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Contents © 1998
by Jim Holman.
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Pro-Life Peace Corps

THE QUIET STRUGGLE AGAINST ABORTION

By Christopher Zehnder

The struggle against legalized abortion did not begin in 1973 with Roe vs. Wade. It began, earlier, here, in California. In 1967, the California Assembly passed a bill allowing abortion in cases of rape, incest and the mental health of the mother. Then Governor Ronald Reagan signed the bill into law.

Among those fighting the passage of this bill was Sister Paula Vandegaer, a Sister of Social Service. "I passed out literature and tried to stop it," says Sister Paula, "but I never thought the bill would pass. I thought it was ridiculous. It did, however, pass in two states that year. From 1967 to 1973, a total of twelve states had legalized abortion. From that time we were working in the Los Angeles area starting hot lines and service centers. On May 5, 1971, I helped train and start the first hotline in Whittier. That was the first pro-life service in Southern California."

Since those early years, Sister Paula has been involved in what she calls "a more quiet part" of the pro-life movement--the service movement. A licensed clinical social worker, she has been instrumental in forming pro-life educational centers and centers to counsel pregnant women in abortion alternatives. In 1985, she and others separated from Heartbeat International, on whose national board she served, to form a new organization--International Life Services.

"Our board," says Sister Paula, "wished to expand. Heartbeat International was started to form service [counseling] centers and to help them grow. But we wanted to get into other things, into the euthanasia issue, and to publish many things, not just about service centers. So it was mutually agreed upon that it would be better to form a different organization with a slightly different emphasis, and slightly different responsibilities."

Like Heartbeat International, International Life Services is non-sectarian. An independent agency, International Life Services has no formal connection with the Sisters of Social Service, though, says Sister Paula, the Sisters of Social Service have lent their support to International Life Services "and they've helped us as they can financially. Many of our sisters work in independent agencies."

International Life Services, says Sister Paula, has four major "divisions." One of these divisions covers counseling centers. International Life Services is federated with 24 pregnancy counseling centers, in eight states. A counseling center federated with International Life Services must, says Sister Paula, "meet certain criteria for counseling and meet our specifications. We provide technical support for them and insurance, accounting services, payroll services, that kind of thing. Each organization is totally independent, maintains its own name, has its own board of direction. There is no commingling of funds. " Like International Life Services, most of their federated centers are non-sectarian, says Sister Paula, "to be open to any group, any peron that comes in."

Another division of International Life Services deals with education. Located at the International Life Services central office in Los Angeles, the education division develops education materials, such as video tapes, to help train counselors. It also puts out a magazine, Living Word, for pro-life counselors, and publishes pamphlets on pro-life issues. One of these pamphlets, "Safe Sex Can Kill You," is a "best seller," says Sister Paula, and has gone to many schools. The education division also helps students on the high school, college, and graduate levels who seek information and help on research projects.

One of the major works of the education division of International Life Services is a directory of pro-life groups in the United States and Canada. The directory, which comes out every two years, lists thousands of groups in every aspect of the pro-life movement; the 1997 directory lists 5,600 groups. Heartbeat International, says Sister Paula, originated the idea of a directory, but they only listed counseling centers. "We started the idea of listing all pro-life groups, not just the service centers, but also groups like Pharmacists for Life, Presbyterians for Life, Americans United for Life, the legal services--everyone who is not just giving services to pregnant women, but who are doing any kind of work in the pro-life movement."

This directory, says Sister Paula, is an important reference for counseling centers. If a woman coming into any center needs information on centers in other cities, on pro-life adoption agencies, or on pro-life doctors, counselors can refer to the directory. "The idea is that a woman who needs pro-life help can get it readily," says Sister Paula. "A woman would be safe with us from beginning to end, since we are linked [to other pro-life organizations] in a vast pro-life network."

One educational outreach of International Life Services is the Advanced Training Institute, to be held May 18-20 of this year at Sacred Heart Retreat House in Alhambra. Counseling Center directors will come to this three day institute from all over the country to attend classes on how to do counseling, how to administer an agency, how to do post-abortion counseling.

A part of International Life Services educational work is the Scholl Institute. Named after Hans and Sophie Scholl, young medical students in Germany who were executed for trying to organize student resistence to Nazi rule, Scholl Institute is dedicated to bio-ethics issues, particularly euthanasia. "We are concerned about the euthanasia issues," says Sister Paula. We send out speakers, we've done a Bible study for churches. People call us for advocacy work when they are having trouble with their life support withdrawal. We're very strong on the nutrition and hydration issue--the rights of people to have nutrition and hydration, to not have it withdrawn."

International Life Services interest in the euthanasia issue stems from Sister Paula's experience with the 1967 legalization of abortion in California. "When the bill passed in California," she relates, "I was flabbergasted. I just couldn't believe it. I could see that the mentality was going to lead to euthanasia eventually. In the early years, when we published the magazine, Living World, we had one article on euthanasia every single issue because we knew, in 1967, that we were caught completely off guard. If we were caught off guard again with euthanasia, it was really our fault."

Sister Paula sees parallels between the pro-abortion propaganda of 1967 and the pro-euthanasia propaganda of today. In 1967, she says, abortion "was seen as a Catholic issue, and the fight was, 'Don't let those Catholics tell you what to do.' They also argued, 'this is a person's right. You don't want to have an abortion, but why should you prevent someone else from doing it?' It was the same argument in Oregon where they legalized euthanasia--'you don't have to go to a hospice if you don't want to, but why do you prevent somebody else from doing it? Why are you imposing your morality on all of us?' It was pretty much the same argument, and people bought it."

Not only are the pro-abortion and pro-euthanasia campaigns analogous, according to Sister Paula, but the acceptance of the validity of "abortion rights" has led to an increasing toleration of euthanasia. Indeed, the entire process predates the abortion struggle; it reaches back to the acceptance of artificial contraception.

"Among the things that have created the problem," says Sister Paula, "is the contraceptive pill. The pill came into operation in 1960, and allowed for sexual revolution, the so-called ability to have sex without consequences. That gave rise to the belief that a couple could have a child when they wanted it, so children were no longer a gift from God; that there were no consequences for sex; that children were a planned thing, and that if there were a contraceptive failure, it was a mistake. Then when abortion came along as a fix up for contraceptive failure, it was readily accepted. The groundwork was already layed in people's mentality."

Since 1967, Sister Paula says she has seen a change in attitude among the women who come into counseling centers. In the early '70s, she says, young women coming into counseling centers "had no experience of abortion. In the early years, we thought all we had to do is teach people that there was a baby there, and then they'd say, 'of course I won't have an abortion.' Now we're seeing women whose mothers have had an abortion, whose sister has aborted, whose own brother or sister has been aborted by her mother; a large number of women who have come into our centers have already had an abortion themselves. The emphasis is, 'well, there's a baby there, and I don't really want to have an abortion, but it's the only thing I can do right now, and it's not fully a baby, it's not fully a human.' When you show them that it is really a human baby, they say, 'well, yes it is, but it's not really a full person.'

"There's been an elaboration, a refinement of the arguments against the child, and there's a whole difference in the sense of self and personhood. There's been a lot of philosophical development to say that we don't have automatic personhood, and that's transferred to saying that the human person gets its identity from the mother or from the people around it, not intrinsically from God. Therefore, though no one embraces abortion enthusiastically, abortion's not really seen as a bad thing because the child is not fully a human yet."

The denial of full personhood to the child, says Sister Vandegaer, leads to the denial of personhood that ends in euthanasia. "Someone who is in a permanent unconcious state--I refuse to call it 'persistent vegetative state; no one's a vegetable--is held to have lost their personhood; therefore they can be dehydrated to death or gotten rid of in some way."

Yet, while many women coming in for abortion counseling are jaded, there are still some who betray the prick of conscience. Sister Paula says she sees more women engaged in extra-marital relationships coming in because they've missed their period, but whose pregnancy tests are negative. Sister Paula thinks that these missed periods may arise from a guilty conscience: "You know, when we are doing something we're not supposed to be doing, God kind of bothers us. Sex is made for marriage, and women engage in sex because they either love the guy or believe the guy loves them and is on his way to marriage. When sex continues without a commitment, it becomes very precarious; people get nervous. We find a lot of women who are coming in are not on a contraceptive--a lot! They are nervous about what they're doing, nervous enough to miss their periods. We find these women are very amenable to chastity counseling."

To engage more effectively in this struggle for life, International Life Services has instituted a new program, Volunteers for Life. Volunteers for Life is a program for women who want to dedicate a year or two to pro-life work in service centers, or elsewhere. It is a kind of pro-life Peace Corps.

"The pro-life service centers," says Sister Paula, "are very poor--all the pro-life groups are very poor, overworked and understaffed--so if we can provide them with staff that can be underwritten by somebody, it would be a tremendous help." As envisioned, the Volunteers for Life will work full-time for these pro-life groups and live in community with the Sisters of Social Service, Sister Paula and Sister Mary Ellen.

Since the inception of the Volunteers for Life program in November of last year, International Life Services has gained one volunteer, 30 year old Marcela Figueroa of Alhambra, who works in the educational information division of International Life Services. Roger Cardinal Mahony, too, has lent his support to the endeavor, drawing attention to it at the January 22, 1997 Respect Life conference, and writing letters of support. Sister Paula says the program still needs not only more volunteers, but people to sponsor these volunteers.

Since volunteers live with the sisters, prayer becomes an important part of their life. The sisters say morning and evening prayer, attend Mass daily, and reserve the Blessed Sacrament in a chapel at their residence. Sister Paula thinks it important for the volunteers to utilize these opportunities for prayer. "This is not a movement that you just work at, it's a movement that requires healing," says Sister Paula. "There's been so much damage done in society, and we're fighting such a philosophical monster that a spiritual life is required, because we are fighting principalities and powers. We are looking for a person who is willing to commit themselves to a fully developed prayer life. It's not unreasonable for lay people to do what we are asking them to do."

For more information on International Life Services and/or the Volunteers for Life, write International Life Services at 2606 1/2, West 8th St., Los Angeles, CA 90057. Or call (213) 382-2156.

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