BOOK REVIEW: unPLANNED, The dramatic true story of a former Planned Parenthood leader’s eye-opening journey across the life line, by Abby Johnson

In 1984, a video entitled, The Silent Scream was published by a former abortionist and NARAL “Pro-Choice” America founder Dr, Bernard Nathanson and the National Right to Life Committee.  The video shows a first trimester abortion via ultrasound.  During the abortion process, the baby resisted the advancing cannula (suction apparatus) as his or her arms and legs and other body parts were being systematically dismembered.  The ultrasound video clearly showed the baby going through much pain and suffering during his or her’s very gruesome ordeal. (This video is on YouTube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Hb3DFELq4Y )

Now, fast forward about 25 years to September 26, 2009.  Abby Johnson was 29 years old, and the director of the Planned Parenthood abortion mill in Bryan, Texas where she had a front row seat to her own personal viewing of an abortion via ultrasound.  On that day, Abby had her defining “Silent Scream” moment and that became the start of her pro-life journey.  Abby’s book, unPlanned tells the entire story very well as she really gives the reader a very good view of Planned Parenthood from the inside.

Unlike The Silent Scream video, the abortion that Abby saw was classified as an ultrasound guided abortion which is not a common practice at a Planned Parenthood abortion mill.  An ultrasound guided abortion simply means, the abortionist is using the ultrasound technology as a tool to help him do the abortion by watching the ultrasound monitor as he is performing the abortion.  This helps the abortionist ensure that he has totally evacuated the entire baby from the uterus.  With the abortion procedure in The Silent Scream video, the abortionist was performing a conventional first trimester abortion that just happened to be recorded on ultrasound video.  The abortionist did not actually see the video of his handy-work until after the procedure had been done.  After the abortionist saw the torment that he put the baby through in his or her final seconds of life, he stopped performing abortions.  Also, the camera operator in The Silent Scream video was an outspoken pro-abortion feminist.  When she saw the same thing, she too changed her mind about abortion.

So, if the abortionist and the camera operator in The Silent Scream video, and Abby change their minds about abortion after viewing only one ultrasound procedure, what does that tell you about the abortionist who routinely performs unltrasound guided abortions and is able to routinely watch his victims struggle and fight for dear life as he murders them?  To top it off, the abortionist in Abby’s ultrasound viewing had a special code that he used to tell the nurse to turn on the vacuum machine.  He said, “beam me up Scotty.”  If this guy is not sick and sadistic, then I don’t know who would be.

There are many different ways one can arrive at being pro-life.  My journey started out much like Abby’s in that I too thought that abortion was okay in the first trimester, but once “it” becomes a fetus and is “viable” then abortion would be wrong.  However, I didn’t need to see an abortion procedure via ultrasound to become pro-life.  They had me at “life begins at conception” once it was explained to me in DNA terms.  For some, seeing some pictures of first trimester babies (aborted or intact) would be enough.  And for others, it would take an ultrasound or fiber optic viewing.  As for Abby, she required a lot more convincing because she had more invested in the abortion cause.  In her book, Abby tells how she bought into Planned Parenthood’s lies and deception.  In spite of seeing hundreds if not thousands of first trimester babies via ultrasound during the pre-abortion exam and the carnage of aborted babies afterward, that was not enough to convince Abby how wrong abortion was.  Abby actually believed that a first trimester baby did not feel any pain because that is what Planned Parenthood specifically instructed their employees to tell their vulnerable pre-abortive clients when they asked if that their babies will feel any pain.

Another lie of Planned Parenthood that Abby bought into was that it was their goal to “reduce” the number of abortions and make them “rare” by pushing birth control.  Any informed pro-lifer knows that this is one of the biggest jokes of all.  However, in Abby’s case, she had to learn the fallacy behind that lie for herself over time.  On March 24, 1989 when Abby was nine years old, I and eight other pro-life rescuers went into the Houston Planned Parenthood facility and held a sit-in/lock-in in the waiting room for more than two hours before we were arrested and hauled off to jail.  Since “reducing the number of abortions” was Planned Parenthood’s stated objective, we thought we would help them out because we too wanted to reduce the number of abortions.  Our unwelcomed visit seemed to work because we reduced their number of abortions by 54 that day.  However, the Planned Parenthood staff was not very receptive to our help.  Peter Durkin, who was the Executive Director of the South East Texas Planned Parenthood at the time called us “terrorists” and “thugs,” and Susan Nenney who was a spokesperson for Planned Parenthood, called us “reproductive terrorists.”

The type of pro-life activism that I just described took place during the rescue era, which went on a few years before Abby came on the scene in 2001.  As Abby described in her book, the most radical level of pro-life activism that she witnessed were picketers carrying signs and pictures of aborted babies and shouting.  Then, there was one guy in particular who wore a grim reaper costume.  After Abby became director of the Bryan Planned Parenthood she received three death threats and just four months before she left Planned Parenthood, late term abortionist George Tiller (aka Tiller the Baby Killer) was taken out by counter hit-man Scott Roeder.  In spite of the of the wide range of pro-life activism (both legal and illegal) that Abby was exposed to, she always managed to make the distinction between the pro-lifers who were doing the softer kind of protesting such and praying and sidewalk counseling, and those who were more vocal and dramatic.  I think Abby’s interaction with the soft protesters who were associated with The Coalition For Life is the most compelling part of her book.

The biggest take away that I got from Abby’s book unPlanned, was learning about the people with The Coalition For Life and how their gentle behavior affected her.  During my time of pro-life activism in the rescue era, our focus was on either persuading the pre-abortive mothers from going into the abortion mill by sidewalk counseling or picketing, or non-violently disabling the abortion mill by picketing and/or sit-ins.  The idea of trying to reach out to the abortionists, their staff or the volunteer escorts in love and win them over really did not figure in very much into our overall strategy.  We pretty much wrote all of them off as terminal due to the adversarial nature of our relationship with them.  We kept our focus on the babies first and then the mothers.  The Coalition For Life proved to me that their constant persistence of sidewalk counseling and prayer on a frequent basis over a long period of time does work.  Abby’s book reveals stories of how The Coalition For Life protesters always treated her with kindness.  On one occasion, one of them brought Abby some flowers with an attached note that read, “Abby we love you and are praying for you.”  As it turned out, she kept that note at her desk throughout her remaining years there at Planned Parenthood.  That act of kindness and others like that had a profound impact on Abby and helped set the stage for her upcoming defining moment of clarity.

Now here is the real kicker, when Abby finally reached her final breaking point and was ready break away from Planned Parenthood and make contact with the pro-life community, it was The Coalition For Life whom she reached out to for help.  Abby went into detail in her book as to how they compassionately embraced and accepted her.  The Coalition For Life was there for Abby when she needed them the most, not the hard core radicals.  As for me and the activists whom I was associated with during the rescue era, I have no doubt that we would have received Abby much the same way she was received by The Coalition For Life.  However, looking at this from Abby’s point of view, I don’t think she would have felt comfortable and safe coming to us for help as she did with The Coalition For Life because we viewed people like her as the enemy, not as a co-victim of the abortion industry who also needed to be saved.

Abby told her story of how she was recruited by Planned Parenthood and rose up through their ranks.  However, I don’t think that was the real tragedy for her.  The real tragedy was that no one from the pro-life side ever got to Abby before Planned Parenthood did.  I think if someone would have showed Abby The Silent Scream or Eclipse of Reason videos beforehand, she probably would have never joined Planned Parenthood.  In any case, I highly recommend that you buy a copy of Abby’s book and read it.  unPlanned is smooth read from cover to cover.  Abby is now a rising star in the pro-life movement and her efforts are worthy of our support.  She has added a whole new dimension to the pro-life movement by creating a program for reaching out to abortion mill workers.  This is another effective tool in stopping abortion because an abortionist can’t kill babies if he doesn’t have a support staff to assist him.  Abby also effective in helping post abortive mothers.  Abby is a tremendous lady and I am glad to see that she is now using her extraordinary gifts and talents for the Lord.

I also highly recommend that you support The Coalition For Life and their efforts, especially during their 40 Days For Life campaigns.  All the prayers from the 40 Days For Life campaigns was the main catalyst that helped save Abby from the abortion industry, and there are many more people like Abby Johnson who need to be saved.

A special word to my hard core pro-life activist brothers and sisters:

If you feel compelled to engage in the harder forms of abortion protests, such as preaching, chanting and using inflammatory signs and theater, I would respectfully ask that you keep that style of protesting away from any of the abortion mills where The Coalition For Life is present and especially during their 40 Days For Life campaigns.  This hard style of protesting is not what The Coalition For Life is about.  The softer type of protesting is more their style, especially if they have a mobile Crisis Pregnancy Center bus in from of the abortion mill.  The objective is to get as many women on that bus as possible and the more dramatic types of protesting does not help achieve that end.  I am not suggesting that the harder forms of protesting are wrong because I have been there and done that.  If you really feel strongly about using the harder forms of protesting, please do it at another mill and may God be with you as you do.

The July 19, 1986 San Francisco Sewer Pip Rescue By James C. Kopp on May 26, 1988

The famous sewer pipe rescue which I do not recommend to anyone because… well, we had actually planned a more sophisticated lock.  We were going to take two lengths of 8” diameter schedule 80, that means a half inch wall pipe which I got from a torn down refinery in Oakland, California.  Two lengths of them about 2’ a piece welded side by side and we were going make locks in there somehow for our feet to spring into and they couldn’t come out and that was going to be our big rescue.  Well, I couldn’t get the pipes to weld together.  We tried to weld them together with oxy/acetylene which was another big mistake, it’s the last thing I would have thought of based on what I know now. 

We tried and tried and tried for two or three days to weld these suckers together and we couldn’t.  So I was standing in the junk yard the night before the rescue, a lot of things were set in place, sidewalk counselors, picketers, all sorts of things.  Being as frustrated as I was, I was determined to make my last attempt for this foot to foot shackle out of two lengths of pipe.  This time it was going to be some schedule 40, 8” diameter sewer pipe.  I mean this was the last desperate attempt, and I got a scrap of it that was about 5 or 6 foot long.  It was terrible, both ends had been cut with a torch, it had a piece steel welded to the side of it that looked like I don’t know what, but it was a rough jagged looking piece of steel.  I shudder to think what I did.  However, things could have come out much worse.

Anyway so, I left my house trying to cut it but I couldn’t cut the thing.  I was inept at using gas torches.  I couldn’t even cut schedule 40 pipe.  This is pathetic, right?  So then I sat there and thought, what can I do with this pipe.  Even the way that it was, could I use it in a rescue.  So I decided to use an old Boy Scout knot called the taut-line hitch.  We had two lengths of rope coming in and we had bowlines around each person’s ankles so it wouldn’t tighten up and hurt your ankle.  We had the lines passing by each other then we would tie the taut-line hitch up by your hip let’s say.  This is with you sticking your foot in the pipe and the other guy sticking his foot in on the other side.  Then you thread the piece of rope through there, I don’t want to give too many details, because I don’t want anyone to do this because it was just a mistake.  Suffice it to say, we tied ourselves into this piece of pipe inside the mill, and in the end because we only had one taut-line hitch, it was in a half inch hemp rope.

Brian Hockel was my pipe mate for this rescue and his other leg that wasn’t in the pipe was attached to three other peoples ankles using a large kryptonite lock.  This also includes by the way, Nick Brough, who is a small guy and was known for being the guy who went flying in Denver.  This big black cop picked him up and just threw him across the sidewalk and he hit the concrete and crawled back to his spot, he was a tough little guy.  Nick was one of these mild mannered computer programmers who comes alive when he sees a picket line.  God bless him, he’s a great guy.

So Nick and a couple of other guys had their feet stuffed into this big kryptonite lock.  The SFFD tried to use the jaws of life to try to snap the krypto and that didn’t work because the krypto chipped the blades.  And to add insult to injury, the gas fumes from the unit that powered the jaws of life, which was like a lawn mower engine filled the abortion mill and set off the smoke alarms.  It was so funny because, just imagine someone watching from the sidewalk.  One minute the police go in and after a while the firemen and then the alarm goes off and the building has to be evacuated.  That means mill workers and abortionists, and not only that, it was a basement building which only had two doors.  So it took another couple of hours to ventilate the place.

Once the SFFD realized the jaws of life wasn’t an option, they just took their shoes and socks off and greased up their feet and pulled them out.  The only time I have ever been able to guarantee that two ankles would be able to stay in a kryptonite lock is if they are stuck into a mini lock.  The 3 x 6 kryptonite lock and provided that they are average sized ankles.  I have seen two women stick their legs inside a mini lock and they were still able to get their feet out.

They got the other guys detached, so at this point they had me and Brian and this pipe.  While the SFFD was pondering how they were going to get Brian and me out of the pipe, I had the privilege of overhearing a conversation between the Chief of Police and the Fire Chief.  Me, Brian and the pipe added up to about 450 lbs.  At that point the one of the younger firemen suggested that they could get us out of here by putting the pipe on a furniture dolly and putting me and Brian on some stretchers and just wheel and carry us out.  Then the mill could resume their operations.

The abortion mill people were saying, “we don’t care if these people ever get detached, we just want them out of here.”  That’s what they told the Police.  Then the police turned to the Fire Chief and said, “carry them out.”  But, do you know what the Fire Chief said?  The Fire Chief said that the minute these people are out of this room, we can no longer justify the use of emergency equipment to detach them.  “Why?” said the Police Chief.  The Fire Chief said, “as it is now we are stretching our authority to use this equipment when there is no one in any immediate danger of death or injury.”

The Fire Department typically uses these tools when someone is in a car wreck on the freeway, and maybe bleeding and there is gas all over the ground or whatever.  They usually need to do this in a hurry because the person might die.  That’s what those tools were designed for.  When the taxpayers paid for these extremely expensive tools, they paid for them for that reason.  And they brought in the jaws of life and we all know when happen there, they chipped it on the kryptonite and those blades cost $700.  That was $700 of tax payer’s money because the jaws of life gets chipped on the kryptonite.  Then the Police Chief says, “if we bring them down to the station as they are, would you then bring your rescue equipment down there and cut them loose?”  And the Fire Chief said, “No, once you take them down to the station, then they are your problem.”  So, the Fire Department of San Francisco was forced to do whatever they could with me and Brian right there in that mill by virtue of the fact that we were connected.

This is the beauty of krypto and the beauty of importing your own implements.  Because even if they could lift you, they don’t want to in that circumstance.  Now that might not be true in every city, but things like that happen in all sorts of cities.  We are getting to the point where we are reaching the limit of what these guys can deal with.  Finally, they got three Fireman on each of us and they yanked real hard and they made the taut-line hitch fail.  It hurt, because we didn’t pad our feet.  I didn’t want our feet padded for circulation reasons because if it is down there in the middle of that pipe and I am thinking about staying for six hours and I didn’t want some pad like an ace bandage or anything.  If we had two taut-line hitches it probably would have held and they would have been forced to cut the pipe which is the next thing they were going to do.

It’s entirely possible that mill was shut down for the whole day.  I do know that by the time they got us out of there, we were in the pipe for one hour and five minutes before they realized that they could pull on us and get us out.  I didn’t even know that they could pull on us and get us out.  I didn’t know that a taut-line hitch could fail if you really put enough pressure on a single taut-line hitch.  If you put two or three in there, who knows, maybe it would have worked.  But the next thing they would have done was to take the steel saw, which is a chain saw fitted with a 12” abrasive wheel directly on to the drive, no reduction and slice a window into the pipe so they could see what was in there.  Once they would discover that it’s just a rope, they could have reached in there and cut it.

The other end of this story is that I got put on trial for assault with a deadly weapon, because I was carrying this thing in and they said that I was using it as a battering ram.  Fortunately, their witnesses contradicted themselves.  Plus, the month long trial was so ridicules, I could have gotten it thrown out on appeal with no problem because they really messed up.

Keep in mind that the Police are required to make a clean arrests.  However, we speak in terms of clean rescues.  That means, rescues without an assault wrap.  But they speak in terms of clean arrests.  That means, an arrest without defect, which means they have to arrest someone whom they believe unquestionably is committing a crime.  If they ask us if we are going to leave and we are locked in, that is potentially defective because we can say, “Well gee officer, I don’t know how I got here.  But I would love to leave but my feet are all tied in.”  If you were working on a technical defense, you could do that kind of stuff.

In fact, not only did they charge me with assault with a deadly weapon and simple assault, they charged me with trespassing under a certain code.  A certain sub-set of trespassing called squatting because we had been sitting in that abortion mill for a hour and they figured that they would get clever.  They said, “this isn’t just trespassing, this is squatting, we want to get Mr. Kopp on squatting.”

I had a great lawyer, from the public defender’s office, a beautiful Christian lady who helped me out and toward the end she was fuming about abortion.  She just started to think about it.  You know most people know what abortion is, but you never draw their attention to it long enough to where they dwell on it.  And because this was an abortion related case, she started to see what was going on in that mill and toward the end of the trial, she was just spitting blood.  She was subpoenaing the abortionist to be on the stand and all sorts of things that an aggressive pro-life lawyer would do.  And she was on the payroll of the City of San Francisco as a public defender.

As for the jury, it was the one Roman Catholic lady who voted for conviction.  The homosexuals were the ones who voted to have me acquitted, and that is why I am not in jail today.  Anyway, the Roman Catholic, “Pro-Life” lady came up to me after the trial and said, “Mr. Kopp, no more pipes.”

When the whole thing was over, not only did the Lord prevail in the courtroom and got all the assault charges dismissed… thank God that he worked through the homosexuals… but as it turned out, you can’t charge someone with squatting trespass unless they fulfill certain elements and one of those elements is that you have to sit in one place for more than 24 hours.  So, all those charges were dropped.  I didn’t even pull time.  I didn’t even have an arrest on my record after that one.

BOOK REVIEW: ABANDONED, The Untold Stories of the Abortion Wars, by Monica Migliorino Miller, Ph.D.

Having been a pro-life activist from 1984 to 1992, I have a very keen interest in collecting books that cover the History of pro-life activism or what is being more commonly referred to by pro-life and pro-abortion authors as the “abortion wars.”  As informative as most of these books that I have are, there is one feature that Abandoned has that these other books don’t.  Abandoned was written by a fellow pro-life activist and I find that to by very appealing.  The author and I share a common bond.  We both have had the experience of being arrested at an abortion mill and seeing the inside of a jail cell.  So for me, the fact that Dr. Miller was an actual pro-life activist gives her book a higher level of credibility than the other books that were written by the non activist authors.

Abandoned is essentially Dr. Miller’s memoirs covering part of her distinguished career as a pro-life activist from 1976 to 1994, primarily in the Chicago/Milwaukee area during that time.  Her post graduate education and background as a college professor is quite evident in the way she compiled her research and arranged her material.  But even beyond that, Dr. Miller can just FLAT OUT WRITE!  Her syntax and writing style is superb.  Not only did Dr. Miller accurately give an account of the events she was involved in, but she wrote her book in such a way that holds her readers’ attention as they glide through the pages.

Abandoned reads like a Tom Clancy novel, as Dr. Miller so brilliantly captured the drama of the events that she wrote about.  Whether it was her interaction with the women that she sidewalk counseled, the police, the judges and lawyers, her jail mates, or her pro-life comrades while retrieving dead babies at the abortion mill dumpsters or planning rescues, Dr. Miller was very thorough in illustrating the demeanor and attitudes of the various characters she engaged.  She has a way of drawing in her readers and making them feel as if they we right there as it happened.  Dr. Miller has done some acting and she has a Bachelors degree in Theatre.  I am guessing that her background in the arts might be one of the reasons she can illustrate drama so well with her words.  I think Dr. Miller would probably be successful if she were to cross over and write in the fiction genres such as novels.

The parts of Abandoned that I found especially interesting were the accounts of the rescues (sit-ins at abortion mills).  Here are some of them:

·         The first rescue in Chicago at the Concord “Medical” Services on March 11, 1978;

·         The first rescue in Milwaukee at the Bread and Roses abortion mill on March 8, 1986.

·         The Interstate Bank Building rescue in Milwaukee on June 8, 1989;

·         The Wendy’s overpass rescue on April 25, 1991;

·         The driveway rescue at abortionist, Neville Sender’s house on June 21, 1993.

As the one who invented the lock and block system for rescues, I especially found the lock-in rescues that Dr. Miller wrote about quite interesting.  Even though the Milwaukee rescuers didn’t use blocks per se as we did in the Houston rescues, they did devise their own unique techniques and apparatuses that achieved the same effect that a block would have.  Such as rescuers using kryptonite bike locks and locking themselves to junk cars or to each other inside a junk car.  Then there was a rescuer that attached himself to barrel filled with cement with a PVC pipe.  It just goes to show that there is more than one way to lock yourself to an object in order to slow down the arrest process.

As I read about Dr. Miller’s experiences during the rescues she was in and her time in jail, I found myself recalling similar experiences during my time as an activist.  As of the time I began to read Abandoned, I was already in the process of writing my own book that will chronicle my History as a pro-life activist.  Also, I spoke with two other pro-life activists who are planning to do the same.  After reading Abandoned, I am inspired more than ever to finish my book.  Suffice it to say Dr. Miller has set the bar very high for all the other pro-life activists who want follow in her path.

May 26, 1988 James C. Kopp Interview, Part 3 (Jim Shares His Philosophy On Crisis Pregnancy Centers)

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.

May 26, 1988 James C. Kopp Interview, Part 2

MJ: We are in a holocaust in our country and that has escalated to over 20 million, maybe 21 or 22.

JK: Right.

MJ: And it’s been going on for fifteen years.  What do you think it’s going to take to stop the holocaust here in America?  And number two, do you think it can be stopped?

JK: I will tell you something that is my private opinion.  It’s not something that I can prove to you.  When I say that I don’t mean that it can be publicized, I just mean that there is no proof that I can offer for it.  I am not pointing to any particular Bible verse or anything.  But, if you look at the tradition of the major prophets and look at the times they were in.  Over and over they are describing that judges can be bought.  Jerusalem goes whoring under any tree or hill top with any god that she feels that she wants to.  You just look at the picture that was painted of Jerusalem when the Lord sent major prophets.  Then you look at the time now, and to that extent I would say that there is a connection with Scripture in terms of just looking around the world right now and trying to piece it together.  I personally feel that.. and I don’t want to discourage anyone when I say this, but the basic picture of abortion will not stop in the absence of a catastrophe.  Now, there are all sorts of catastrophes that could happen.  If the Lord were to come again, obviously that would be a catastrophe in the eyes of unbelievers.  If AIDS were to pass the epidemic threshold which is 6% of the total population, it would start moving up toward 51% which is what you would call pandemic, if became a much higher thing and started cutting much deeper into the hetero population, that’s an example of a catastrophe.  Or a nuclear war, or a communist takeover, these sorts of things.  The absolute worst thing that could happen for this whole planet is for everything to go along with the status quo, because then the judgment that God hold in reserve is even greater.  Hitler and his people did not stop doing what they were doing because they had moral qualms about it.  They stopped doing what they were doing because we forced them to.  You know this whole thing about pro-choice now?  That’s bologna.  They are murdering people, there is no choice.  They evolved in that and it’s the same with Mr. Hitler.  Hitler did not stop doing what he was doing because he chose to, and the fact that he had to be forced to stop was that the western civilization slipped back morally.  If Germany could have come to the conclusion that it was morally wrong and stopped for that reason I don’t think we would have had abortion.  So this is really just a continuation of the German situation. 

JK: (cont’d) But, in terms of whether it can be stopped or not, the other side of this whole thing, is because we are pro-life workers, each of us has the tremendous pleasure of knowing at least one woman who had a baby as the result of the efforts that the Lord brought to pass through us.  This is a tremendous privilege.  I would say most of the pro-lifers in the entire country have never had that privilege even though there work accounts for very much.  But, still in a way we know people, we have the faces of the women in our minds right now and the faces of their babies stored away, that we know that we if hadn’t gotten out of bed that morning and overcome all the fear and so forth, humanly speaking… as Dr. Schaffer would always say… “humanly speaking” those babies would have died and the souls of those mothers would have been on the path to hell.  And for that matter I’ll tell one even worse, our own souls, who know where we would have been with the Lord, if he had really been tapping at our heart.  I am not saying that, that is what you have to do to save yourself, I’m just saying Jesus wants us to walk with him.  But anyway, what I was going to get at… I ramble too much, (laughs)

MJ: That’s okay.

JK: What I was going to get at was this, as far as those women are concerned, abortion did come to an end.  You see what I’m saying?  As Mother Teresa says over and over and over…  all these atheist reporters come up to her and ask, “Mother, why are you working in the black hole of Calcutta?”  There is however many tens of thousands of people dying in the streets and you pick up your 500 a day, imagine, I don’t know what the number is, but imagine picking up a 100 dying people in a day and taking good care of them, I mean good care of them.  And even more than that…  I mean even an atheist could even do that if they had enough money.  Right?  Giving them enough emotional support so they can die with dignity which is part of what Mother Ts ministry is all about.  Just imagine how much effort that is.  But anyway, so the atheists come and they say, “well mother you come and pick up these 100 or 200 bums of the streets and half of they die anyway.  And the other half, after you patch them up, they are going back out on the street and they are going to die next week.”  She always has her standard answer that she gives.  She says, “it’s a drop in the ocean, but without that drop, the ocean would be one drop less.”  I have said this to myself many many times while I am sitting in a jail cell, or sitting in a court room.  We have got our one or two babies and as far as the Lord was concerned, he probably would have been prepared to ground the whole universe to a halt just to make sure we got our lazy tails out of bed that morning when we were having second thoughts.  You know what I mean, that feeling before you do a rescue.  You know, and He said, “Jim, the whole universe has been ground to a halt so you can take another 5 minutes sitting there in bed overcoming your fears.  Get down there!  That’s how important that baby is to me.”  And there’s a bigger picture and because of the television and everything, we are used to seeing TV pictures of everything that is evil in the whole world in 30 minutes on headline news, but that’s not our problem.  I hate to say it, but in the bigger picture I suppose it’s our problem.

JK: (cont’d) The Germans had this expression of Weltschmerz, “you want to have this pain for the whole world.”  Well, I do have a pain for the whole world, I wished I could preach the Gospel to every human being.  But I also know that Jesus cannot call me to do that.  Not if he wants to keep me in the flesh doing this and having this amount of energy and needing so sleep and so much to eat and so forth.  There are limitations.  I can think of a lot of Pro-Lifers that I have met that have burned out because they wouldn’t take care of themselves and wouldn’t set limitations for themselves, or would not allow the Lord to set limitations on themselves.  Had they done that, we would have a lot more manpower, we would have two or three times the amount of manpower in the rescue movement alone.  And in the CPC movement, I would say that we would easily have two or three times the manpower there.  If the people had just paced themselves.  This is probably an aside, but there has been many times during my pro-life career where I have taken a whole day off and I didn’t answer to anyone for it on this planet.  There are times when I took two weeks off.  Just before New York I was in a hidden location where nobody knew where I was except for one priest.  Finally toward the end I finally broke down and called Randall Terry, I didn’t want to tell him where I was.  But for two weeks, I walked up and down the beach, because I knew the upcoming Operation Rescue event in New York was going to be a heart attack.  It was going to be a panic and there were going to be people up in my face asking me to do things all week long and that’s exactly what happened.  And as it was, I barely made it through the week.  Having had the resources of two weeks of silence and prayer to build up.

MJ: It’s a marathon race.  A lot of people don’t realize, especially pro-lifers is the abortion is only one front.  Abortion just happens to be the watershed point, it happens to be the tip of the iceberg.  Even if we do stop abortion which I really think we can.  I think it is a very realistic goal, but even if we do stop abortion, there is still a lot of work to be done and a lot of other fronts and we definitely just can’t kick back.  If you really want to evaluate how well your movement is doing, sometimes its good to listen to what your enemies are saying about you.  Because they have a different perspective and can sometimes tell it best.  This is something that Kate Mitchelman who is the Executive Director of the National Abortion Rights Action League said.  This is her quotes: “Up until now the anti-choice groups have been chipping away at the right to abortion with a chisel.  But now they picked up a sledgehammer and they are trying to crush the whole thing.  They obviously feel that it is within their reach to overturn Roe V. Wade and make abortion illegal again.  And the frightening thing is that I am not sure they are wrong.”

JK:  Hum…  it’s great.

MJ: That is heavy when we got the abortion industry shaking in their boots.  I mean they are scared, we have got them scared Jim.  Now that the iron is hot, if we could just mobilize the masses to do it.  What do you think it’s going to take to stop abortion?

JK: Well that’s what I was saying, it would take a catastrophe which would force people to remember God.  In this country we have obviously forgotten about God.

MJ: Do you think a series of rescues would be enough of a catastrophe?  If the rescue movement were to gain more momentum and numbers within the next few years?

JK: I’ll tell about another quote that was made that same week by a similar person.  And this was after a week along effort which I don’t think anyone would ever deny that this was the greatest rescue effort that has ever been done.  In terms of manpower, organization and prayers and just raw success that the Lord heaped on this thing.  Suffice it to say, it was a great effort and one of the abortionist said during that week, “well these people can do what they want.  But basically what it boils down to is that next week we are going to be here and they aren’t.”  That’s one of the reasons I am anxious to get back in New York.  But, I’ll tell you another little story, quickly and that is, I was at a pre New York, OR (Operation Rescue) rally held on Long Island.  Not a rally, it was just where Randy was speaking to a group of people that was let’s just say your average right to life group.  I’m not casting aspersions, believe me these are great people.  Randy was going to speak at the end of the agenda, and they ran through their agenda and there were two people there who we knew at the beginning of the meeting that were identified to us as being clinic workers for Bill Beard.  Or I should say, mill workers that were there sitting in that meeting.  I don’t know why they were even allowed to be there, but the right to life people said, “that’s okay we don’t have any secrets.”  And Randy said the same thing, when he started to talk.  But anyway, so they went through this meeting and we waited for Randy to go on and it was about an hour and a half.  They talked about all sorts of things, legislation, education, “we got to get into this church” and “we got to hold a dinner here” and “we got to have a potluck,” all kinds of stuff which is all fine work.  Now I do remember toward the end that they had a 15 minute discussion on the cheapest source of a precious feet pin.  There were about 30 people there and they were discussing where can you get precious feet pins for the least amount of money.  All of this I admit is great pro-life stuff, and during this whole time these two women sat in the back and just sat there joking the whole time with each other.  Then Randy Terry comes on, and they became extremely quiet, and the expressions on their faces became extremely sullen.  And after a while, they realized the impact of what Randy Terry was going to do, or what he was hoping to do with the Lord’s blessing.  They wanted to ask some questions and they got very angry and got very upset.  For that matter, if they had known that Jim Kopp was standing in that same room, the one who is being sued by N.O.W. for opening up a Crisis Pregnancy Center in the city of San Francisco, the Devil’s play ground, I would have imagined that they would have been quite upset about that too.  Especially if I want to target and open up a CPC across the street from Bill Beard’s mill, or whatever.  You see what I’m saying?  When you get into the more intense pro-life stuff, suddenly just like the point you were making, you enemy perks up and says your hurting me!  Your hurting me!  Well, that’s what I want to do.

MJ: Joe Scheidler said that he attended these abortionist conventions and has told that the number one thing they complain about… they don’t complain about Jack Wilke and National Right to Life, (Jim interjected, “as great of a worker as he is”) and the pro-life political agenda.  When they talk about the problems that they are having, and who is giving them the most problems, they are talking about the activists.  They are talking about the people who are doing the sit-ins, the picketing and the sidewalk counseling.  They are talking about, “how are we going to stop these people.”  That should be a good barometer to go by, I would think.

BOOK REVIEW: Pro-Life Activists in America, Meaning, Motivation, and Direct Action (2002) by Carol J. C. Maxwell

As a former Pro-Life Activist from 1984 to 1992, I have always been interested in reading literature others have written about the movement that I was a part of for 8 years. Carol J. C. Maxwell holds a Ph. D. and is an anthropologist. She wrote this book, Pro-Life Activists in America, Meaning, Motivation, and Direct Action as a part of her anthropological studies. On page one of her book, she stated that she, “embarked on two years of field observations to provide an anthropological account of this social movement (i. e. the pro-life activist movement).” All though I would agree that the pro-life activist movement qualifies as a “social movement” per se, I think the scope of Dr. Maxwell’s study was too narrow. The reason there was a pro-life activist movement, was because our civil government abolished laws that protected its unborn human citizens. The origin of the movement was solely based on a re-action to the federal government’s action. Hence there is a reason the movement came about in the 70s. The reason a pro-life activist movement did not exist in the 60s, 50s, 40s and earlier is because unborn babies were legally protected in the decades leading up to the 70s.


I think an anthropological study of legalized abortion as a whole and its impact on American society as a whole would have been more comprehensive angle to take as opposed to studying a single facet of that issue. As of the date of this article, 53 million babies have been aborted since 1973. I think a study documenting how the loss of 53 million potential wage earners and taxpayers has affected our national economy and the solvency of Social Security and Medicare /Medicaid would be a much more constructive and comprehensive anthropological study. Doing an anthropological study on just the pro-life activist movement would make about as much sense as doing an anthropological study on the abolitionist and the underground railroad during the pre-Civil War 1800s without doing an anthropological study of slavery in America and how it affected American culture. Or, doing an anthropological study on Corrie Ten Boom and other Christian Nazi resistors who hid and harbored Jews without doing an anthropological study of Hitler and the Nazi holocaust as a whole. BTW, when pro-lifers equate their cause for the unborn to Slavery and the Nazi Holocaust of the Jews, Dr. Maxwell calls that an attitude of “ethic of extensivity.” (page 12)

Another thing that gave me pause about this book is Dr. Maxwell taking a neutral posture on the abortion issue. She wrote on page six:
When interviewees asked my position on abortion, I told them that I had trouble reconciling abortion with my personal values, but neither could I know what another woman would best do. As I recall, only one activist pushed me to take a stand on one side or the other of the pro-choice/pro-life divide, but I did not feel the need to define myself according to that dichotomy. The other interviewees appeared to accept or at least tolerate, the neutrality created by the tension of my beliefs.

Dr. Maxwell said that she spent two years (from September 1989 to August 1991) “making field observations” of pro-life activists. Yet, she said that her neutrality on abortion was created by the tension of her beliefs. What? During my 8 year tenure as a pro-life activist, there was one thing you could always count on. Pro-Lifers displaying placard sized photos of aborted babies. I would find it very hard to believe that Dr. Maxwell never once saw a picture of an aborted baby during those two years of interviewing. I find it very hard to believe that she is totally unaware of the carnage that is taking place at the abortion mills where she conducted her interviews. This woman is smart enough to write a book and earn a Ph.D. Yet, she doesn’t know “what another woman would best do” concerning the killing of her unborn baby? Suppose it was legal to kill one week old neo-natal babies. Would Dr. Maxwell still say that she would not “know what another woman would best do”? What other issues in the political spectrum is Dr. Maxwell having an internal struggle over? What about gun control, same sex marriages, illegal immigration and universal government run health care? Is Dr. Maxwell neutral on those issues also?

On multiple occasions, Dr. Maxwell wrote that the motivations of the pro-lifers participating in direct action as being “complex.” When it comes to the pro-life side of the abortion issue, I can assure you that our motivations for activism were quite simple. Babies are killed at the abortion mills and they were there to stop the killing. That is the root motive, you need not go any further than that. And if Dr. Maxwell learned anything during her two years of field observations, she would have known that.

I found one piece of data that Dr. Maxwell gave on page three to be very interesting. She wrote:
By the early 1990s, an estimated forty thousand individuals had participated in sit-ins at abortion facilities and related locations in the United States (Ginsburg 1993:564).

The footnote in the parentheses references the following source:
1993 Saving America’s Souls: Operation Rescue’s Against Abortion. In Fundamentalism and the State: Remaking Politics, Economics, and Militance. Martin E. Marty and R. Scott Applebby, eds. Pp. 557-88. Chicago: University Press.

Now I could be wrong, but 40,000 seems a little high to me. I have often wondered how many pro-life activists have been arrested prior to 1994 and my estimate was much lower than that. I would be curious to know how Martin E. Marty or R. Scott Appleby arrived at that number since Dr. Maxwell cited them as her source. I wonder if they made the distinction between total arrests of pro-life activists and total number of pro-life activists who have been arrested since a lot of them have been arrested multiple times.

Dr. Maxwell published some statistical data on pro-lifers in the appendix of her book. She displayed over a dozen different statistical tables that covered basic demographic fields such as level of education, age, average household income, occupations, religious affiliation, marital status, family size and so on. Her data was compiled within a two year period of a movement that spanned a little more that 20 years and the data gathered was isolated to the pro-life activists working in the mid-west region of America. Anybody who knows anything about compiling sats knows that the data compiled is based on a small sampling size of the body of work that you are investigating and analyzing. However, as thorough as Dr. Maxwell was in compiling and presenting her data, (and I don’t question its accuracy) I don’t think her sampling size was not big enough to paint an accurate demographic picture of the pro-life activists movement as a whole. Especially if she thinks 40,000 pro-life activists has participated in sit-ins.

This book is not an easy read, and is not well formatted in a ready friendly way. As I drudged through the book, I kept asking myself, who is her audience? Her writing style and vernacular was very academic. I don’t think the pro-abortion people would take an interest in this book, why would they want to read an academic dissertation on pro-life activists? They already think that they were a bunch of crazy loons. I can’t imagine very many pro-lifers wanting to read this book either. The pro-life activists who participated in the rescue movement already know what motivated them to action. As for the non-activist pro-lifers, half of them thought that breaking the law was wrong, and the other half were too scared to break the law or just too lazy. As interesting as some of the stats might be, in the end, this book was written by an academian for a bunch of other academians.