan until 1989.
0:19: He helped to lead the Family Research Council for nearly two decades.
0:24: He served as a senior fellow in religion and civil society at the Heritage Foundation.
0:29: And he’s the founder and was the president of the Charlotte Lozier Institute, the research and education arm of Susan B.
0:36: Anthony, Pro-Life America.
0:37: And Chuck, I’m just so delighted to have you here today to talk to us about the history of Planned Parenthood.
0:45: So I’d love if you could tell our listeners a little bit more about your history with the pro-life movement.
0:51: Well, even, it’s a pleasure to be aboard with you today.
0:55: The history of my involvement pro-life now goes more than half a century, so, yeah, your listener can understand how long I’ve been around at this.
1:06: I think I got involved in pro-life growing up.
1:09: I was blessed to be a part of a family of 9, 10 total brothers and sisters.
1:16: I didn’t always have an easy time of it economically or any other way, so.
1:20: , certainly saw what it was like to be around younger children all the time and to defend them, and I think my entire mission in pro-life has been to be in support of, moms in need, who are certainly numerous, but also babies in need, and they are dependent on us for their protection, for their sustenance, for love, and life just seemed to me very much a part of that.
1:47: When I entered college, it was 1970.
1:51: And as you know, within a couple of years we had Roe versus Wade.
1:55: I wanted to know how that came about because it is still the gravest injustice, at least one of the two or three in American history.
2:04: And while I was at Notre Dame, I got involved in establishing the student pro-life group there, and that just led to one thing after another, as we tried to find ways to mitigate and reverse Roe in the abortion culture.
2:18: That’s wonderful.
2:20: Now, since you have spent so much of your life fighting for the pro-life mission, I’m wondering, could you tell our listeners what your reaction was when you heard about the Dobbs decision, the overturning of Roe v.
2:33: Wade?
2:34: Well, as you know, we actually heard about what we thought the decision was going to be as a result of the leak from the court.
2:42: that in itself was, I think, devastating because the integrity of the process, matters as much as anything, you know, the, the great shock of Roe v.
2:52: Wade was the assertion, not only that babies weren’t protected from conception all the way through delivery, which is what Roe v.
3:01: Wade Wade implied and said.
3:04: It was that somehow this insight into our Constitution, which had been our governing document for nearly 200 years, somehow it had eluded the attention of Jefferson, of Madison, of Lincoln, Washington, FDR, you name it, every party, somehow all of them had failed to see that abortion on demand was mandated in the laws of all 50 states by our Constitution.
3:32: You you people talk about an insurrection that was a legal insurrection by Justice Blackman and the six others who signed with him.
3:42: So when I heard about Dobbs, I would say we celebrated because we were getting back to a just understanding of the Constitution, but at the same time, we were just beginning, as we are saying now, the battle to protect the lives of these babies.
3:58: the Constitution doesn’t do it automatically.
4:00: It falls to us.
4:03: That’s really helpful.
4:05: now, Chuck, I want to spend a good portion of our time today talking about the history of Planned Parenthood and the just the background of Planned Parenthood, and I know you wrote a book about this.
4:17: I was just wondering to start off this portion of the podcast, if you could tell us a little, a little bit about that book.
4:23: Well, yes, it’s called Blessed Art of the Baron, the Social Policy of Planned Parenthood.
4:29: you can still find it on Amazon.
4:31: I checked it, very recently, and it’s under $20 but, and it doesn’t come to me, so there’s no incentive there.
4:39: but it’s still out there.
4:41: We tried to write along with my colleague Bob Marshall, a Virginia assemblyman of note.
4:47: A book that would analyze where the social policies of Planned Parenthood came from.
4:53: It wasn’t just about the morality of contraception or abortion.
4:57: this was a social movement that embodied in Margaret Sanger, conceived and carried out the notion, that population and eugenics should rule our societies.
5:10: And therefore, taxpayers should be engaged in in supporting these things.
5:15: And then, in fact, these things were all collective decisions, and some of the brutality we’ve seen through their programs was there from the very beginning, but we wanted to tell that complete story from 1910 into the present, and that’s the aim of the book.
5:32: That’s wonderful.
5:33: Now, you mentioned Margaret Sanger.
5:35: Could you tell our listeners who she was and why she started Planned Parenthood?
5:41: Well, she is one of the towering figures, like it or not, of the 20th century.
5:47: she was a nurse.
5:48: She was born herself, actually quite like my own biography.
5:53: She had 10 brothers and sisters.
5:56: She was Irish.
5:57: Her mother was an immigrant from Ireland, and she had her mother, whose name was Anne Higgins, had, I believe, 11 children over the course of 18 years.
6:08: And tragically, she died young.
6:11: she died in her 50s from tuberculosis, and the family, some members of the family at least believed, probably reasonably that having so many children in such a short period of time under less than ideal health conditions that would have prevailed at the turn of the 20th century, had cost her years of life.
6:33: And some of, some of Sanger’s motivation did go to improving the health of women.
6:39: where she, things got very tricky for her was when she was looking for political allies, she tended to go to radicals.
6:47: Part of it was because contraception was illegal, in the period in which she came to her work in the second decade of the 20th century.
6:58: but part of it, I think, is because of her inclination and her worldview.
7:01: , she was not very fond of human beings generally.
7:07: Could you tell us more about Margaret Sanger’s views on family, children, and morality?
7:15: Yeah, she walked a balancing act in some ways.
7:18: When I, I went back and and did another review of some of her writing.
7:23: She had a book, multiple books she wrote.
7:26: She wrote books on sex education, on population eugenics.
7:31: she published something called the Birth Control Review, the masthead of which said no gods, no masters.
7:39: she liked to shake her fist at anyone in authority.
7:42: But she did time and again try to distinguish contraception from abortion.
7:49: I’ll just give you one quote, she says in her book, Birth control has always been practiced beginning with infanticide, which is abhorrent, she said, and then by abortion nearly as bad.
8:03: Contraception on the other hand, she said, is harmless.
8:07: So, there’s a really valid argument to be made that she didn’t live out this distinction between contraception and abortion, but for many decades, maybe for politics, maybe some extent for her belief, she did follow it, and, Planned Parenthood stayed away from abortion, but she was not able to maintain that, and I think it’s partly because, she had such a sour review, based on her idea of eugenics, that there were inferior groups, numbering in the millions, and these people with whom she called the feeble-minded morons, human weeds, these should be weeded out.
8:50: So far beyond being concerned about women’s health, she was very ideological in her politics.
8:57: Now with statements like callinging other human beings, human weeds, I feel like Margaret Sanger would have been canceled if she was around today.
9:06: So how was it that she was able to gain her influence back then?
9:12: That, that, that is a tremendous question.
9:14: I would say in part it took her quite, quite some time to do it.
9:18: she had many sympathetic allies, and she was, agile.
9:22: Early in her career, she was a radical socialist, she lived something, of bohemian lifestyle, at least among those folks in New York City.
9:32: , she was a colleague of the Workers of the World Party, and the Goldman, the Socialists, but eventually she migrated away from them, and it appears to me, if I were analyzing it, that she did, did so because of a desire for financing.
9:49: she had trouble getting money, she wanted government money.
9:53: In 1932, she proposed what she called a plan for peace.
9:57: Under which somewhere between 15 and 20 million Americans would have been confined to farms from which they could escape only if they agreed to be sterilized because of their inferior genetics.
10:10: there wasn’t much government money for that, during the, the 1930s, we had a slightly different attitude, during the depression, but she was very negative and eventually she made her way into a new marriage.
10:26: With an industrialist named Noah Slee.
10:29: She also had friends in the Gamble family, and I’m not implying any connection with Procter and Gamble today, but it was this kind of connection with very wealthy people, and they were more open to her ideas regarding eugenics and population control.
10:45: And I think if you look at Planned Parenthood today, those are the same motivations that have contributed to their obtaining millions and even billions of dollars to drive their program.
10:56: That’s why it’s not essentially a women’s health program, it’s population and international politics driving what they do.
11:06: Speaking of Planned Parenthood, would you be able to give us some key milestones in Planned Parenthood’s history, and feel free to take your time on this question.
11:16: Well, yeah, there’s certainly a lot of big ones.
11:19: 1916 was the opening of the first, clinic in the Brownsville section of, New York, where which where Sanger was based.
11:30: she published the birth control review, and that’s where you find very many of her most controversial publications.
11:38: she published some of the precursor, philosophers like Harry Laughlin.
11:43: , who were inspiration for the forcible sterilization laws, of that time period and also, in, in Germany during the 1930s, and, and Sanger was very sympathetic to that.
11:59: , she staged, world population conferences.
12:03: she had one that was a Neo-Malthusian, conference.
12:07: The Malthusian Conference was focused around the idea that overpopulation had to be dealt with by the most, stern and rigid means if you want to adapt one of her phrases.
12:19: So, she continued in the 1930s to expand overseas.
12:24: In the mid 1940s, they found they needed a change of name because the Birth Control League of America, or American Birth Control League, as they were first called, didn’t have an attractive name.
12:36: They wanted something that sounded a little pro parenthood at least, so they came up with Planned Parenthood.
12:43: In the 1940s, and by the way, it’s a very effective name.
12:47: We did a study at Lozier Institute that showed it has 96% name recognition, about twice what pregnancy centers do, and it has a bit of a positive ring to it, even though Planned Parenthood produces almost no parenting and parenthood, they don’t do parenting training, all that, you can certainly, debate, but it’s been their name ever since, and I don’t see them changing it.
13:13: , it has given them a little broader appeal, appeal.
13:18: probably the biggest transition that happened to the organization didn’t come through Sanger.
13:23: By the time she got into her sixties and older, let’s just say she was less active, and she began to cede control of the organization to a couple of different actors.
13:37: one of them was Mary Caldero, who was Planned Parenthood’s medical director beginning in 1953, and she had no hesitation at all to promote abortion.
13:48: she helped drive the organization in that direction academically.
13:52: And politically, she also had connections in the public health community outside her own field, and she was a bit of a revolutionary, later went on to found, become a medical director of the Sex Information and Education Council of the US, which is very much a free love organization, if you will.
14:14: The other person who helped drive it was Alan Guttmacher.
14:17: , the institute still bears his name, and, unlike Sanger, whose name is now being shunned by Planter centers, Guttmacher celebrated, he was a great performer and champion of abortion, and helped transform, both the Guttmacher Institute into an advocate and Planned Parenthood from the period when he was with them from 1962 to 1974.
14:45: Those are probably the big things until we get into all the federal funding, which has become the source of great controversy now.
14:53: Yeah, that’s really helpful.
14:55: Could you also tell our listeners about the historical relationship of Planned Parenthood with minority communities?
15:03: Yes, and this one has become, actually a very current story.
15:08: , when we wrote our book in 1991, and laid out the case that that Sanger was certainly, How should we put it?
15:19: We, we believe that she had racist tendencies and, and thought patterns.
15:25: there was no question, that in the placement of Planned Parenthood clinics, it’s true now as it was ever.
15:33: Those clinics are close to minority populations.
15:36: When you look at the publication literature of the International Planned Parenthood Federation these days, where do they emphasize they work?
15:44: Well, they emphasize they work in Africa.
15:48: In South America, they’re very comfortable with that kind of imagery and their clientele are overwhelmingly minorities.
15:57: a very careful biographer or singer named Angela Franks is not as sure about this categorization of her as being racist, but she does say she was an elite bigot.
16:09: Which is a phrase she uses to describe the fact that Sanger readily condemned anyone of lower intellectual quality as she saw it, anyone physical issues, the disabled person, the unemployed, she had a long, long list of names she flung at anyone she disliked.
16:29: And you would see that in Planned Parenthood’s clientele in their fundraising, and in the outcomes.
16:36: And it’s true in abortions today, for example, in the United States today, abortions among minorities are 2.5 times as common as among the majority population.
16:48: So Planned Parenthood, I do believe, targets minorities to the point where just within the last few years, in New York City, employees of both the Guttmacher Institute, in New York and DC and also up in New York City, objected to keeping her name.
17:07: And Planford is in fact dropped her name on their center in New York City.
17:12: They have suspended the Margaret Sanger Award, which has gone to such lights as Hillary Clinton.
17:20: they have acknowledged that she had definite racial issues, and when you look up anything online now, the liberal press has been begrudgingly, dragged into admitting that she was very problematic on these things.
17:35: Wow, now, how, how do you think Planned Parenthood’s messaging was able to be so persuasive in these types of communities?
17:45: Well, that’s interesting, I think.
17:47: I think they have promised and they still do a kind of freedom.
17:52: , They portray the image, yeah, I think in some elite circles that they’re simply for choice.
18:01: they don’t emphasize their still eugenic aims.
18:05: They don’t emphasize how much they intend or try to save governments.
18:10: they have moved toward, I would say, a softer version of feminism.
18:15: In the early 20th century, the feminism was radical in a sense, although the policies of the country were, did have issues with respect to the women’s vote and others’ issues.
18:28: but it was much harder knows now they’re softer about it.
18:31: That has helped the other thing though, I think is that they have unusual entree, to the most powerful sectors of society.
18:40: This was accomplished through emphasizing, national security themes.
18:46: Back in the 1950s and 1960s, they, on, on the question of moral issues, they made very little progress with leading Democrats, for example, until they took up national security issues, and you came to 19 1960s and 1970, when the Rockefeller Commission on Population Growth and the American Future came to be.
19:11: , these were largely Republicans.
19:14: we used to call them country club Republicans.
19:17: I don’t think we do that anymore, but, these Republicans were persuaded to invest large sums in Planned Parenthood in the belief that they were stemming overpopulation and contributing to peace in countries overseas.
19:33: And I think those kinds of concerns are what brought them, the kinds of funds they have today to the point where just last year for which we have data, Planned Parenthood took in $2.5 billion.
19:47: they, they have had a lot of help to get there.
19:50: Wow, that is a really staggering number.
19:54: and just to slightly switch gears here a little bit, I’d love to talk more about the policy and the influence of Planned Parenthood.
20:02: So Chuck, could you walk us through some of the ways in which Planned Parenthood was able to gain influence through their policy work?
20:10: And again on this question, feel free to take your time.
20:14: Yeah, that that’s an interesting question because we tend to think, or I tend to think, looking back, that Planned Parenthood has always made steady policy progress.
20:24: I think it’s more like that they’ve made it in fits and starts.
20:29: let’s take 1970.
20:31: Goodmarker was very much involved.
20:33: New York State was the target, as were several other states for liberalized abortion laws, and New York under Governor Rockefeller.
20:41: , passed a law allowing abortions essentially up to 20 weeks, which is, of course, more, more restrictive than what we have at the moment, but not very restrictive.
20:53: And Gumacher was shocked that they got something as liberal as that.
20:57: , but it was done with the support of Republican leaders at the time.
21:04: Planned Parenthood that same year opened their very first abortion clinic in Syracuse, New York.
21:11: they got into it fairly slowly at first, and part of their hesitation illustrated by the fact that in 1972, New York actually voted to repeal that liberal abortion law.
21:24: It was that repeal was vetoed by then Governor Nelson Rockefeller.
21:30: Who, later, later served as Gerald Ford’s vice president.
21:34: So abortion was preserved, but, would not have may not have been preserved for long if the Supreme Court hadn’t come along in 1973 in Roe v.
21:43: Wade and made abortion legal everywhere.
21:47: Planned Parenthood did not bring that litigation in Texas, but they did file an amicus brief in the case.
21:54: It was written by a woman named Harriet Pilpel who was there.
21:58: , most active, attorney representative.
22:02: She worked for both Planned Parenthood and the ACLU.
22:06: She also did the moot court, the, training of the attorneys before they did the oral argument in the case.
22:13: So Planned Parhood was very active in that case.
22:16: They had, been involved in the prior cases in the Supreme Court.
22:20: , one in particular that, legalized the distribution of contraception to minorities, not minorities, I’m sorry, minors, which had not previously been legal in the United States.
22:34: So they’re very strategic in their legal work, I would say very effective, didn’t really experience their first loss until thehide Amendment.
22:42: , in that case, in 1980 at Plan was very involved.
22:48: They wanted to secure government funding for abortion, and, came within one vote of doing it, 5 to 4, the court voted to uphold the Hyde Amendment.
22:59: And looking back, I don’t think we realized what a big victory it was, as the Lozier Institute has shown, at least 2.6 million babies have been saved, by that piece of legislation alone.
23:13: But Planned Parenthood was very shrewd about where they went into the courts.
23:16: As long as they had a favorable court, they persisted in that, that, that situation pertained really until the last few years, with the three additions to the court by President Trump.
23:30: We now have a court that’s basically gonna let the rest of us debate the issue.
23:34: And probably not tell us whether the unborn child has the right to life, or that there is an absolute right to abortion, but uhlan has been very smart in the courts.
23:45: That’s really interesting.
23:48: what do you think has been the most persuasive messaging that Planned Parenthood has used?
23:55: Well, probably the one that’s persisted the most, because I think it, it walks in the background.
24:01: It’s their catchphrase, every child wanted child.
24:05: And you know what, pro-lifers agree with that.
24:08: It’s just that we agree to want every child that exists.
24:12: , we have, an enduring non-discrimination principle.
24:19: your life is valuable, my life is valuable.
24:22: The child with Down syndrome, or another trisomy, has the same value.
24:28: , Planned Parenthood Note flips and focuses on the desire of the parents as somehow being determinative.
24:37: But in my view, if you raise children, you know, they, they have different capacities.
24:43: They have different talents, and different qualities, and if we begin to see them as having different value, then everything is a power struggle.
24:53: I don’t know if you sense in our culture, maybe cause I’ve been around in it for 60, 70 years now, I feel like we are in the midst of a very power oriented struggle.
25:05: That is trying to find some transcendent basis on which to value each life, equally, even as we sometimes have to address different problems.
25:18: and I would include immigration in that.
25:20: I think illegal immigration is a big problem.
25:22: I know it’s not, our issue today, but whatever we need to do to get a rule of law restored, we need to honor the value of every person affected by it.
25:35: Yeah, that’s a really beautiful answer.
25:39: why is it, Chuck, that you think that lawmakers, justices on the Supreme Court, men and women alike have fallen prey to this type of messaging?
25:51: Well, I think I think there’s a There’s a fair amount of soul searching people are beginning to do about all of that.
26:03: , it’s no accident, that for a significant period of time, most of our Judicial minds, have been graduates from a handful of universities.
26:16: , I, you know, I believe in the principal judiciary, in a judiciary of, of restraint.
26:25: But for, I think, decades, it became the preserve of elites in society that probably lost touch.
26:33: Yeah, in many respects, it became a question of whether the courts were a representative institution at, at a certain point.
26:44: I think that is going to take a while to change that as people look for ways to get their policy preferences enacted without persuading the vast majority of their neighbors.
26:56: on the Supreme Court, we changed the definition of marriage by one vote.
27:02: That definition of marriage had endured in civilization for millennia.
27:07: But one person on the Supreme Court can change it.
27:11: I, I think some people don’t have necessarily a proper all about the power that is vested in them, either as a judge or an elected official, maybe as a maybe as a bureaucrat.
27:24: There are certain things that were not meant to be entrusted to one or two people, so democracies matter.
27:31: if, if the court had stayed out of the abortion issue, I don’t know what the law would be now, but I know it’d be a lot more protective than what we have because the American people, even when they believe in choice, on many matters, they want that choice to be reasonable and humane.
27:48: , and they get there by debating and discussing with their neighbor, not by pounding their fist.
27:56: That’s great.
27:56: On that note, would you encourage our listeners in any other ways for opportunities for normal everyday pro-lifrs to speak up against the very damaging messaging of Planned Parenthood?
28:13: Well, I always believe and I think it’s attributed to Saint Francis.
28:19: I don’t know if it’s true, but, About preaching the gospel, but then if necessary use words.
28:28: I, I do believe the importance of good laws and good practice, but I also believe that 80% of what’s good in this life comes from example.
28:38: , the example of a good marriage of a sacrificing parent, of standing up for your siblings, of the person on the schoolyard who’s not gonna let someone be bullied.
28:54: those things are far more powerful.
28:55: One of the, adages I remember reading about the founding fathers is their despair if too many laws were needed.
29:04: Because they thought that most laws in order to be really effective, would be internalized.
29:10: one of them said that our Constitution was adequate only for virtuous people, which sounds redundant, but basically, we have a system of laws that doesn’t have a, a directive for every single thing one does.
29:27: some of our systems of government like China and Russia do have that.
29:31: And they’re relatively miserable.
29:34: But in the United States, I think we’ve seen the dissipation.
29:39: Of those virtues that make fewer laws possible or needed.
29:45: That’s a really great answer.
29:47: at this point, I want to transition us to talking a little bit more about the dangers and controversies of Planned Parenthood, and I’m wondering, have you spent any time studying the ways in which Planned Parenthood largely uses its funding?
30:01: , probably not as much detail, recently because of the press of other issues, but one of the things that’s pretty obvious is that Planned Parenthood is a hyper political organization.
30:16: , that’s not to say that medical groups, pharmaceutical companies, and others, don’t make expenditures on people for public office.
30:28: those are continuing concerns.
30:29: How do, how do you become a legislator and deal with the safety of things in our food supply and drug supply, while receiving tens of thousands of dollars for your campaign, from somebody who wants your attention?
30:43: , but Planned Parenthood was a, a modern forerunner of all of that.
30:49: they have an action fund.
30:50: , there are stories out there now that, one of their affiliates provided office space for a presidential campaign.
30:58: You can guess which one.
31:00: they spend a lot of money in politics, and they encourage a lot of people who give to them to also do the same.
31:08: very strange if you’re really a health organization that’s, doing legitimate work that that you really need, to have the kinds of doctrinaire political expenditures that they do.
31:20: , but that is something they picked up quite a bit in the 80s, when they faced some resistance and I, I, I, I, I don’t think it’s an asset to the, to our society, but keep in mind, Planned Parenthood is not really a healthcare organization, in my view, it’s a eugenic and population control organization.
31:43: There is a reason why 97% Of the women coming to them with pregnancy situations get abortions.
31:53: They don’t do infertility care.
31:55: They do next to no prenatal care, continues to slide.
31:59: adoptions have dropped dramatically.
32:02: Even their contraceptive and sterilization clients have dropped dramatically, but abortion has grown.
32:08: It’s nearly 400,000 per year.
32:11: And Eva, we tend to cite the number of abortions.
32:17: I tend to think, what about the number of spouses who are gone?
32:20: .
32:23: Wow.
32:23: Yeah.
32:23: Who did not live.
32:26: How many people did without a You know, a lifelong partner.
32:31: Because they were destroyed in the clinic.
32:34: How many children of those children, when we think about the devastation, yes, 60+ million lives have been taken.
32:42: I view that as 30 to 40 million families and generations that have been destroyed.
32:49: It’s unfathomable.
32:51: Wow, that really is unfathomable.
32:55: just with our concluding time, I have a few questions for you about the pro-life movement and the way that it has related to Planned Parenthood.
33:04: So could you just briefly describe the relationship between Planned Parenthood and the pro-life movement?
33:11: A very interesting question.
33:13: You know, I was on Capitol Hill, in the 1970s for National Right to Life Committee.
33:19: I saw, up close and personal how Planned Parenthood sought federal funding and support.
33:25: , I saw the pro-life movement originally, and something of a defensive posture, which, made sense at the time.
33:34: We sought to reverse Roe versus Wade by votes in the Congress in 1983.
33:39: I was working for President Reagan at the time.
33:43: he was enthusiastically in favor of doing that.
33:45: We were 10 years out from the that ruling, but we lost in the Congress.
33:51: And you know, I can tell you that for several years, the pro-life movement, I won’t say we were lost, but we didn’t know what next.
33:57: , the vote wasn’t all that close in Congress, it was like 50/50.
34:03: We needed 17 more votes for one type of bill, 10 more for the other.
34:09: We didn’t have it.
34:11: And a group of people in the pro-life movement around an organization called Christian Action Council, now called CARNET.
34:21: And Heartbeat International, said, well, we can’t wait on the, we can’t wait on the on the legislators and the politicians.
34:28: We have to go build a pro-life society.
34:32: And lo and behold, they did it.
34:35: small efforts at first, a pregnancy center here, a church basement there, but eventually they built the network that’s 3400 centers strong in the US, thousands more overseas, and, they’re not waiting.
34:50: And we have something of that now because we now have 50 states with different laws on abortion.
34:56: We have a chance to build model states.
35:00: States where abortions are limited or are prohibited, where pregnancy services are strong, where a culture of life, a culture of family is promoted, and that’s our challenge.
35:15: Can we make America a place where it’s obvious that if you value life and you want good family, good communities, you want to live in a Florida or Kentucky or Texas, and California and New York and New Jersey and not the places you wanna go.
35:35: that’s a substantial test for us, but I hope we’ll take it up.
35:40: That’s wonderful, yeah, and just one last question for you.
35:44: Can you just offer a word of encouragement to those who are active in the pro-life movement who might be discouraged at times by what they see in the media, by what they see with Planned Parenthood?
35:59: Well, I would encourage anyone.
36:02: Who was standing up for a cause as great as this one.
36:07: To realize that the true value of what we are doing.
36:10: , probably won’t be immediately visible every day to us.
36:17: I like quoting the Talmud, which says that he who saves a single life.
36:23: It is as if he has saved the world entire.
36:27: We don’t know how many lives we’ve saved.
36:29: I sit here after 52 years in pro-life.
36:33: I may be able to think of a couple of babies I helped get here, but what those children will do, what they will mean, the difference they will make in this world, to me only be revealed in the next life.
36:48: And yet to have given a life to this cause, not to seeking individual gain or prestige, it’s just, I, my satisfaction with that.
37:02: , paired with a wish that I could only done more, is immensely satisfying.
37:10: And I think pro-life should view itself as an opportunity to show love to the least of these.
37:17: And we can’t always guarantee that love will be accepted, but it must be shown.
37:23: Wow, that was a beautiful way to conclude this interview, Chuck, and we’re just so grateful for all of your efforts for the pro-life movement, and thank you for so eloquently laying all of this information out for our listeners, and I’m sure our listeners are going to leave feeling encouraged by what you have shared today.
37:44: So just thank you so much for taking the time to be with us and We wish you the Lord’s blessings in these upcoming years.
37:53: So thank you so much.
37:55: You’re welcome, Eva.
37:56: Thank you.