Orlando Planned Parenthood executive targets ethnic community near Disney World
Without federal tax money, the new abortion mega center could not have been purchased
KISSIMMEE, Florida (www.forerunner.com) – Almost 200 Osceola physicians, pastors and community leaders packed a 3-1/2 hour open microphone forum at Kissimmee City Commission meeting on Tuesday night, April 1st. Over 100 concerned citizens sat and stood the chamber. Dozens more stood in the hallways not able to gain immediate entrance.
610 Oak Commons Blvd, Kissimmee, Florida is the location of a proposed Planned Parenthood abortion mega center.
Mayor Jim Swan listened patiently and at times responded testily as dozens expressed their outrage and concern at the audacity of Planned Parenthood of Greater Orlando’s (PPGO) strategy to open a $2 million abortion “mega-center.” The location is in the heart of Kissimmee’s Hispanic community at 610 Oak Commons Blvd. directly across the street from Osceola Regional Medical Center.
Several of the speakers, including John Barros, a local pro-life evangelist, explained to the City Commission that Orlando area abortion clinics have brought urban blight to the properties immediately surrounding them. Orlando abortions centers are a magnet for pimps and prostitutes associated with the tourist industry. They bring into the abortion center the worst kind of human trafficking imaginable, as well as drug users and all sorts of criminal activity.
“You have no clue as to what this will bring to your neighborhood,” said Barros.
John Barros spoke about what goes on around abortion clinics.
Several other doctors spoke of the patients they deal with daily whose lives have been ravaged by abortion. They spoke of the emotional and physical problems that continue for many years.
Some expressed concern that an abortion clinic would make neighboring buildings unmarketable and would drive down the property values of the medical complexes along Oak Commons Blvd.
Dr. John Littell, who heads a local family medical practice near downtown Kissimmee, spoke passionately about the financial and moral impact the abortion center will have on families. Littell argued that it is nearly impossible to get a pain clinic licensed in the city. Strip clubs are not allowed within city limits. Recently, a funeral home was not allowed to open next to a MacDonalds. Littell urged the city to consider how an abortion center could be allowed to open, when more stringent laws are applied to far less less dangerous and offensive businesses.
Dr. John Littell and several Kissimmee area doctors defended the sanctity of life.
Others strongly urged the city of Kissimmee to take a long, hard look at zoning laws that might prohibit PPGO or at least a future abortion center from opening in Kissimmee.
At 9:30 pm, Mayor Jim Swan cut off further comments saying that it might take several more hours to hear from every person who signed up to speak.
He noted ironically that not a single pro-abortion advocacy comment had been heard among the dozens who showed up to speak at the meeting.
Stop Planned Parenthood of Kissimmee
Kissimmee is the principal city in Osceola County, a fast-growing family community populated by many Hispanic families who work in the service industry related to the many tourist attractions. The city serves as the “South Gate” to Disney World in neighboring Lake Buena Vista with hundreds of hotels and restaurants.
According to an Orlando Sentinel interview with the president and CEO, Jenna Tosh, the Kissimmee mega center will target “a largely Hispanic population.” Tosh emphasized several times in the article that the center would target the “ethnic” community and “the young and diverse population” of Osceola County.
The Sentinel article stated that funding for the new Planned Parenthood $2 million mega center came from over 30 individuals and foundations.
According to Rachel Burgin of Florida Right to Life, a large tax-payer funded federal grant enabled PPGO to expand their operation into Osceola County. A PPGO prospectus lists their 2012 federal grant revenue at $731,870 up from $388,831 in 2011. Individual contributions were $110,948. Foundations and corporate contributions were at $94,877. Without federal tax money, the new abortion mega center could not have been purchased.
Ironically, the pro-abortion leaning Sentinel made no mention that Planned Parenthood is the largest abortion provider in America or that the Kissimmee center would provide abortions. The article reads as little more than a cheerleading piece for PPGO. Jenna Tosh, in fact, is a frequent guest columnist.
In a Channel 13 News report, Tosh used a Planned Parenthood talking point to claim that “less than 10 percent” of what they do involves abortion.
The stark reality of PPGO’s 990 forms tells a different story. In fiscal year 2011, PPGO reported that the total revenue of the non-profit organization was $3,891,501 while $1,412,162 was earned through surgical abortion. In addition, $104,211 went to the salary of the President/CEO, a position formerly filled by Susan Idtensohn and then Jenna Tosh who took the reins in mid-2011.
To say that $1.4 million out of $3.9 million amounts to less than 10 percent is either deceptive or else Jenna Tosh is extraordinarily bad at math.
The key word here is “services.” PPGO’s claim is akin to a Cadillac dealership claiming that they do preventative car maintenance, oil changes, charity car washes, and provide free bottled water in the show room for thirsty customers. It would be a ridiculous statement for Cadillac to claim that their business isn’t about selling Cadillacs because less than 10 percent of their “services” involve car sales.
It is also revealing that Planned Parenthood takes pains to downplay the fact that they are America’s largest abortion provider. If they believe women have the right to abort their unborn children, then why do they try to minimize what they do?
Jenna Tosh is once again underestimating the moral outrage that will result from her audacity. She claims that she is targeting Hispanics. Well-organized education will be mounted by the local pro-life medical community, as well as hundreds of local churches and pro-life ministries in the central Florida area, will show that Planned Parenthood harms, but does not help ethnic minorities. What Planned Parenthood of Greater Orlando really does is to earn millions from abortion to enrich a few. This will be exposed.
A Facebook page called Stop Planned Parenthood of Kissimmee was launched by several Orlando area pro-life evangelists in an effort to alert the community on March 19th. Grassroots efforts resulted in a turnout of about 200 concerned citizens at the Kissimmee City Commission meeting on April 1st. In addition, a prayer vigil and awareness campaign is planned for Saturday, April 5th at 610 Oak Commons at 9 am.
The Legacy of Margaret Sanger’s Planned Parenthood
Many of the comments before the City Commission stressed that the Hispanic community of Kissimmee would be harmed by the abortion mega center. Some of the residents spoke of Planned Parenthood’s founder, Margaret Sanger, who favored eugenics and spoke of ethnic minorities as being “inferior” and as “human weeds.”
Sanger once wrote, “The most merciful thing that the large family does to one of its infant members is to kill it.”
While I do not want to believe that Planned Parenthood’s leaders today are as overtly racist and opportunistic as Sanger, the effect of the abortion giant on ethic communities has been more devastating than anything Sanger herself would have sanctioned.
In another passage in her autobiography, she writes of meeting with a female branch of the Ku Klux Klan.
I accepted an invitation to talk to the women’s branch of the Ku Klux Klan at Silver Lake, New Jersey, one of the weirdest experiences I had in lecturing. My letter of instruction told me what train to take, to walk from the station two blocks straight ahead, then two to the left. I would see a sedan parked in front of a restaurant. If I wished I could have ten minutes for a cup of coffee or bite to eat, because no supper would be served later. I obeyed orders implicitly, walked the blocks, saw the car, found the restaurant, went in and ordered some cocoa, stayed my allotted ten minutes, then approached the car hesitatingly and spoke to the driver. I received no reply. She might have been totally deaf as far as I was 1 concerned. Mustering up my courage, I climbed in and settled back. Without a turn of the head, a smile, or a word to let me know I was right, she stepped on the self-starter. For fifteen minutes we wound around the streets. It must have been towards six in the afternoon. We took this lonely lane and that through the woods, and an hour later pulled up in a vacant space near a body of water beside a large, unpainted, barnish building. My driver got out, talked with several other women, then said to me severely, “Wait here. We will come for you.” She disappeared. More cars buzzed up the dusty road into the parking place. Occasionally men dropped wives who walked hurriedly and silently within. This went on mystically until night closed down and I was alone in the dark. A few gleams came through chinks in the window curtains. Even though it was May, I grew chillier and chillier. After three hours I was summoned at last and entered a bright corridor filled with wraps. As someone came out of the hall I saw through the door dim figures parading with banners and illuminated crosses. I waited another twenty minutes. It was warmer and I did not mind so much. Eventually the lights were switched on, the audience seated itself, and I was escorted to the platform, was introduced, and began to speak. Never before had I looked into a sea of faces like these. I was sure that if I uttered one word, such as abortion, outside the usual vocabulary of these women they would go off into hysteria. And so my address that night had to be in the most elementary terms, as though I were trying to make children understand. In the end, through simple illustrations I believed I had accomplished my purpose. A dozen invitations to speak to similar groups were proffered. The conversation went on and on, and when we were finally through it was too late to return to New York. Under a curfew law everything in Silver Lake shut at nine o’clock. I could not even send a telegram to let my family know whether I had been thrown in the river or was being held incommunicado. It was nearly one before I reached Trenton, and I spent the night in a hotel.
Margaret Sanger An Autobiography, 1971 reprint by Dover Publications, Inc. of the 1938 original published by W.W. Norton & Company, pp. 366-367.
Tallahassee Abortion Center Announces Closure
Local abortionist plans to open new clinic
TALLAHASSEE, Florida (www.forerunner.com) – A few days after a legal notice appeared announcing the closure of an abortion center that has operated in Tallahassee since 1981, clinic workers announced that Stephen Wiley Duncan, the primary abortionist at North Florida Women’s Health & Counseling Services, plans to open a new abortion center “sometime in April.”
The abortion mill posted that they will close by March 31, 2014 in a legal notice in the Tallahassee Democrat.
North Florida Women’s Health & Counseling Services, Inc. will stop providing services on March 31, 2014. Current and former clients may obtain a copy of their medical records at 1345 Cross Creek Circle, Tallahassee, Florida 32301 before March 31, 2014. Please call 850-877-3183 and speak with Stephanie, Erin or Debra to arrange to obtain your records. PUBLICATION: March 5, 12, 19 & 26, 2014
Further announcements stated that the abortion center’s last day would be Monday, March 17th. The announcements spurred a flurry of celebration on the pro-life blogosphere with some posting that the abortion center would be closing “permanently.”
Todd Rasner, a Jacksonville OB/GYN who also kills babies at the Tallahassee clinic, stated, “I wouldn’t consider it closing, more relocating.” Rasner stated that Duncan has plans to open up his own abortion center.
An application for an abortion clinic license being processed with the Florida Agency for Health Care Administration lists the same address with a slightly different name, North Florida Women’s Services, 1345 Cross Creek Circle, Tallahassee, Florida 32301. It will be owned by an LLC formed in August 2013 that lists Stephen Duncan as the manager.
An abortion center worker, posted on her public Facebook page that she wasn’t at liberty to tell the reason for the closure. She expressed hope that she would make the transition.
“There will be another clinic opening in Tallahassee and I will most likely be working there.”
When asked if reason for the closure was “misogyny related,” she wrote, “No, no, it’s just legally I shouldn’t talk about it because I don’t even know what I’m talking about. I don’t even know the whole story. So I wanna refrain from slander.”
A pending medical malpractice lawsuit on record names both the abortion center and Stephen Duncan. The lawsuit, Jackson v. Duncan, was filed on October 30, 2013.
Matt Ferro, president of Florida State University’s Noles For Life, explained the need for pro-life evangelists to stay vigilant. “I think it’s vitally important to tell that one is closing for good, but Stephen Duncan and folks from the clinic plan on opening another. We need to nip it in the bud now. I don’t want pro-lifers to celebrate ignorantly.”
According to the Florida Association for Health Care Administration (AHCA) website, the application for an abortion clinic license takes 60 days to process. Pro-life ministries throughout Florida meanwhile expressed hope that the AHCA application would be denied based on Stephen Duncan’s past record.
“Dr. Duncan’s continued, unrestricted practice as a physician constitutes an immediate serious danger to the health, safety or welfare of the public.”
– Florida Department of Health, 2009
As seen in the mugshot below, Stephen Wiley Duncan was arrested in 2009 on nine felony counts of prescription fraud.
Name: DUNCAN, STEPHEN W
SPN: 208456
Race: WHITE
Gender: Male
Eye Color: BRO
Hair Color: BRO
Height: 6′ 4″ (1.93 m)
Weight: 200 lb (91 kg)
Birth date: 12/01/1962
Duncan was offered a deferred prosecution deal in February 2011. Under this agreement, the charges will be dropped if he fulfills his obligations.
An investigation by the Florida Board of Medicine resulted in Duncan’s license being placed on “active/probation” status by the Florida Department of Health (DOH). The Florida DOH also imposed a permanent restriction on Duncan’s license:
Respondent license shall be permanently restricted as follows: Respondent is permanently restricted from practicing weight loss outside of his customary OB/GYN practice.
The order from the Florida DOH says Duncan violated the law while working at both First Impressions Weight Loss Clinic and his own Resolution Weight Loss Centers in Tallahassee, Jacksonville and Panama City.
The Florida DOH also fined Duncan $50,000 for 36 counts of violations of state statute involving the illegal dispensing of controlled substances.
A WCTV local news program in Tallahassee reported in 2009:
The order says employees at those clinics would routinely fax prescriptions to Alphameds Pharmacy on Tennessee Street … which would then fill them and mail them back before the patient ever even arrived for his or her first visit. It also cites patients who say they were given prescriptions during their first visit and four of them said they never met nor talked to Duncan while they were clients of the weight loss clinic. The order says, “Dr. Duncan’s continued, unrestricted practice as a physician constitutes an immediate serious danger to the health, safety or welfare of the public.”
Matt Ferro in Tallahassee contributed to this article.
UPDATE:
This article was edited on March 12th, 2014.
In preparing this article, we wanted it to be timely, but didn’t want to simply repeat what nearly everyone else in the pro-life blogosphere has reported. A legal notice simply read that the current corporation would “stop providing services” on March 31st, 2014. The “lack of doctors” story is what the abortion mill told people who phoned into their office, but then they changed their story a short time later. According to the same staff members, abortionist Stephen Duncan is not quitting and plans to continue by locating some of the same staff in his own clinic. He has run medical offices in other locations in Tallahassee.
Abortionist Todd Rasner said in a December 23rd interview with Matt Ferro that he’d be quitting Tallahassee’s only abortion clinic soon. He also said that this was one of the reasons he wanted to talk. Rasner then said that he would not agree to stop doing abortions, but that he was working in Tallahassee only for a short time to help them through a transition because they had been having problems. He has now told Matt in an email that this abortion center was run by a corporate board for over 30 years. Now most of the past board members have died or have quit. Duncan wanted to continue and is now taking ownership – most likely through his own company or corporation. Now we believe that the reason Rasner quit was because the transition has been accomplished. That is what he told Matt in an email.
(We are thankful that Rasner has agreed to keep open lines of communication, even though in every exchange, Matt implores him to repent for the sin of child murder.)
There were a few factual errors in my initial story. I wrote earlier that a Daytona-based abortionist, Randall Whitney, had worked for North Florida Women’s Health, when it was actually The Feminist Women’s Health Center of Tallahassee. This was another abortion center that operated until 2002. The Tallahassee Feminist Women’s Health Center had to recruit out-of-town doctors to perform abortions because the center’s founder had given a newspaper interview criticizing the local medical community, thereby causing their staff physicians to quit. They had a reputation for antagonizing other area doctors as well as their own abortionists, according to Randall Whitney.
Randall Whitney, an 80-year-old abortionist based out of the Daytona Beach area, outlined several of the abortion clinics he had been involved with in a 2011 lawsuit testimony against the Orlando Woman’s Center abortion mill. The plaintiff in the case was eventually awarded $36.7 million. Whitney explained why he stopped working for The Feminist Women’s Health Center.
Well, they were also largely lesbian and man-haters. And, you know, I tried to work with them and after a while, it became impossible. They would train women to fight physicians. Actually, do everything they could to subordinate physicians. So it was not a pleasant environment. It was a radical feminist center. That’s what it was, the Tallahassee Feminist Health Center.
The Feminist Women’s Health Center dissolved their corporation on April 3rd, 2002.
Commentary: An Open Letter to the Pro-life Community in Tallahassee
By Jay Rogers
What is needed to open an abortion clinic in the state of Florida is a license through AHCA. See also a listing of licensed Florida abortion clinics.
Depending on the locale, there will also be zoning issues and business licenses to obtain. However, if a city tries to block an abortion clinic from opening by denying a license, they will go to court and likely win. Orlando tried that in the 1990s with James Pendergraft. The abortion mill went to district court in Jacksonville and won. Then Pendergraft turned around and sued the city for “lost income” during the time he could not open. The city eventually settled for $350,000. (This was tax money at work to open an abortion mill!)
One strategy might be to contact the AHCA office in Tallahassee and implore them not grant Stephen Duncan a license to open an abortion mill. He was charged with multiple counts of prescription fraud. He is permanently restricted from prescribing diet pills to patients. He also has his license on active/probation status. While under probation, he has to practice medicine under the supervision of another doctor. This is likely why Dr. Todd Rasner of Jacksonville is working with him.
Agency for Health Care Administration
2727 Mahan Drive
Tallahassee, FL 32308
(888) 419-3456
Bear in mind, this will not keep an abortion mill from opening under a license with the name of another administrator and owner. The business or corporation that “owns” the abortion mill in reality can be a related second entity. Then Duncan could be an executive board member of that corporation (according to their bylaws) not named on the official state corporation papers. That is how most of the abortion mills in Florida operate.
We have to do a better job at policing the quack doctors who kill unborn babies for a living. Prayer is of utmost importance, but God always uses a physical instrument in His hands as a secondary cause to effect justice. We will each be held accountable to God for what we do. The pro-life movement was birthed out of a deep measure of repentance because we realized we acted too late. That attitude of repentance with vigilance is needed again today. We shouldn’t be celebrating prematurely until we see what happens.
Last month, we did an awareness campaign at an abortionist’s neighborhood in North Tampa named José Quintana. He lives (literally) right across the street from a Catholic church, is presumably a member of the parish, and sent his son to a Catholic school. People in the church were providentially letting out for a funeral. We handed out 50 flyers to people letting out from the funeral. The many Catholics who value the sanctity of life were shocked by this revelation and a few came to express their grief over that fact that an abortionist lived right across the street from the church without the knowledge of anyone in the parish.
You will see a similar pattern with Stephen Duncan. He has been hiding in plain sight. Many of his friends and neighbors don’t know he is an abortionist. Know your enemy. Conduct awareness campaigns. Evangelize with the message of the Gospel of Life. Support those who are called to this ministry of pro-life education and awareness. Matt Ferro and Noles for Life are doing a great job in taking the lead on this. They need volunteers for awareness campaign and financial support for flyers, displays for the FSU campus, etc.
Matt Ferro is at: mattferro95@hotmail.com
“Know ye not that we shall judge angels? How much more things that pertain to this life?” (1 Cor. 6:3).
Postmillennialism: Prophecies Regarding the Messianic Kingdom
Behold, the Lion of the tribe of Judah, the Root of David, has prevailed … (Revelation 5:5).
Old Testament prophecy regarding the Messianic Kingdom presents us with a paradox. On one hand, we know the kingdom of God began in Jesus’ day, clearly declared by Christ as he began to preach, “The kingdom of God is at hand” (Matthew 4:17). On the other hand, many of these prophecies speak of almost unimaginable peace, prosperity, health, long life for the people of God and a prevailing godliness throughout the world that has not yet been realized.
The postmillennial view is that we are progressively laying hold of these promises. We will not see the fulness of the glory of God until Christ’s return. However, the kingdom of God is already here in it’s fulness. The Gospel is working through the whole world, bringing untold multitudes of souls into the kingdom.
Most Christians would readily agree that the Gospel is advancing in the world in terms of the numbers of people professing faith in Christ. In fact, more people now come to Christ in the world every day than in the whole New Testament era. Further, a larger percentage of the world is Christian and this percentage has been growing ever since the age of world missions in the 1800s.
In light of that fact, what do we expect the Gospel’s effect on culture and society to be? Will the world grow darker and darker as more souls come to Christ? Or will the world see a great light dawn as the Gospel takes hold of every aspect of society?
Two Postmillennial Principles
1. The first principle in understanding the postmillennial view is that God’s promises to Israel apply to the Church today. This is the simple meaning of Paul’s letter to the Galatians.
That the blessing of Abraham might come upon the Gentiles through Jesus Christ; that we might receive the promise of the Spirit through faith (Galatians 3:14).
Some spiritualize this passage saying that the covenant with the church is for salvation only, but the covenant with Israel is for the land and material blessings. According to the dispensationalist view, the material blessings for Israel will occur only during a future millennial reign after Jesus returns to the earth. Postmillennialists agree that the promise of the Spirit is a greater dimension than material blessings, however, the church is to “go and teach all nations.”
The Old Testament is rife with prophecies concerning the nations being under the Christ the Messiah. This is an important aspect of our faith. A whole book would be necessary to quote entirely the texts of the Old Testament that predict the triumph to come in Christ, how all the nations shall be His. Isaiah and Ezekiel, and most of the minor prophets, have foretellings of the kingdom age when the nations of the world will turn to Christ and obey God’s law. This means that we have a duty. Christians must occupy the whole world. The Great Commission is to make disciples of all nations with Christ as the ordained King of all creation. As we do this, great material prosperity and peace will be secured by the people of God that all nations will enjoy. Most Christians agree that eventually Christ will win, but for now Christians are on the losing side. But the impulse for victory is a God-given instinct. Victory has a strong appeal to the people of God. The promise of God tells us we have a magnificent calling because we are a people called to victory not to defeat (R.J. Rushdoony, God’s Law and Society).
Of course, the Second Coming of Jesus will be a marked time of victory, prosperity and peace in the world – in fact a new heavens and a new earth will be inaugurated when Christ returns. But just imagine for a moment that these promises speak to the current stage in which we live. If we concentrate on the image offered in the parable of the mustard seed and the leavened lump of dough, then we will understand that these trends will increase gradually and will become the normal state of affairs for a long period of time before Christ’s Second Coming.
In studying the prophecies of the Old Testament, I’ve personally become more and more convinced of the postmillennial view – the idea that this Golden Age speaks not only of an age to come, but a great victory for the people of God in this age as well. One scriptural example in particular explains my conviction.
No more shall an infant from there live but a few days,
Nor an old man who has not fulfilled his days;
For the child shall die one hundred years old,
But the sinner being one hundred years old shall be accursed (Isaiah 65:20).
What is remarkable about this passage is not the prediction that there would be no infant mortality in the millennium, but that God’s people would live to be an old age. In the premillennial view, this implies that the resurrected saints of God, who return to earth with Christ will live side by side with mortal men, who will be born, live to a very old age and die during the millennial reign. I suspect that this passage and others like it refer not to a future millennial reign after Christ’s return, but to history before the Second Coming. It is not unlikely that in the next few generations, infant mortality will be all but wiped out and that most people will live past their one-hundredth year. There will be a literal fulfillment of this prophecy in history prior to Christ’s return.
2. The second postmillennial principle in understanding Old Testament prophecy is the regeneration of a great number of souls out of every nation in the world. The kingdom of God spreads not through a top-down rule by churches, but through evangelism resulting in a grassroots voluntary movement of the nations to serve the Lord. This obedience to Gospel will result in ever greater blessings poured out by God to enrich the whole Church, who will further evangelize and bless the nations. Even in the Old Testament, a time of great victory in the field of evangelism is prophesied.
“Behold, the days are coming,” says the Lord,
“When the plowman shall overtake the reaper,
And the treader of grapes him who sows seed;
The mountains shall drip with sweet wine,
And all the hills shall flow with it” (Amos 9:13).
There will not be universal redemption of all men during history, but in some nations the vast majority of people will at least outwardly profess to serve the one true God. Isaiah says that even in Egypt, being a type of the unregenerate world, five cities out of six will call upon the name of the Lord, an image of great victory.
In that day five cities in the land of Egypt will speak the language of Canaan and swear by the Lord of hosts; one will be called the City of Destruction (Isaiah 19:18).
There will be a time when the holiest of all men will be advanced to greatest positions in civil politics.
Kings shall be your foster fathers,
And their queens your nursing mothers;
They shall bow down to you with their faces to the earth,
And lick up the dust of your feet.
Then you will know that I am the Lord,
For they shall not be ashamed who wait for Me (Isaiah 49:23).
The richest people in the world, those who have great influence, shall devote all to Christ and His Church.
And the daughter of Tyre will come with a gift;
The rich among the people will seek your favor (Psalms 45:12).
War will one day be unknown according to the Bible. There will be universal peace, love and understanding among the nations of the world, instead of confusion, wars, and bloodshed.
He shall judge between the nations,
And rebuke many people;
They shall beat their swords into plowshares,
And their spears into pruning hooks;
Nation shall not lift up sword against nation,
Neither shall they learn war anymore (Isaiah 2:4).
World peace will come through universal disarmament as weapons of warfare will be destroyed.
He makes wars cease to the end of the earth;
He breaks the bow and cuts the spear in two;
He burns the chariot in the fire (Psalms 46:9).
All nations will live together in peace.
My people will dwell in a peaceful habitation,
In secure dwellings, and in quiet resting places (Isaiah 32:18).
Strong families will be restored and there will be great love between children and their parents.
And he will turn
The hearts of the fathers to the children,
And the hearts of the children to their fathers,
Lest I come and strike the earth with a curse (Malachi 4:6).
There will be a time of great economic prosperity in the Christian nations of the world.
For the seed shall be prosperous,
The vine shall give its fruit,
The ground shall give her increase,
And the heavens shall give their dew—
I will cause the remnant of this people
To possess all these (Zechariah 8:12).
Then it shall be to Me a name of joy, a praise, and an honor before all nations of the earth, who shall hear all the good that I do to them; they shall fear and tremble for all the goodness and all the prosperity that I provide for it (Jeremiah 33:9).
There will be a time of great light and knowledge.
It shall come to pass in that day
That there will be no light;
The lights will diminish.
It shall be one day
Which is known to the Lord—
Neither day nor night.
But at evening time it shall happen
That it will be light (Zechariah 14:6,7).
It will be as though God will give so much light to His church, that the sun and moon will be ashamed.
Then the moon will be disgraced
And the sun ashamed;
For the Lord of hosts will reign
On Mount Zion and in Jerusalem
And before His elders, gloriously (Isaiah 24:23).
Of course, there are many more prophecies speaking of unheralded increase of the Gospel in the world prior to the Second Coming of Jesus. But it’s only when we will survey the New Testament in light of the promises of the Old that all this comes into clear focus.
Abigail Seidman testimony - Wiccan Rites
Update 1/1/2013
I had an email conversation the day before yesterday with a long-time sidewalk minister who often stood at the abortion mill in Toledo where Abigail Seidman’s mom worked. I checked his testimony against Abigail’s when we did her interviews for The Abortion Matrix in 2011.
Yesterday, “Frankie” gave more information that can be used in corroborating what Abigail has said. Note that these two people do not know each other, but may remember each other vaguely from the time when Abigail was a teenager. Compare the interviews below with the email I got from “Frankie” yesterday:
12/30/13 (2 days ago)
I knew a volunteer (who used to work where I worked) who during lunch would talk about the weekend escapades to Traverse City and doing their “new-age” stuff. This now CLOSED abortion facility’s owner was a wiccan and was sometimes referred to as a “choice goddess.” She, in her younger years, graduated from an all-female Catholic high school (go figure!) I believe that each abortion gave these “womyn” warm fuzzies on the inside, along with the financial gain that accompanied them.
Besides abortions going on in the inside, I also witnessed drug deals going down in the parking lot between the owner’s boyfriend & people who would pull into the lot for a few minutes and then leave. It was such a rather bizarre place, but thanks be to God, after relocating 12 years ago, they are now CLOSED permanently! After their move, this kind of activity was not happening anymore with the new-age stuff. This is about all I can remember.
Abigail Seidman testimony
Originally published: 1/13/2011
In June 2009, a reader named “Frankie” left a comment on one of my articles, Statements of a Practicing Witch? The article deals with abortion clinic owners and staff in Birmingham, Alabama and Melbourne, Florida who were involved in Wiccan and pagan practices – with one even going as far as to call abortion “a sacrament” and a “sacred act.”
“It’s true that many abortion centers, especially those that say ‘for women by women’ are tied to practices in the occult. One such clinic in Ohio had women staff/volunteers go on weekend trips to Traverse City, MI for what they would call experiences of ‘entering the womb of Mother Earth.’ Often Wiccan style jewelry/clothing could be seen by staff. This IS true and not made up stuff.”
Posted by Frankie on 06/01/2009 11:36 PM
Traverse City is about five hours over the border from Toledo, Ohio where Abigail Seidman’s mother worked at an abortion clinic. I didn’t make the connection at first when I began seeing Abigail’s testimony go viral on the Internet a few weeks ago. Abigail too says her mother participated in Wiccan rituals. We finally did a video interview with Abigail (see below) and she pointed out that “Frankie” must have been referring to the clinic where her mother worked.
I preface this interview with Frankie’s corroboration because some of the details below are so disturbing that it is going to provoke disbelief. Abigail would prefer to talk about her conversion to Christ in June of 2010. She would prefer to emphasize her own experience with abortion and how she has been delivered from the depression that often comes with Post-Abortion Syndrome (PSA). She seems disappointed that the fascinating aspect of her story to many people is her experience with a circle of occultists who would perform blood rituals at the abortion clinic where her mother worked and sometimes have “mentrual extraction parties” at her home. The whole thesis of the recently produced DVD, The Abortion Matrix, is the relationship of Wicca and pagan religion to the abortion industry. Most of the questions we asked were based on other interviews in which she touched on this bizarre aspect of her upbringing.
The following is the text of our interview with Abigail Seidman, which she used as notes for the video interview. The video on YouTube is just the raw footage edited into seven parts. I then chose a few shorter clips for use in The Abortion Matrix.
– Jay Rogers
Director, The Forerunner
FR – You say you are sure the clinic that “Frankie” mentions is your mother’s clinic? How so?
AS – Frankie says the clinic is in Ohio, my mother’s clinic was in Ohio. The clinic staff frequently used the terminology “by women for women” when explaining the clinic and its mission to others (for instance, to say why a woman considering abortion should come to their clinic rather than to a clinic that was more of a doctor’s office atmosphere, or to a hospital). The idea stems from the mentality of lesbian-separatist style feminism – the idea that only women can truly understand women’s experiences and what is going through a woman’s mind, and thus health care, counseling, and that sort of thing should only be provided to women by other women, particularly in areas unique to women’s experience such as pregnancy.
FR – What do you think Frankie means by clinics that say “for women by women”? Also what is “entering the womb of Mother Earth”?
“By women for women” is essentially a marketing phrase in that it preys on the obviously vulnerable mindset of a woman in an unplanned pregnancy – it lures the woman into a false sense of security, that she will be understood, respected, and cared for more by other women than by men who cannot truly understand her viewpoint, when really the clinic’s sole purpose is to provide abortions, and thus their economic success depends on the sale of as many abortions as possible. Of course, in this case we are dealing with people whose purpose is to provide as many abortions as possible not only for economic success, but also for spiritual success, which can be a bigger incentive. Money on earth is temporary, but your spiritual capital lasts forever.
Frankie mentions Traverse City, Michgan. My family visited there frequently for recreation (skiing, hiking) and I believe that is where my mother may have first met clinic staffers who encouraged her to join the group. We traveled there with people from the clinic several times, although I did not take part in any occult rituals on those occasions, I was just there to ski with my dad and friends, my mother went off on her own with the other women. I tried to stay out of personal involvement in the occult stuff, which was easy because I was young and had not had an abortion yet so I was not welcome to attend any rituals (abortion was considered an “initiation rite”). I’m not sure what exactly the “opening/entering the womb of Mother Earth” refers to, since I never attended or participated in one of the ceremonies, but I heard the phrase mentioned by the clinic staff. It refers to some sort of ceremony, probably involving an intentional “sacred” abortion. I heard those spoken about, including intentional pregnancies to be used in the ceremony, but I never saw one.
FR – Can you describe your upbringing as a child whose mother worked for the abortion industry?
AS – It was strange. I was definitely kept isolated, especially when I was younger and she was just starting out in the radical feminist world. My mother always had a lot of strict rules about using the phone, going places with friends or staying at their houses, going to parties, that sort of thing. Dating was mostly out of the question, and to be honest I didn’t have a lot of opportunities because she kept me unattractive – she cut my hair, dressed me in shapeless, baggy clothing, forbade me to use makeup or hair products – it really damaged my development as a woman and I basically had to learn on my own how to be feminine.
I used to go to the library and sneak fashion magazines behind a copy of Our Bodies, Ourselves. I had my own copy of that at home, of course – it was my 14th birthday present. I remember reading the section on safe sex, which describes every possible sex act between two humans of any gender, and thinking – “I have to learn how to do all of this – and be good at it?” I had never even kissed a boy at that point and I was being exposed to this.
People at school kind of took advantage of that – they knew that I had access to things like sex information and condoms that they couldn’t get at home, so I became sort of the school “sexpert.” People would ask questions and I would either know the answers already, or be able to look them up. I kept condoms and safe-sex pamphlets in my bookbag at my mother’s insistence, and after a while people just knew to expect that and if I felt someone unzipping my backpack in the hall while I was talking to someone, I would just say, “Help yourself and zip it back up.” The condoms had stickers on the back advertising the abortion clinic – they were the same ones that were handed out at the clinic. One of my jobs there was to take the new shipments of condoms, separate them individually, and stick the pre-printed stickers on.
FR – What about your education? Were you influenced either toward a pro-life or pro-abortion point of view from teachers?
AS – School was pretty silent on the issue. Even in sex ed, abortion was just not mentioned. Birth control was, but the sex ed and health teachers acted like it was kind of foolproof. Use birth control, don’t get pregnant, end of story.
FR – Did you attend college? What was your spiritual experience there? Were you taught feminist ideology by any professors?
AS – I didn’t attend college long enough to be influenced by anyone really – I dropped out at the end of my first semester before exams. I was also – against advice – majoring in computer science, so my classes were primarily math and technical oriented, where there is little room for ideology. Obviously, my mother wanted me to major in Women’s Studies or a related field (Gender Studies, Gay Studies, etc). When I was unexpectedly pregnant in college, I was offered help by a Catholic counselor, including help to convert to Christianity, but I had been heavily indoctrinated to be distrustful of Christians at that point and I was afraid to follow her advice.
FR – What is your earliest church experience? When did you first become aware of the idea of God or His presence?
AS – My parents were actually very involved in church when I was born and when I was very young. My dad has always been a Christian, a member of the Episcopal Church, although his involvement has varied throughout the years. I was baptized as an infant and some of my earliest happy memories take place in church. My parents fell away from the church when I was about 5 years old, I think primarily due to my mother’s increasingly strong feminist views and her insistence on enforcing them on others.
When I was four, I was old enough to take part in the church Christmas play, and all of the boys were to be shepherds and the girls were to be angels, all surrounding the holy family together and singing songs of praise and worship. I was so excited to get to be a beautiful angel – and my mother threw a fit and said that separating boys’ and girls’ roles was sexist and that I should be “allowed” to be a shepherd – there were several heated phone conversations and eventually, on Christmas Eve, I was dressed in burlap sacks and made to stand among the boys, while I watched the girls in their sparkly white angel costumes, with fairy wings and tinsel halos and stuff, walking by. I just cried uncontrollably through the whole thing and was unable to sing, even though our song was O Come All Ye Faithful which is still my favorite Christmas carol. The next year, I did not participate in the pageant at all and I just sat with my parents. The next year, and all following years, we were no longer attending church.
I was aware of God and His presence from a very early age – I loved praying, I loved going to church, and I really felt God’s presence in the church – which greatly upset my parents. They were constantly telling me to “stop pretending”, “calm down”, etc. After my parents left the church when I was 5, I did not attend any church again (I was forbidden to, when I lived with my mother) until I was an adult and living with my father. He did not actually allow me to attend church with him right away after they separated and I moved in with him – after I begged, when I was searching for post-abortion healing, he reluctantly let me attend with him sometimes, but he found my crying to be embarrassing and he didn’t like that I took Communion even though I wasn’t confirmed (the Episcopal church had relaxed its rules and allowed any baptized Christian to take Communion in the intervening 15 years). So he had me speak to the minister directly and the minister told me that, having been an atheist, I had no business in a church and I was not welcome there anymore. I was reluctant to try Christianity again for a decade and even now I still face some rejection from people who seem to believe that if God had wanted me to be a good Christian, He would have had me born into and raised by a good Christian family.
FR – You describe in detail the Wiccan/pagan paraphernalia and rituals in the abortion clinic you mother worked at. When did you first become aware of this?
AS – I wasn’t really aware of the Wiccan/pagan things that were going on until my mother got heavily involved in NOW in the Toledo area (including being its vice president in the early 90’s), and I started escorting outside the clinic in 1992. I was really only peripherally aware since I just tried to shut it out as much as possible. I remember seeing goddess statues and art around the clinic, and my mother bringing them into the house, but I didn’t see them as anything except art until a few years after they started to appear.
FR – Was this openly practiced?
AS – It was very openly practiced, nobody was shy about wearing pagan jewelry or clothing, and Christians were treated very scornfully. There was one woman who worked at the clinic and was a liberal Christian, I was friends with her daughter for a while in high school (we were the same age, and both in band at our respective schools), but after a few months she told her daughter to cut off contact with me and she may have stopped working for the clinic as well. She was disturbed by the occult things going on, and her perception of my family’s involvement with it (we did not attend church, and I was perpetually depressed and had a lot of health problems that caused her concern).
FR – Can you describe what happened in some of the rituals?
AS – I was never allowed to participate in a ritual since I did not have an abortion until I was 18 and ‘out of the loop’ (I am not sure if I would have done, if I had been invited), so I don’t know exactly what went on. I learned the general philosophy, but not the specifics of the rituals or ceremonies.
FR – Is abortion really seen as a form of child sacrifice to the goddess or as a “sacrament” among some Wiccans?
AS – It’s impossible to generalize – much like among Christians, Jews, or any other religious group, opinions will vary. Some Christians think abortion is morally acceptable – some even work in the abortion industry. Some Wiccans I’ve known are strongly pro-life, and most of the ones I’ve known or heard of felt that abortion was a tragic thing and should probably not be done except in extreme circumstances. Abortion is definitely celebrated as a sacrament among some goddess-worshippers, though, and I believe those people are particularly concentrated among the abortion industry in the modern world (since that is the venue that will provide them with what they need). Abortion-worship and child-sacrifice is well documented in some books and in the Bible, of course.
FR – You mention a “menstrual extraction party at our house once in 1992” what was that and what was the purpose?
AS – Menstrual extraction is, well, just what it says it is – it uses basic and readily-available equipment to remove the uterine contents by suction immediately before menses are due. This may or may not include a very early pregnancy. I have heard of female athletes, dancers, and actresses having it done regularly in order to not be inconvenienced by a week of bleeding/cramping (but obviously, they’re having it done in a doctor’s office under sterile conditions, with proper anesthesia and monitoring, etc). Technically if it was done after a missed/late period, it would be a suction abortion. Due to the crude nature of the technique (this is now excluding d&c procedures in a medical setting and referring only to the “underground” method), it should be done on the first day of the woman’s expected period, but obviously some women would be having it done later in an illegal abortion situation.
Since there is no curettage being performed as there would be in a typical suction abortion, the chances of missing the pregnancy altogether, or retaining tissue, would be much higher. The technique involves thin flexible tubing which would be inserted into the woman’s cervix after minor dilation, then suction would be applied with a large syringe or low-powered vacuum pump to remove the blood and tissue from her uterus into a receptacle. The equipment would be sterilized by boiling before and after each use, and these are all things that would be reasonably readily available even without access to medical suppliers.
At various times from the 60’s onward I have heard of women gathering in groups to teach/learn this technique or to practice illegal abortion techniques in general (e.g., the “Redstockings” of the early abortion-advocacy movement), and in the 80’s and early 90’s there was an increased interest due to the rise of social conservatism/pro-life with the Reagan and Bush administrations. My mother’s party was held during the ’92 election season when there was a lot of paranoia about Roe v. Wade being overturned or severely crippled if Bush won re-election, especially if there was also a Republican majority elected to one or both houses of Congress. About a dozen women who either worked at the abortion clinic or were involved in the local NOW group (my mother was the chapter VP at the time) met at our house one evening, bringing supplies (mayonnaise jars, aquarium tubing, plastic sheets, towels, etc). My father and I were home when the party began but left partway through after an argument about whether or not I would be required to participate (I was 13 years old at the time).
My mother had been pressuring me about it for weeks, insisting that not only should I have it done at the party (because it would be “useful” to “practice” on a young teenager’s body and because it would make her a “cool mom”) but that I should have it done (by her) every month so I wouldn’t have to be inconvenienced by periods, and so that she would never have to worry about me being pregnant (this despite the fact that I was on the birth control pill, had ready access to condoms, and was abstinent for nearly all of my teen years anyway). I stayed out of the living room after helping set up the plastic sheets and serving drinks and hors d’oeuvres – Dad and I both stayed in the kitchen, keeping the stockpots of water boiling to sterilize equipment, and socializing with anyone who happened to be in there, until the argument, when Dad decided it was time to escape with me for dinner and movies – we came back well after midnight, when everyone was gone and mom was in bed.
I remember the jars of blood starting to stack up in the hall, and a few times when I walked past the doorway I saw naked women on the floor, or couch, either taking their turn at having the procedure done on them or doing it on others, and using some of the blood to draw symbols on each others’ breasts and bellies. (That was the biggest issue for me, I didn’t want to be naked in front of a bunch of other people, even if we were all female, and I was also grossed out by blood.) It was a ritual sort of atmosphere in addition to the party theme, with goddess music playing on the stereo and the clinic owner sort of directing things. She also took the jars of blood with her when she left.
The next day my dad and I folded up the plastic and bloody towels and bagged them, then drove them to a unlocked dumpster behind an office building and threw them in.
FR – What was your reaction to this at the time?
AS – I was young at the time and only peripherally involved, so I wasn’t aware of anything else until I became older and researched the topic a bit more.
FR – In other interviews you give a few examples of goddess worship. You say Kali and Hecate were worshipped. Who are they specifically?
AS – Kali is a Hindu goddess of death, frequently depicted with a necklace of skulls. Her worship included ritual murder and human sacrifice until it was suppressed by the British Empire. Hecate is an ancient Greek goddess, the daughter of Persephone and Hades. She has a long history in European folklore as a goddess of witchcraft and a protectress of witches. Since her father is Death personified, she has a strong association with death. She is also the goddess of crossroads – in other words, of “choices.”
FR – Were there other “goddesses” mentioned by name? Who are they?
AS – The goddesses I heard mentioned by name most commonly were Ashteroth and Tiamat, both ancient Near Eastern goddesses. Ashteroth was associated in the Bible and elsewhere in history with Moloch and the practice of ritual child sacrifice. Tiamat, or the “great dragon,” was said to be the Goddess’s truest and most ancient form. She figures heavily in the Babylonian creation myth, as the masculine sun/warrior deity Marduk murders her and uses her blood and body parts to create the Earth and its inhabitants. The abortion-worshippers said that by “stealing” blood from men by sacrificing their children, they could “feed” Tiamat (as Mother Earth) and help her to regain her power so that she could destroy the male-dominated world and bring about a new spiritual world ruled by women. Diana (a.k.a. Artemis), of course, is the most commonly-worshipped goddess among modern Wiccans and neo-pagans, and she was also mentioned frequently, particularly in her role as virgin huntress – a woman who was independent of men, and who had and used the power to kill.
FR – You say that you believe that the occult believers are the “core” of the pro-abortion movement. Is there evidence of this?
AS – I say that they are the “core” because they are the ones who will stop at nothing to abort their children and any others they can get their hands on. They are the ones who are truly pro-abortion. Most pro-choice people are actually pro-choice, not pro-abortion, and they don’t fully understand the moral issues involved, or they have a slightly warped moral sense. If abortion were outlawed, they might bemoan it, but they would obey the laws. The core – the abortion-worshippers – would not obey the law, just as they did not obey the law prior to Roe v Wade. There were radical feminist groups like the Redstockings, like Margaret Sanger’s Birth Control League, I’m sure countless other unknown local groups, who worked to teach each other abortion techniques and practice abortions on themselves and other women, for hundreds of years.
Abortion would not have been condemned by the Hippocratic Oath, by the Church Fathers, by the Reformers, by countless moral authorities throughout the ages, if it was not being actively practiced in secret all that time. Those techniques, herbs, potions, and so forth were being passed down as folklore – as “witchcraft.” The Biblical injunction to not suffer a witch to live is specifically aimed at the village abortionists. Malleus Maleficarum focuses on abortion as a sign of witchcraft. The hereditary tradition of village witches and wise-women throughout the Middle Ages up to the present day was always centered around potions and remedies to prevent conception or, if that failed, to cause abortion – because, let’s face it, humans have always been morally deficient beings. We fornicate, we commit adultery, and then we try to cover up the evidence of our sin, just as Adam and Eve covered their nakedness with fig leaves. I think it’s not too far of a stretch to associate the cause of Adam and Eve’s fall, with the cause of the other sins and ills of the world, including the present-day tragedy of legal abortion.
FR – How did you become a Christian?
AS – I became a Christian for a number of reasons. The short version is, that I, after years of trying to handle my problems for myself and always falling short, turned to God to sort them out for me – and He’s done a fantastic job so far. I had spent my early years as a Christian and really enjoyed it, only to be told by my mother a few years later that we were done with that and that it was no use looking back. I won’t say that all Christians have always been perfectly wonderful to me, either. It’s easy, when you haven’t faced a particular hardship or stumbling block in your life, to judge and condemn others whose lives and pasts you don’t understand.
At age 30 I came to realize that I had been abused, judged, and ill-treated by Christians, Jews, pagans, and atheists alike – so it was hardly fair to judge any of those belief systems solely on the merits of its believers. I was confronted with a lot of personal tragedies in 2008 and 2009 – loss of fertility, the total silence of both of my parents, a brief separation from my husband, financial problems, and my sons’ diagnoses with autism and other developmental disabilities. It was far, far too much to handle, and I was coming to an increasing realization that rationalistic atheism just wasn’t cutting it.
To be blunt – the value system I was trying to follow, the same one that noted atheists like Richard Dawkins and Peter Singer follow, said that my children should be killed. Not just the ones I had already killed through abortion and birth control, but the two living, breathing, walking-around boys I loved to hold and talk to and play with every day. My loss of fertility was probably for the best, too – for the best of humanity, regardless of how I might feel about it. My genes were defective and had no right to propagate themselves, and my children were “human waste” who, for their own good and everyone else’s, ought to be euthanized. Obviously, this is illegal – and I didn’t want to get rid of them, even if I could have legally dropped them off at the nearest Defective Child Euthanasia Centre – so what was I to do? Worst of all, I was unable to forgive myself or others for past wrongs. There was just no framework for that sort of thing. I was also looking for post-abortion healing, as I began to realize that my psychological problems lined up exactly with post-abortion syndrome. The post-abortion websites were all adamant that healing begins with Jesus, and you must remember that I had been thoroughly brainwashed into believing that Jesus could never be an option for me.
I began reading websites on the subject of conversion from atheism to Christianity – most notably Jennifer Fulwiler’s Conversion Diary Blog – in late 2009. I bought a Bible in early 2010 and started searching for a church that might accept me. Episcopal churches seemed to be out, as the church had changed drastically since I was a small child, and now endorsed a lot of things that I didn’t approve of, such as homosexuality. I broadened my search and found a friendly-seeming evangelical church nearby. I attended one of their services for the first time on the first day of June 2010. The experience was so intense that I, rather unexpectedly, had to run out to the lobby to grab napkins from the coffee table to soak up my tears. I stayed there for a few months but ultimately left due to their opposition to my pro-life work. I am now preparing to be received into the Catholic Church.
This may be an anomaly. I have heard more stories of people who became Christians first and then gradually reconciled themselves to a pro-life view. However, there are a significant number of pro-lifers – and this number is growing – who are not Christian, who are not even religious. My husband is one of them. Certainly, there are enough arguments for the pro-life position from a scientific, medical, and ethical point of view that we don’t need to bring religious arguments into it in order to convince someone. To me, this conversion is more important than the religious one, because it affects more people. With a stroke of a pen, thousands or millions of lives can be saved by tightening restrictions on abortion or outlawing it altogether. The same cannot be said for religious belief – even if outward conformity to a particular religion were legislated, it would not change hearts and minds. That has to be an internal, personal thing. I still feel a bit awkward speaking about my religious conversion and experiences, whereas I can speak very openly about the importance of respect for vulnerable human life.
FR – Some of the clinic workers must have been attached to other occult groups, such as covens or pagan circles. What are some of the names of these people and can you tell some of the names and describe the groups that they were a part of?
AS – As far as I knew, the clinic and its core of staffers was the circle. There was a Zen buddhist temple in Ann Arbor, MI that my mother and a few other clinic workers were affiliated with, but as for the pagan, Wiccan types, I don’t know of any affiliations other than the clinic itself and its practices. I only went to the Buddhist temple once, but I remember being kind of nervous around the woman who was the “priestess.”
FR – This is an abortion clinic in _____?
AS – The clinic I am describing is in Toledo, Ohio.
FR – Is it still going on today at this clinic?
AS – I can’t say. My contact with the clinic ceased in 1996 when my parents separated and I moved away with my dad. My testimony is all from 1991-1996. I have been in recent contact with a pro-life leader in Toledo and she reports that the same people are still in leadership positions at the clinic, and that the clinic owner and doctor were visibly upset in the days after the initial article in WorldNetDaily about me was published.
FR – Do you think someone would make this stuff up? And what would you say up front to skeptics or even Christians who doubt your claim that Wiccan/pagan practices are the spiritual “core” of the abortion industry?
AS – Someone could make anything up, but I don’t see why someone would, when there are perfectly legitimate arguments against abortion from a scientific and ethical perspective, plus moral arguments to be made from religion. This does not necessarily even help the pro-life movement and I have taken some flak from other pro-lifers for bringing it up, because they feel it would hurt the movement. Pro-choicers have nothing to gain from making it up, either, because it makes them look bad, and could easily turn into a real “witch hunt” or set off an already unbalanced person into taking it upon him or herself to attack the “witches.” I suppose it gets me attention, but it’s not all positive by any means and it’s quite stressful to have to bring up and talk about memories that I would rather bury. I had a much nicer time of things before I came out with this information, both in the pro-life movement and in life in general.
There’s also the fact that, to some people, it makes me sound like a crazy person. Unfortunately, the pro-life movement in particular contains a number of well-meaning and devout people who come from very Christian homes and environments, some of them have never known someone who wasn’t at least nominally Christian, and it sounds absurd to them that there are literally people practicing other religions. To those people, I would point out the absurdities and atrocities committed in the name of various religions worldwide. It’s very comfortable for us here in the United States, where we have a Constitution that guarantees religious freedom, and a Christian majority. In other places, young girls are suffering genital mutilation, people are whipped for having premarital sex, people are stoned to death for being suspected homosexuals, and so on. Obviously, some people are going to think I am crazy or lying or both. Some people are going to think YOU are, for making this film. I can’t let that stop me. I’ve actually been to a few different types of counseling, and never been diagnosed with any mental illness other than minor anxiety and sleep problems. Most of those have gone away since my conversion to Christianity.
I would encourage skeptics to examine all the evidence before drawing their conclusions. There is a disturbing tendency in modern culture for people to choose an ideology and then make their experiences conform to it, by shutting out, ignoring, or actively attacking anything that does not fit with their preconceived ideas. I have seen it among atheists when I was one – many of them outright refuse to even look at information about creationism, for instance, because they KNOW it is made up and wrong so there is no point. Now I see the same thing among Christians – many of them refuse to even look at information from a source that is not “Christian.”
I made my decision to follow God after years – really, a lifetime – of study and consideration, including reading about every religion I could find information on. In other words – whatever the topic, be it evolution, abortion, homosexuality, or even cooking – I would encourage everyone to learn as much as they can about an issue before making up their minds – and to be open to change if something convincing comes along. My husband is a pro-life agnostic Jew who has dabbled in new-age activity in the past. He was skeptical of my claims about the abortion industry and witchcraft, but he was open-minded. He said that my statements made sense, but he still held a small amount of doubt – maybe my mother’s group was unique and ALL the other abortionists were just misguided normal people. Then he watched part of your video on YouTube with me. After watching it (with me occasionally pausing to comment, “I’ve seen that statue, book, heard that song, etc.”) He was convinced that the connection is real and is at least somewhat widespread. He was also deeply disturbed.
FR – What you’ve shared, even though it is the whole thesis of The Abortion Matrix presentation, is “far-fetched” to some Christians. Is there a specific “smoking gun” in your experience that proves to skeptics you aren’t just looking for attention.
AS – I wish there was. If I could get my mother to talk, that would be helpful. For obvious reasons, these people want to keep this as secretive as possible. This is why I can’t give a ton of detail, because I was as uninvolved as possible during my teen years and then stayed well away from it all afterward. Initially, I found it to be interesting, but that quickly faded as I saw the problems it caused. My mother’s behavior changed, my parents’ relationship worsened and eventually fell apart, and I began to mourn my loss of the future I had planned for myself – a fairly normal future including marriage – to a man – and children, and – although I hadn’t ever dared to mention it – being a housewife and stay-at-home mom. I resented this strange world that I was being forced into – a seemingly upside-down world where a wedding would be the worst day of a woman’s life, children were a curse, and, although men were hated, the greatest thing a woman could aspire to would be to be just like one.
Noles For Life leader confronts Jacksonville abortionist
Pro-life Awareness Campaign in Jacksonville, Florida
JACKSONVILLE, Florida (www.forerunner.com) – An awareness campaign is an effective strategy that pro-lifers in central Florida and other parts of the country have used for many years. In its most basic form, an awareness campaign is a residential picket letting an abortionist’s neighbors and friends know what he or she does for a living. Beyond picketing, there are literally hundreds of other ways to create awareness. Mailing letters, appearing at the abortionist’s “legitimate” places of business, posting videos and writing internet articles are just some of the legal, peaceful methods of exposure.
FSU Noles For Life leader Matt Ferro confronts Jacksonville abortionist Todd Joseph Rasner.
The Ephesians 5:11 mandate states: “Have nothing to do with the fruitless deeds of darkness, but rather expose them.” Our goal is to let everyone around an abortionist’s daily life know that he kills babies for a living. We also call Christians to lovingly yet firmly confront this sin of child murder and to pray for the abortionists’ conversion as well as those in the pro-abortion community who support them.
In the 1990s, I lived across the street from a notorious abortion clinic in Melbourne, Florida. Some of the local pro-life group used to participate in these awareness campaigns. At first, I thought these were a bit too much – going to the vicinity of abortionists’ and clinic workers’ homes and sometimes upsetting neighbors with large posters of aborted babies.
Shouldn’t we concentrate on the abortion mill itself, which is where the shedding of innocent blood actually occurs?
Then I read from the horse’s mouth that this was one of the most effective “tactics” that the pro-lifers used. Abortion clinic owner Patricia Baird-Windle claimed in her memoir that 24 abortionists quit in as many years that she was in business because they could not bear the exposure by local pro-life activists.
I am not one who places a lot of importance on pro-life “strategies” or “tactics.” What we ought to be concerned about is whether our actions are scripturally based and done out of love. The Bible commands us to love our neighbor as our self. To answer the question of whether exposing an abortionist is a “loving” act of ministry, a few pertinent questions can be asked.
If you had the opportunity to sit down and talk to an abortionist for almost an hour and share the Gospel with him, would you do it?
If your gynecologist was doing abortions in a city three hours away twice a month and I knew about it, would you want me to tell you?
If you are a Bible-believing Christian and you were unknowingly renting a house from an OB-GYN who also kills children for money, would you want to know who you are writing a rent check to each month?
If you are a Christian who donates money to Baptist charities, would you want to know that the Florida Baptist Hospital has an abortionist on staff?
All this and more was accomplished at this week’s awareness campaign in Jacksonville, Florida.
We went to Jacksonville on Monday, December 23, 2013, with a small cadre of Christians to gently and lovingly make this known to Todd Joseph Rasner’s patients, a tenant at a home he owns and to patients at the Florida Baptist Medical Center where he has staff privileges.
According to Florida State University student and Noles For Life president, Matt Ferro, Todd Rasner has been driving three hours from Jacksonville to Tallahassee every other Sunday to do abortions at the city’s only surgical abortion center, North Florida Women’s Health. (“Noles” is the abbreviated form of FSU’s mascot, the Seminoles.)
We will continue the awareness campaign until Todd Rasner quits doing abortions. Beyond the impact that is seen in the video, I enjoy doing these campaigns because I am always amazed and surprised by God’s presence. It is easy as a Christian to become “functionally agnostic.” This can occur as we know the Word of God, but do not often do the will of God, which is the work of spreading the Gospel’s Truth to every area of human life.
Every campaign is different and never repetitious or boring. This one was significant in that we each had to travel several hours. We began with just four people. We had tried to get some of the Jacksonville pro-life ministries involved, but had no immediate success. On the day of the campaign, however, one of the pro-life activists in the city drove by and spent about 30 minutes with us on the sidewalk.
Since the local pro-life group did not know about Todd Rasner, we are assuming that he does not want to be known to his Jacksonville patients as an abortionist at any of the four local abortion centers. Therefore, he drives three hours to another city. when he performs abortions. He has been, in effect, hiding in plain sight for many years. Our contention is that many abortionists who also maintain “legitimate” OB-GYN practices fear the exposure that such awareness campaigns bring them.
This was the first campaign in which the abortionist himself responded by spending almost an hour with Noles For Life leader Matt Ferro in his office. The highlights of this conversation consisted of Rasner explaining that what we are doing will not affect his OB-GYN business and that each of the doctors on staff with him have also performed abortions. Earlier, one of his patients had said that if what we were saying was true, she would quit coming to Rasner’s practice.
The abortionist Todd Rasner himself responded by spending almost an hour with Noles For Life leader Matt Ferro in his office.
Rasner also tried to rationalize that he would never perform second term or late term abortions. He claimed that the only reason he was helping North Florida Women’s Health is that he is afraid that a less scrupulous abortionist might take over if he decided to leave.
According to Matt Ferro, Rasner mentioned Orlando abortionist James Pendergraft by name as one of the “sicker ones” he fears might take over in his absence. Nevertheless, he claimed that this arrangement is probably short term. He might soon stop traveling to Tallahassee. Ferro made it clear that he wanted to help him make that decision sooner than later.
From there we traveled about ten minutes to a home owned by Todd Rasner. Within a few minutes of arriving, the tenant who was renting his house pulled into the gated community. The look of shock on her face was apparent. She told us that she has always opposed abortion and is an outspoken Christian witness.
The look of shock on her face was apparent.
Our job being done, we left her with information and moved on to the Florida Baptist Medical Center where Rasner has staff privileges. There two hospital security guards told us that they personally agreed with what we were doing, but we needed to stay on public property, which then oddly shrunk after a visit from a second security guard.
At the end of the day, we realized that our little Gideon band of just five people had accomplished more than what we’ve done with larger groups at other campaigns. This is due to the grace of God, who alone deserves all the praise, honor and glory!
The Four Keys to the Millennium (Book)
Foundations in Biblical Eschatology
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All Christians believe that their great God and Savior, Jesus Christ, will one day return. Although we cannot know the exact time of His return, what exactly did Jesus mean when he spoke of the signs of His coming (Mat. 24)? How are we to interpret the prophecies in Isaiah regarding the time when “the earth will be full of the knowledge of the LORD as the waters cover the sea” (Isa. 11:19)? Should we expect a time of great tribulation and apostasy or revival and reformation before the Lord returns? Is the devil bound now, and are the saints reigning with Christ? Did you know that there are four hermeneutical approaches to the book of Daniel and Revelation?
These and many more questions are dealt with by four authors as they present the four views on the millennium. Each view is then critiqued by the other three authors.
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Amazing Grace: The History and Theology of Calvinism (DVD)
Download the Free Study Guide!
Just what is Calvinism?
Does this teaching make man a deterministic robot and God the author of sin? What about free will? If the church accepts Calvinism, won’t evangelism be stifled, perhaps even extinguished? How can we balance God’s sovereignty and man’s responsibility? What are the differences between historic Calvinism and hyper-Calvinism? Why did men like Augustine, Luther, Calvin, Spurgeon, Whitefield, Edwards and a host of renowned Protestant evangelists embrace the teaching of predestination and election and deny free will theology?
This is the first video documentary that answers these and other related questions. Hosted by Eric Holmberg, this fascinating three-part, four-hour presentation is detailed enough so as to not gloss over the controversy. At the same time, it is broken up into ten “Sunday-school-sized” sections to make the rich content manageable and accessible for the average viewer.
Running Time: 257 minutes
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Go Stand Speak (DVD)
With “preaching to the lost” being such a basic foundation of Christianity, why do many in the church seem to be apathetic on this issue of preaching in highways and byways of towns and cities?
Is it biblical to stand in the public places of the world and proclaim the gospel, regardless if people want to hear it or not?
Does the Bible really call church pastors, leaders and evangelists to proclaim the gospel in the public square as part of obedience to the Great Commission, or is public preaching something that is outdated and not applicable for our day and age?
These any many other questions are answered in this documentary.
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Abortion Clinic 911 Calls (DVD)
Exposes the Dangers of Abortion to Women!
These shocking eyewitness accounts expose the dangers of abortion not only to unborn children, but to the health and lives women as well. An antidote to the smokescreens of the liberal media, these short clips show what really happens in and around abortion clinics.
Although the content is emotionally gut-wrenching, these videos have been used in church seminars and small groups to educate Christians on the abortion issue and to lead people toward a pro-life position. Contains 2 hours and 40 minutes of materials that can be shown separately.
Watch these pro-life videos on-line.
“These videos helped change my mind from pro-choice to pro-life. Your videos are what did it for me. I will be walking in next year’s March For Life in San Francisco.” — A. Jackson, California
“I was going to have an abortion until I saw your video. Praise Jesus!”
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A Revival Account: Asbury 1970 (DVD)
What is true Revival and Spiritual Awakening?
Discover the answer in this eyewitness account by Dennis Kinlaw, President of Asbury College, Wilmore, Kentucky, who recounts the story of a visitation of the Holy Spirit in 1970. This is the presentation that has continued to spark the flames of Revival in the hearts of people around the world. Contains eyewitness footage from the Revival at Asbury College in 1970 in Wilmore, Kentucky.
Certain to challenge you to greater holiness and a deeper commitment to full-scale revival. Original news and private footage has been included. If you are a student who longs to see a spiritual awakening at your school, you must see this video!
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Running Time: 40 minutes
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