After a fortnight touring the Eastern Seaboard, a Missouri family of nine visited about 20 claims in just over 30 days and took some of the country’s most illegal abortion state. This week, they returned home.
Brian Westbrook, professional chairman of the pro- life volunteer Coalition Life, set out with his family in late May, inspired by David Bereit, the today- retired founder of 40 Days for Life, who visited 89 sites in 40 days with his wife and children during the organization’s primary campaign in 2007.
” It was a huge task in front of them… to support these people on the ground,” Westbrook said. ” ]Bereit’s ] last season at 40 Days, he did another tour and visited all 50 states”.
The family traveled from Missouri to Florida, all the way up the coast to New York, documenting their journey with daily videos and feature interviews with pregnancy resource professionals, Students for Life leaders, and other pro-life activists.
First and foremost, the Westbrooks wanted to incorporate their children, ranging in age from 16 to just under 1 into the tour, providing a powerful testimony as they prayed outside dozens of abortion facilities.
” Secondarily, we wanted to tell the stories of the people who are on the ground”, Westbrook said. Many unsung heroes lack the capacity or ability to produce videos that highlight their stories. So we wanted to do that. Thirdly, we wanted to look through the various post-Dobbs challenges in each state and how we could contribute to that as well.”
‘ Devastation’ on the Eastern Seaboard
As a midwestern family with a midwestern background, it’s easy to look at the hundreds of dots on a map representing abortion facilities, Westbrook said.
” To go and visit these places and see the devastation that is happening on the Eastern Seaboard is a whole other thing,” he said.
This was particularly alarming for the Westbrooks in Boston, where the medical establishment has allowed access to the procedure in nearly all hospitals.
” This has been the goal of the abortion industry for over 50 years”, Westbrook said. ” To have abortion being fully accepted as legitimate health care by the medical community and the hospitals.”
The family also saw that several “run- of- the- mill” cities had generated some of the most contentious, high- profile abortion court cases.
” We were surprised by the sites that have attracted national attention, such as the Mark Houck case in Philadelphia and the significant buffer zone case at Planned Parenthood,” said Westbrook. ” They seem like normal, nothing special locations. It demonstrates that these incidents could have taken place anywhere.
Creating a Ground Game Map
” Pro- life people around the country have one very common theme: joy”, Westbrook said. They are enthusiastic about life and think it’s our responsibility to properly manage the resources that God has given us. Some pro-life advocates have spoken to people who are depressed by the Dobbs decision and the subsequent repercussions from individual state local struggles. However, there are so many people who are excited about the lives being saved by Roe‘s overturn.
On the other hand, they also observed a common theme among pro-choice activists who they encountered. ” Mean, vulgar, and uncaring”, Westbrook observed. That seems absurd because Planned Parenthood claims to care about women no matter what, but it does n’t seem to care anything more than rushing a woman into an abortion facility.
Westbrook has plans to expand Coalition Life, a professional sidewalk counseling nonprofit, nationwide, and the density of abortion facilities on the East Coast also inspired the family’s decision to map the Eastern Seaboard.
” High volume, that’s where a professional model of sidewalk counseling works the best”, Westbrook said. ” It’s kind of a sad fact. We’re looking for locations with the busiest traffic to work with nearby pregnancy centers that are willing to do so.
Westbrook claimed that understanding and mapping the actual ground game required was another benefit of visiting these abortion facilities in person.
” Being able to travel to those various locations and comprehend what the real ground game is, in these different states, required us to actually visit these physical locations and abortion facilities.”
The faces the Westbrooks have captured provide a crucial look at the activism of activists on the ground in pro-life America.
” In a post- Covid world somehow everything’s virtual … but we wanted to make real, human connections with real people”, Westbrook said. It was” about seeing the people,” according to the author,” and it was a look at what was happening on the ground that Google Maps and Google Street View could n’t provide.”
Ashley Bateman blogs for Ascension Press and writes for The Heartland Institute about policy. Her work has been featured in The Washington Times, The Daily Caller, The New York Post, The American Thinker and numerous other publications. She previously held positions as an adjunct scholar for The Lexington Institute and as an editor, writer, and photographer for The Warner Weekly, a publication for the German-speaking American military community in Bamberg. A Catholic homeschool cooperative in Virginia has Ashley on the board. Along with her brilliant engineer/scientist husband, she educates four of her incredible children at home.