Pro-life advocates use county fair booth to share message
There are children and even teenagers today who probably don’t know that they owe their lives to a booth at the San Mateo County Fair.
For two decades, passersby at the San Mateo County Fair have seen booth workers dedicated to ending abortion. Members of the 30-year-old group, San Mateo Pro-Life, use the opportunity afforded by the large gathering to spread their message to those who might not ordinarily hear it.
Cheryl Amalu, SMPL board member and mother of six, told Catholic San Francisco the booth work is both rewarding and challenging. Ultimately, she said, the message is paramount.
“We witness to the reality of what pre-born life is, what it looks like,” said Amalu, a member of St. Gregory Parish in San Mateo. “It’s not a blob of nothing.” The group displays fetal models showing the development of an unborn child from the embryonic stage to seven months. Amalu said the models are particularly popular with pregnant mothers and young children. The group gives away models of a 12-week fetus.
One example of the models’ impact is especially memorable for Amalu. A man came to the booth and asked for a model, she said, explaining that he had picked up one the previous year. He told Amalu he had shown the model to a young woman considering an abortion, an abortion she did not have as a result.
“Every year it’s gotten more and more positive,” Amalu said.
Fellow SMPL member Mary Beaudry said her experience this year was also positive. A woman whom Beaudry said was in her 60s came to the booth and thanked her for the work she was doing. The woman told her that at 17 she had almost aborted her daughter, but her pregnancy was too far along. She gave the child up for adoption. The daughter later found her and the two became close. The woman told Beaudry she now has two grandchildren and was grateful for having chosen life. “It’s terrible to end a child’s life without giving them a chance,” Beaudry said. Fifteen years ago Beaudry was an admitting clerk at a clinic. Early in the job, she was asked to admit a girl seeking an abortion.
Beaudry found a brief opportunity to be alone with the girl and tried to persuade her not to have the abortion. When the nurses and doctors found out about Beaudry’s attempt to derail the procedure, she was sternly reprimanded.
Then a woman burst through the clinic door and started yelling at the nurses, the doctor and at the girl whom Beaudry had tried to counsel. The girl was the woman’s daughter. The distressed mother took the girl by the hand and led her out of the clinic.
“I don’t know who was crying more, me or the mother,” Beaudry said. “I often wonder about what happened to them.”
Beaudry quit the job, went back to school and now works as a nurse in rehabilitative medicine.
Retired doctor and SMPL member Eugene Bleck said pro-life ideas are decidedly foreign to the dominant medical culture in America. Still, he said, there is no logical alternative to the pro-life position.
“The whole person is formed at the time of conception,” said Bleck, a parishioner at St. Bartholomew Parish in San Mateo. “Everything you are and hope to be is fixed in the cells very early in the first weeks of pregnancy.”
Bleck said his background in pediatric orthopedic surgery made him particularly mindful of the struggles of the disabled, many of whom are aborted in the womb simply because they are disabled.
“If you look historically at the Nazi doctors, the program that led to the extermination of the Jews started as a eugenics program, getting rid of the ‘unfit,’” Bleck said, likening the present situation with that faced in the 1930s and 1940s. “It’s quite a scandal that a doctor would support that. How a doctor could is beyond me.”
Beaudry said while working at the booth this year, she encountered a woman whose story illustrated the modern-day eugenics movement. The woman, now middle-aged, told Beaudry that as a newly married and expecting mother, her doctor recommended she obtain an abortion because he believed her child was mentally disabled.
The diagnosis was based on a uterine test that showed an abnormally high protein count. The doctor recommended performing the abortion immediately, but the woman refused. She wanted to wait for the results of the sonogram. Those results revealed that the woman was not carrying one mentally disabled child, but healthy twins.
SMPL chair Jessica Munn said the group looks for opportunities to present the pro-life message. In addition to their work at the fair, SMPL has had booths at the public colleges in San Mateo County and has done outreach at Hillsdale Mall in San Mateo.
Echoing other SMPL members, Munn said negative reactions to the group’s efforts have waned.
“Years ago, people would come by occasionally and start arguing, some vociferously,” Munn said. “My husband always liked that, because he said it gets boring otherwise.”
Munn said she has seen a marked increase in the number of pro-life people responding to the booth. She also said the resources the group hands out go quickly, particularly the fetal models.
“We went through 500 fetal models in two days,” Munn said. “The 500 cost us $225, but it’s worth it if it saves even one life.”
For more information about San Mateo Pro-Life, contact Jessica Munn at (650) 572-1468 or themunns@yahoo.com.
(By Michael Vick)
