Posted on 08/24/2019 11:15:05 PM PDT by Morgana
NEWPORT, Tenn. — Wendy Ramsey began her day as she often does, in the cool basement of Lincoln Avenue Baptist Church. It was a Thursday, and her first client was coming at noon. She flipped on the fluorescent lights.
Racks of infant, toddler and maternity clothes neatly lined the waiting area. Formula and baby food were on the shelf, free for anyone who came. A flier for a local domestic violence shelter was taped to the cinder-block wall, one of its tabs ripped off.
A whiteboard in her office listed her prayer requests: for her clients, for their salvation and for new babies.
“We are very open about what we do here — I guess more so, what we do not do here,” she said. “We are not a medical facility, we do not perform abortions and we do not refer for abortions. You can see the form right there.”
She pointed to the sign-in clipboard. The disclaimer was printed in bold and all caps.
Ms. Ramsey runs Options Pregnancy Help Center, a small evangelical Christian nonprofit that provides peer counseling, baby supplies and social services referrals to pregnant women and parents of young children.
The June morning was quiet, the opposite of the anti-abortion protests she used to attend. Protests alone, she had come to think, were “not how Jesus handled anything.” She remembered a Bible story of Jesus welcoming an outcast woman — people like the pregnant women and new mothers she now spends her days trying to help.
“If we want to be pro-life, we have to want more than legislation,” she said. “It just can’t begin and end there.”
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
kudos to NY Times for publishing...
I volunteer in a crisis pregnancy center as a dad coach, an this is an accurate representation (at least up to the pay wall). We take care of the women and men from moment of positive pregnancy test to the baby’s second birthday. We offer “ mommy money” and “daddy dollars” for classes taken, homework finished, and outside reading done. These credits can buy very high quality clothes and equipment.
I cannot abide the false claim that pro-life means pro-birth, insinuating that the women are forgotten after the baby is born. That.is.a.lie.
God bless you for caring enough to volunteer for such important work! :-)
God bless you, and thank you for helping. You are making a great difference. It seems that people are reproducing with few of the skills needed to raise the child.
NARAL Pro-Choice America calls pregnancy center activists “anti-choice extremists” who “lie to and mislead women to prevent them from considering abortion.” Planned Parenthood clinics, like one in Memphis, report that pregnancy center volunteers try to lure women away from their doors with gift bags or protest vigils. “All of that is directed at shaming patients who come for abortions, and stigmatizing abortion, which is a part of health care,” said Aimee Lewis, a vice president for Planned Parenthood of Tennessee and North Mississippi. “They are fake clinics.”
“The job is to not just say, ‘Hey, this is a real life inside of you, you need to save it.’ That’s not going to accomplish anything,” Ms. Ramsey, 31, said. “It is to get her to see that whatever she thinks is too big for her to handle, she can actually handle it.”
“I don’t ever look at a baby and think, ‘This is going to make this girl’s life way worse,’” she said. “When I see people that are living in poverty, I don’t look at it like, those people shouldn’t have a kid because they aren’t going to take care of it. I look at it as, ‘Those people aren’t in a good situation; how can we help them be in a better situation, with or without a kid?’”
She offers extra points for Baby Bucks if they go to church. “I can’t lie,” she said. “Ultimately, I just don’t think that there can be an abundant life without Jesus. If they say that’s manipulative and a secret tactic, then I will not apologize for it.” - c
Yeah, but you couold tell it was the Slimes: they couldn't resist slipping the occasional,non-sequitur, irrelevant, snark...
"A flier for a local domestic violence shelter was taped to the cinder-block wall, one of its tabs ripped off."
...indicating what, exactly -- that the center was sloppy in its housekeeping?
NEVER trust the NYSlimes to do an unbiased piece. It'll never happen!
“...one of its tabs ripped off ...”
It probably had a fringe of tabs at the bottom with the phone number on each. You tear one off so you can take the number with you. It’s kind of old-fashioned now that people can take pictures of the poster with their cell phone and capture the phone number.
~~~~~~~~
Thank you! I've never encountered one of those posters.
In that case, "removed" would have been a better descriptive and more emotionally neutral term than "ripped off".
My overall impression is that the inside of any evangelical Christian church was "strange and foreign territory" -- and a bit intimidating -- to the reporter...
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