“We do battle here.”

I was standing with Beverly Oswalt, Marketing and Communications Coordinator for Elizabeth’s New Life Center in Ohio looking eastward out the large window in the prayer chapel at ENLC’s Women’s Center on Stroop Road in the Dayton suburb, Kettering. The view was grim. Directly across the street stood an abortion center owned by Martin Haskell, the doctor infamous for being the first to scientifically describe — after performing more than 700 of them himself — the most grisly of all abortion procedures, partial-birth abortion. I felt like I was gazing out on Abortion Ground Zero.

We were joined there by Center manager Jennifer Ellis, who along with Oswalt had set aside part of her morning to tell me about ENLC, its heart and its services. I was impressed by their joyful sense of mission. Ellis said, “The Lord calls us. I still can’t believe I get to work here. … To watch God orchestrate the ministry is just amazing: volunteers, donors, and watching the women come through here and decide to carry their babies.” Oswalt added, “We don’t just work here to have a job.”

Their Stroop Road location is no accident. Elizabeth’s New Life Center was founded 28 years ago by Vivian Koob, who was dismayed at the presence of an abortion clinic on Main Street in Dayton, and wanted to provide women a nearby alternative for life. The Main Street abortion center has since closed, and so has the ENLC women’s center there, but since then ENLC, like many other crisis pregnancy centers nationwide, has sought to open new centers near other abortion providers. Their Sharonville (Cincinnati) Women’s Center is likewise located directly across the street from another Martin Haskell-founded abortion center.

And so they stand as centers for life, daily looking death in the eye and doing battle for life through prayer, through teaching truth, and by showing love.

Prayer

Beverly Oswalt explained their prayer focus this way:

There’s battle in this room as you pray. We’re faith-based. Some religions do and don’t study about warfare and our fight is not against flesh and blood but against principalities … we don’t see the abortion providers as evil; it’s about warfare and they’re deceived by principalities of darkness. That’s why I say when you walk into this room you feel a spiritual battle coming at you through that window. When you’re sitting here praying, you feel it. We’re praying against the evil of murder.

Jennifer Ellis added, “When I lead prayer here with our staff I pray that the women going in for an abortion will feel the evil over there and come across the street and feel the love here.”

Teaching Truth

That prayer gets answered. Sometimes, surprisingly, someone at the abortion clinic will sense that a woman isn’t quite sure she’s ready to abort her child, and will refer her to the ENLC. Other times women will come to the ENLC office thinking they’re showing up at the abortion clinic for their appointment. “But my GPS brought me right here!” ENLC staff members ask them, “Have you been looking for reasons not to have an abortion?” Often the answer is yes. They call these women “right-placers” — they’ve come to the right place.

One right-placer came in and said, “I can’t have any more children, I already have two kids. I have an appointment.” Ellis told her they didn’t have an appointment on the schedule under her name; then she asked and found out the young woman hadn’t seen a doctor yet for her pregnancy, so she offered to take her straight back for an ultrasound. “The woman agreed,” she said, “and found out she was already in the third trimester. Had she gone to the abortion center she couldn’t legally have had an abortion but she would have wasted a lot of money. But she left excited about having another child.”

Another woman was on her way to the abortion clinic when the father showed up and said, “No! Don’t do that!” They walked across the street to the crisis pregnancy center, received a pregnancy test and ultrasound and left excited to have the child.

“There’s lots of tunnel vision,” explained Ellis. “We try to open their eyes to not just this day but the future; to look five years down the road: ‘If you carry this pregnancy you just move past the here and now, and if you do in five years you’ll have a beautiful child getting ready to start kindergarten.’ We’ll often tell them just to slow down and think.”

She went on to say, “I’ve had clients who have no faith background, but I can explain them them scientifically it’s life they’re carrying, and if there’s any part of you that’s not sure about this, if you have any reservations at all, remember you’ll have to live with your decision. You’ll always have been pregnant. It doesn’t just go away because you terminate the pregnancy. And abortion has long-term effects on women much like PTSD.”

Showing Love

ENLC’s broad range of family and parenting services includes counseling for women who have already had abortions. Ellis explained, “Our post-abortion counseling comes from a place of love: it’s about forgiveness, forgiving self and experiencing forgiveness from God. I love to point women to Psalm 139, where it says, “You knew all my days and all my days were written in your book before one of them came to be.” I remind them that passage isn’t just about the baby but about them; that ‘God loves you so intimately that he allowed you to come to us today and learn the truth.’” ENLC’s training for staff members is called “The Love Approach” (from Heartbeat International).

Underlying their entire conversation was a strong sense of God-given purpose, mission, and (again) love. In fact I left my interview there with an enlarged understanding of the meaning of “pro-life.” Sure, it’s about saving babies, first and foremost. So far in 2016 more than 400 young lives have been saved at the Stroop Road Women’s Center, and five times that many among all ENLC locations combined. But it’s more than that. Elizabeth’s New Life Center and its staff exude life in all kinds of ways, through joy, love and even hope in the face of darkness.

Across the Street

When our conversation ended I walked across the street, wondering what it was like over there. A small group of pro-life protesters, unaffiliated with ENLC, stood on the sidewalk, as they do day after day. A “No Trespassing” sign in the flower bed near the front door discouraged me from approaching the clinic. And if that wasn’t enough, an armed security guard walked up and informed me politely but firmly that the sign applied to the parking lot as well. I was not welcome there.

I said earlier that I felt like I had come to Abortion Ground Zero. It’s true that that’s how I felt: the evil on that side of the street was palpable. There’s a larger truth, though, which is that every abortion clinic is ground zero for the baby whose mother brings him or her there.

Not every crisis pregnancy center looks death in the eye the same way this one does. Not every one of them is situated across the street from a Martin Haskell abortion mill. Still, the same battle going on there on Stroop Road takes place in communities across the country: a battle against death and against evil, carried out through prayer, through the teaching of truth, and through showing love.