Pictures that save lives

Thanks to ultrasound technology, parents today routinely see their unborn children waving their hands or sucking their thumbs inside the womb. More and more pregnancy care centers are using the technology to empower women to bond with their babies and choose life.

Now, with the help of the Knights of Columbus, the archdiocese�s Respect Life Ministry has acquired two ultrasound machines for two of its five pregnancy care centers.

The Knights� St. Katherine Drexel Council 14212 donated the ultrasound machine for the North Broward Pregnancy Care Center, 5115 Coconut Creek Parkway in Margate; and the Miami Council 1726 has raised more than $20,000 for the ultrasound project at the Sunset Pregnancy Care Center, 9360 Sunset Drive, Miami.

The work is part of a national Ultrasound Project put in place by the Knights in 2009, on the 36th anniversary of Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court case that legalized abortion. As part of the program, the national organization matches funds raised by local Knights to provide medically certified pro-life centers with funding for the purchase of ultrasound machines.

But the money to purchase the machine is only half the battle, said Joan Crown, archdiocesan director of the Respect Life Ministry. Additional funding is required to fully implement the program. 

�Now that we have got a tool to actually show the women their child, we are going to need ongoing donations to hire ultrasound technicians and maintain supplies,� Crown said.

By law, an ultrasound must be operated under the direction and supervision of a licensed physician. Use of the technology also must comply with local, state and national laws and meet national standards as defined by the American Institute of Ultrasound Medicine.

The launch of the ultrasound program in the archdiocese will depend on what the ministry can afford to pay the technicians. 

�Ideally, we would like to have technicians available whenever we are open, especially on a Saturday morning when we are praying in front of an abortion mill. If sidewalk counselors do convince a girl to come over to our center, we would like to be able to show her the baby right away,� Crown said. 

The ultrasounds will not be diagnostic. They will be performed to confirm pregnancy. Currently, the Respect Life centers offer pregnancy tests which cannot confirm whether or not women are pregnant � only whether or not they have a positive or negative pregnancy test. 

The machines also are equipped with a vaginal probe, another device used to monitor the growth of the embryo � and a good way to capture the image of the child in its early stage of development. 

�Usually, someone is not going to come to you until they are three to four weeks pregnant, because they have to wait a couple of weeks to be sure they have missed a period, so the vaginal probe should pick up the child at that point and is even more accurate than the over-the-belly type of ultrasound, but we will have both. How and who we offer which type to will be up to the doctor who is overseeing the operation and the technician,� said Crown.

Legislation passed this year in Florida requires all abortion providers to perform an ultrasound to confirm the gestation of the child in order to determine the abortion method that is safest for the woman. 

This law also requires abortion providers to offer the mother an opportunity to see her child. 

�Now she can decline � no one can force her to look � but the abortion provider is now required to offer the opportunity to see the image,� Crown said.

The question of who will enforce this in the abortion centers remains unclear. Crown�s opinion is that the law will be very loosely enforced because nobody will be standing there watching. 

But, she added, it will just take one court case involving a woman who says, �I wish I had seen my child. Nobody offered me the opportunity to see,� to start prosecuting people for not following the law.

Either way, Crown said, the new law is a step in the right direction. 

�In any other surgical procedure that we have performed we sign off on different documents to make sure that we understand what is happening,� said Crown. �Here we have abortion � an invasive surgical procedure � and we don�t do any of that. If this is supposed to be a legitimate medical procedure then why are we not following the same rule that we have to do with everything else?�

�Abortion is chosen with very little information,� Crown continued. �So, in order to make an informed choice, one has to be educated on what abortion is � what it does to the child, what it does to the mother, and what it does to the father and mother relationship.�

That�s what the Respect Life ministry�s trained counselors, with their compassionate listening skills and knowledge of fetal development, offer the women who come into the pregnancy care centers. 

With the ultrasound machine and the new law, Crown expects that many more lives will be saved. 

�It�s going to be one more tool in our arsenal of helping the mother to bond with her unborn child,� she said. 

As far as money is concerned, she added, �We believe that God will provide in some way, because I do believe people see there is a need for this modern tool that is going to help us save a lot of children�s lives.�