ST. LOUIS—The grip that Planned Parenthood has had on Missouri’s abortion industry since the 1970s is slipping, according to a key president and vision leader with one of the more influential Pregnancy Resource Centers in the state.
Bridget VanMeans told The Pathway June 1 that about 1,100 people are registered to pray daily for the end of abortion in St. Louis.
“We’re seeing what I would have to describe as a supernatural whispering across the board denominationally and also within para-church organizations that unity is the theme,” she said.
Technically, Planned Parenthood is still running two abortion clinics in Missouri, in St. Louis and Columbia. But the citizenry is clearly pro-life. And that consensus is also in line with historic Southern Baptist belief.
“From the very first of the abortion debate, Baptists have overwhelmingly sided with the pro-life position,” said Missouri Baptist Convention (MBC) President John Marshall, pastor, Second Baptist Church, Springfield. “Being a Bible-based people, we hold to the Scriptural teaching that life begins at conception.”
The lawmakers in the Missouri General Assembly are overwhelmingly pro-life. There are bills on the desk of Gov. Jay Nixon, who as a Democrat could be viewed as an obstacle to the advancement of the pro-life cause in Missouri. But indications are that the governor, who previously allowed a pro-life bill to become law by dropping his pen on signing day, will cooperate. Even the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, which is notoriously liberal, in a May 31 editorial could only weakly chide its beloved governor by stating “a real leader would take a stand and urge Missouri lawmakers to focus on the more significant issue,” which to them is reducing unintended pregnancies.
Meanwhile, while editorial board writers in big city newspapers continue to pontificate about the philosophy of reducing unintended pregnancies, leaders like VanMeans are actually getting results. ThriVe shows women images of their babies on ultrasounds and trims the number of abortions that way. Their goal is 1,000 fewer in St. Louis this year and the eventual eradication of all mills in the state. Currently there is one full-time clinic in St. Louis and partial coverage in Columbia that tends to come and go according to the prayers of local Christians.
“Everybody sees the pendulum swinging more toward the right, which would be a benefit to the pro-life cause,” said Kerry Messer, legislative liaison for the Christian Life Commission of the MBC. Messer was instrumental in the 2007 paradigm shift/first in the nation that legally and historically removed Planned Parenthood from Missouri’s public schools.
Laura Ingraham, a national talk radio host, said in the last annual count Planned Parenthood was responsible for 332,119 abortions and only 977 adoption recommendations. The deaths may be gigantic, but VanMeans is full of faith.
“We have a five-year plan which I think will get done sooner than that,” she said. “It’s a multi-tiered strategy which in some ways is mirroring what Planned Parenthood has done so successfully—kind of flipping that on them and leveraging some of their tactics and ideas.”
VanMeans said ThriVe’s Mobile Medical Center is being parked directly across the street from the St. Louis Planned Parenthood location a couple of times a week to provide support for the sidewalk counselors there.
“So they’re able to intervene really at the mouth of Hell there, at the gate, and then they’re able to refer that client right across the street (to ThriVe),” VanMeans said.
VanMeans is building on a structure that was put in place by ThriVe’s founder, Mary Nelson, who was a devotee of the teachings of Francis A. Schaeffer, a thinker who attempted to jar the church out of its malaise before he died in 1984.
“God’s hand of blessing was on her,” VanMeans said. “I call her a modern-day Esther. From that has grown one of the most dynamic and significant baby-rescuing moves of anyone in the nation.”
And the union that is flowing out of that does have an upside.
“We have tremendous unity across all kinds of sociological and cultural lines throughout Missouri,” Messer said. “We are harvesting the fruit in the pro-life battle because the unity that we are experiencing is true spiritual unity. It is in line with God’s Word.”
ALLEN PALMERI/associate editor
apalmeri@mobaptist.org
