Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, September 19, 1993 TAG: 9309190038
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: B-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: CODY LOWE STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
The quip came lightly from her lips, but it was a jest with an edge to it. Though she's quick to smile in casual conversation, when she's rapid-firing her verbal barrages against the "abortion industry," there's not much room for levity.
Everett is a former part-owner of two abortion clinics who now is well-known on the anti-abortion lecture circuit. She's the featured speaker at this year's fund-raising banquets for the Crisis Pregnancy Center of Roanoke Valley.
About 450 people attended the first banquet at the Roanoke Airport Marriott hotel last night, and another 450 will pack the banquet room for a 1 p.m. luncheon today. The Christian-oriented center offers pregnancy testing and counseling, specifically aimed at encouraging women with unwanted pregnancies to select alternatives other than abortion.
Though she expresses confidence that one day abortions will be unacceptable, Everett acknowledges that the anti-abortion movement faces serious difficulties.
"We're not going to win in the Oval Office or the Supreme Court," Everett said in an interview before Saturday evening's banquet. For the movement to be successful, she said, people's minds have to be changed about the acceptability of the procedure.
The anti-abortion movement has been almost exclusively "reactive," Everett said, "never leading the way." That's a situation she believes must change for the movement to be more effective.
"We've got to plan and carry through our plans . . . take the offensive."
That means mobilizing anti-abortion Christians and finding money to help fund the effort.
Since crisis pregnancy centers generally don't charge for their counseling or testing services, they must rely on donations - mostly from individuals and churches - to pay their costs.
The Roanoke Valley center - with its $160,000 annual budget - is one of the largest in the country, Everett said. Yet its monthly budget is less than what Everett made in the last month she was involved in providing abortions 10 years ago.
She already had experienced a religious conversion that she says was leading her to question her involvement in abortions, she said, but "God used Channel 4" - a Dallas/Fort Worth television station - to help her make up her mind to quit.
The station ran an expose of the clinics in which it accurately reported that they had offered an abortion to a woman who was not pregnant and were using a man who was not a licensed physician to perform the abortions.
Everett left the clinics a few days later and eventually turned over the proceeds from their sale to a "fund used to help women with problem pregnancies."
She said she was astonished, though, that the publicity - even though it was negative - actually seemed to improve business.
As time passed, she said, she was even more amazed that "not one city, state or federal official ever investigated" the allegations of the news story. Though the practices were unethical, they apparently were not illegal, she said.
In speaking engagements around the country and in her literature, Everett has condemned the entire system of abortion clinics as unregulated, uncaring, unprincipled and dangerous.
Mary Nottingham, director of the Roanoke Valley's only abortion clinic - Roanoke Medical Center for Women, has denied that her clinic is run the way Everett ran hers.
If clinics were not safe, they would be classified as "a public health menace and be shut down," Nottingham said.
All patients at the Roanoke clinic are required to have a pregnancy test and receive counseling "to be sure they are not being coerced into an abortion by a husband or boyfriend or parent," Nottingham said.
Contrary to the allegations of critics, Nottingham said, clients are told about the possibility of adoption and that financial and other help is available to women who choose to continue their pregnancies.
Nottingham said women are told what will happen to them during the abortion procedure and are advised about birth control. Photographs of fetal development are available and are shown to clients "if they ask," Nottingham said.
Everett and most leaders of the anti-abortion movement nevertheless contend that there is no way to confirm the operations of most clinics, which they say are less regulated than "barbers, cosmetologists, restaurants and veterinary clinics."
In the end, however, it's not regulation but the eventual elimination of abortion that Everett and the supporters of the Crisis Pregnancy Center hope to see.
Information released at the Saturday banquet indicated the center had seen 606 clients, of whom 184 were pregnant, in the first half of this year. The clinic received more than 1,000 phone calls related to its services.
Some 41 percent of clients are between the ages of 15 and 19; another 35 percent are between 20 and 24. Only 2 percent were under 15. Just over two-thirds of their clients were white and most - 68 percent - were single.
In addition to pregnancy testing and counseling, the center offers childbirth classes, used maternity and baby clothing, used baby furniture, post-abortion counseling, some transportation and housing assistance, and sexuality and abstinence counseling.
by CNB