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Here’s one thing that pro-life and pro-choice people apparently agree about: a woman who is fully aware of what she’s doing is less likely to abort her baby. That agreement is why Planned Parenthood and other ardently pro-abortion businesses strenuously oppose informed consent, parental consent, and pre-abortion sonograms. Of course that is also why pro-life advocates very much favor laws that require women to receive complete information about the life she is thinking of ending. The statistics indicate that 70-80 percent of abortion-minded women who see sonogram results before an abortion will choose to let their babies live. That’s still a choice, isn’t it? Those who profit from abortion consider it an unacceptable choice. For the abortion industry, those women represent a loss of 80 percent of potential customers. For pregnancy resource centers, those choices represent women who are unscarred from having an abortion, AND children who live and grow up to have kids of their own.
That’s where the Psalm 139 Project came from. The Southern Baptist Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission has raised money for and placed sonogram machines in cities all across the country. More recently, the focus has been on the cities in which the Southern Baptist Convention meets each year. In 2011, Psalm 139 placed a machine in the Phoenix area; last year, a portable machine was place in the New Orleans area. This year’s SBC meeting is in Houston. The intent of Psalm 139 leadership is to place a sonogram machine that city. The location chosen is Mission Greenspoint.
Mission Greenspoint is a human needs ministry supported by several Houston area churches including Houston’s First, Metropolitan, Houston, Spring Baptist, Champion Forest of Houston, and Fallbrook, Houston. They provide the normal services: counseling, feeding, a clothes closet and assistance for those seeking employment. The pregnancy center built into Mission Greenspoint is within a short radius of several abortion providers, including one of the largest abortion franchises in the country. Their community is poor and the clientele of the pregnancy center there is 40 percent high school dropouts. We’ve got to imagine that the cluster of abortion providers in a poor neighborhood is there because the customers are there. A pregnancy resource center that depends heavily on donations and volunteers—that doesn’t make a profit—is there with a completely different motive. An average seven to nine people each month accept Christ as a result of someone at the pregnancy center sharing the gospel. I’ve often seen the stats and heard the testimonies of those who confess Christ in a pregnancy resource center and wonder, pound for pound, what else we do that has better evangelistic results.
I hope that Mission Greenspoint will have an increased flow of clients as a result of expanding its services to providing sonograms.
Perhaps they can cut more deeply into the nasty commerce being done at local abortion clinics. That’s our hope and that’s why this is a good investment.
Would you or your church be able to contribute to the Psalm 139 project? If so you can go to psalm139project.org or contact the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission at 901 Commerce, Nashville, Tenn., 37203. Because the Cooperative Program provides all the administrative support for Psalm 139 through the ERLC, 100 percent of your gifts will go to place a sonogram machine where it will do the most good.
Our goal this year is raise funds so that we may build up the ministry of Mission Greenspoint’s Pregnancy Assistance Center in time for the SBC meeting in June. I’m convinced that our support for this ministry will result not only in children who will live because their mothers saw them in the womb but also those who will live forever because of the gospel ministry of the center. Rarely does the intersection of social ministry and evangelism meet so perfectly as it does in a Christian pregnancy center. Few ministries deserve our enthusiastic support more than these.
