JK: Keep in mind, I include in the activists, although they are not in a high of profile, and on purpose they are not as high of profile is the Crisis Pregnancy Centers because in the long run they save more babies. Even though I do believe in the rescues. Obviously I do, I do them all the time.
MJ: Well they work together hand in hand. In my first rescue we saved 6 babies, but if we had not had a CPC a block and a half away from the actual mill… In fact, all of them walked over there. Some of them couldn’t get in the mill because the door was blocked. If that CPC wasn’t there, I am not so sure that we would have saved 6 babies. However, I am of the opinion that CPCs in and of themselves will not stop the abortion holocaust.
JK: Well, I will tell you one little story and this is part of the reason that I have not abandoned the CPC work that I do. When I am in jail obviously the main thing I can do for pro-life is to pray and to write letters of encouragement to the people who have the CPCs and so forth. And when I am out of jail, I am usually planning the next rescue. There is a lot of heterogeneity of style in approach in running CPCs. A man I know who I have completely modeled myself after in terms of his style of operating CPCs is someone by the name of Bob Pearson. In fact, Kurt Young.. I think I have the name right, who is the director of the Christian Action Counsel… He went to Bob Pearson in 1979 or 80 after Bob had been running CPCs for about 11 years and asked him how you do this. This was about the time of the Koop/Schaffer series and the tour and all that stuff, and within 3 or 4 years on the Evangelical side, the Christian Action Counsel had sponsored like, 250 of these things. It was incredibly effective and it sweep through the Evangelical churches like it should have, and it did. To my understanding, most of those CPCs are still standing today. But anyway, suffice it to say, there is a much older stream of CPCs that came before Kurt Young and he’ll tell you that if you ask him. And that was operated by a man named Bob Pearson. It’s not quite as simple as all this but it’s not inaccurate at all to say that he walked into Honolulu in 1968 where there were 8 free standing abortion mills and no Pearson centers. In 1976, he walked out of Honolulu where there were 8 free standing Pearson centers and zero abortion mills. He did not throw a bomb obviously, he did not get arrested once, he did not do any rescues or kryptonite himself to anything like we love to do, he didn’t do any number of things. He quietly opened up these places… You know I heard the other day, someone told me that they opened up a CPC in a conservative area. It was in the plains somewhere or mid-west, and they had a big party there and a press conference, and a parade. And I went, “Well, I suppose I could imagine a town that is so conservative, that you could do that, there would be so much support. But then I said to myself, by the time you got a town that conservative you probably would not have that many abortions anyway.” You see what I saying? He opened it up in an aggressive situation. Honolulu is an extremely liberal town, and so is San Francisco.
JK: (cont’d) Let me give you an example on how not to open a CPCs. There is this attitude right? Someone else a very beautiful respected leader with a good heart went in to New York said, “I’m going to open up 20 CPCs” and they announced it in the press and everything. That night, the state government of New York in Albany held a session and made them all illegal overnight before they could open. They passed a law that said you cannot do an on-site pregnancy test without a Doctor. Which is effectively for us… since we can’t afford to hire Doctors to stand around and rubber stamp urine tests… shut is down. Now, thank God, I really believe that when the Lord was working in San Francisco, he would have us open these things right under the nose of the devil and do it without him knowing it. That is how we decided to operate, and that’s definitely how I would recommend it to someone because the greatest need is going to be in your most liberal place. That’s where you are going to have tons and tons of mills. So anyway, I said all that just to say that you can have an aggressive policy of running a CPC, you can have a name that does not reveal the fact that you are pro-life. I don’t care what you say, at this point in the game in 1988, if you open up a pregnancy counseling center and it says over the door, “Crisis Pregnancy Center,” you might as well say on there, “Save a baby for Jesus.” There is no difference anymore. There is a Bible verse that says, that the children of darkness are wiser than the children of men. These people have all these things figured out. They know what birthright means, they know what CPCs mean. But if you open a center and I don’t want to use any of the names we’ve used in practice now, but if you open a center and let’s say… Women’s Emergency Center or whatever. Just pick a name that’s true, and when they come to you, you be as shrewd as you can when talking to them without lying. Obviously the Lord doesn’t honor lying, but any good salesman knows the difference between lying and being aggressive. CPCs can cut into, the will not stop all abortions, that’s too your earlier point and I agree with you. They will not stop all abortions, you will have to have rescues stop to them. But I could easily say 50 to 70% of abortions could be stopped with CPCs alone. Keep in mind, when you stop an abortion, you have stopped abortion for that one woman. If you bring her into a CPC and take care of her and show her that baby she was going to kill, she becomes pro-life. She becomes a pro-life disciple. Then she tells other people.
MJ: On the other side of the token, one point Joe Scheidler has often made is that you may have some pro-lifers who get arrested once and rest in their laurels over that one arrest and one rescue. Where you may have a guy that might sidewalk counsel every Saturday and never get arrested, but he will take several women to the CPC and end up saving 25 to 50 babies. And of course over the long haul, which one was more effective?
JK: If I were purely into how many babies you could save, I wouldn’t do rescues. But, part of the reason I do rescues is that there is more involved in just how many babies I can save. There’s the bigger picture of trying to communicate to a large number of people and get a strong message across.
MJ: I guess the number one thing I see about doing rescues is… obviously it saves the baby and that is or primary purpose to begin with. But another thing it does is, you got to remember that the abortion industry is a multi-billion dollar industry. And if we are going to have any chance of stopping this big locomotive that is very heavy and very fast, is by hurting their pocket book and make it inconvenient for them to have an abortion facility and that is one of the things that I see the rescue movement doing. We are making it inconvenient for the abortionist to practice his death trade. Where the CPCs on the other hand doesn’t stop the abortionist… John Cavanaugh-O’Keefe pro-choice because they are giving the girls a choice too. He wasn’t being derogatory when he said that.
JK: I know, and that’s a much debated comment and we could talk all night about that. I would just say one thing and that is… every time a woman chooses to have her baby at a CPC that she would have otherwise had an abortion, we have taken 3 or 4 hundred dollars out of the pocket of the abortionist. Now when you talk about this termite approach and wearing them down, that has a value too. In the case of Honolulu, the reason those abortion mills shut down was because they had no market. In the end, it’s the market that you have to aim at. The young woman with $300 in her hands keeps the abortion industry going. Until you have changed her mind, or brought her back, you will still have an abortion. You can change her mind by making it illegal, and fat chance. If that happens, great. If it doesn’t, we still have our job. Bob Pearson says in his manual, there is no baby that wasn’t saved that it wasn’t a matter of sidewalk counseling. Ultimately, it all boils down to sidewalk counseling. CPC counseling is just good sidewalk counseling moved into an office. The reason I like CPCs is that you can take someone who is tender hearted… I am always aiming at the tender hearted person. Most of the people who are interested in pro-life are going to be tender hearted. Think about it, it just follows. And those people might not have the where with all to go out on a sidewalk. So, I can lead those people into a CPC where I pay the rent, and I pay the phones and I sit them down and I say this is your place. If a young woman wants to come in a take a pregnancy test, she’s my guest. You see, it’s on our turf or the Lord’s turf that we are operating. There are a lot more people who will operate in that situation than will go out on a sidewalk. But, when they are in there, they will learn about the sidewalk. They will learn about what abortion is all about talking to these girls and pretty soon they will be out on the side walk.
MJ: There is a CPC in Fort Worth where the Attorney General of Texas wants them to shut down.
JK: I know the whole story,
MJ: When I heard that story, my first thoughts were, well obviously they are doing something right.
JK: Chuck Pelletier is a living saint. He was a living saint before he opened the CPC… After he opened it up I think he was getting… Last time I talked to him he said he used to get 3 babies a day. That was the going rate before his restrictions. Now he’s under all these restrictions and gets one baby a day. I don’t know anyone with numbers like that. That man could shut down 3 mills without ever writing a letter, with 15 abortions a week. You could have a little tiny mom and pop abortion mill that runs off 15 abortions a week. That is the whole principle of CPCs. If you have a town like San Francisco that has 8 abortion mill within the city limits, then you better have 8 CPCs. This is why it bugs me so much when you talk about someone getting arrested and sitting back on their laurels, I know people who would open up a CPC and sit back on their laurels. Not only that, if somebody new comes into town and wants to open up a CPC, they will say, “Well, I don’t think there will be enough money.” Well the Lord’s got the money. The limiting factor I have always ran into was finding directors that will take it as a full time thing.
MJ: You know my wife worked at a CPC and she told me stories about the financial records and how they are just struggling to stay open and just fighting for every dime.
JK: Well, it has always been my philosophy with every director that I have ever worked with, I always tell them. Your job is not to raise money. Your job is to bring young women in your area across your threshold and tell them the good news. Tell them that they don’t have to kill their baby, they don’t have to continue in their life that is turned away from God. Tell them the good news. That’s your job and that’s all your job. Obviously, they need to recruit counselors and train them.
MJ: Whose job is it to raise the money?
JK: That’s God’s job. Our job is to do advertising and whatever it takes to get those women to come in across the threshold. And for every woman, that’s like money in the bank. If a woman comes across the threshold and I am taking care of her and her baby. She sends up a prayer to God that she needs help, how is He going to let my door shut if a keep doing that? I hate to say this, but most CPCs are paying $500 to $1,000 in rent a month, they have overhead. They have this and that, and they are just not aggressive enough about bringing people in. They don’t advertise enough. There are all sorts of places that you can advertise that won’t cost you a nickel. Like passing out flyers. I mean that cost something but not a fortune. They could go to public schools and pass out cards. They are not aggressive enough. They sit in their little office and the got their Yellow Page ad that runs over and over. Now they have restrictions on their Yellow Page ad so it’s not filed in the same place the abortionist file theirs. And they have a big disclaimer the Yellow Page ad that says, “we don’t do abortions.” Then they sit back and say oh woe is me because they are not getting enough money. We have to overcome these obstacles. The Lord has given us difficult jobs, but he has also given us infinite resources. I have had my first CPC out of four that had serious ongoing money problems. It’s not anything that can be fixed with trying to raise more money. Part of it is lack of interest in the area, but I think the ultimate thing is that Director needs to get more close to God and spend more time on their knees and just be more aggressive about bringing the women in. With low budget advertisement and hit the pavement. So anyway, that’s my little advertisement for running CPCs.
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