GT interviews Dallas Kornelsen, part of Many Rooms Church Community, an EMC house church group in Winnipeg, and a staff member at Crisis Pregnancy Centre of Winnipeg.

Transcript

Growing Together: Hello, my name is Erica Fehr. I’m the Director of Communication and Administration in the EMC office and I’m speaking today with Dallas Kornelsen. Dallas is part of the Many Rooms Church Community, an EMC house church in Winnipeg. And he is also with the Crisis Pregnancy Centre and he’ s been there for many years. We’re talking today about abortion. We’re talking today about what brings a woman in to the CPC for counselling. We’ll talk about the approach counsellors take and why they’ve chosen that and we’re also going to talk about what happens if the CPCs lose their charitable status. Thank you for joining me today Dallas.

Can you tell me your title again?

Dallas Kornelsen:  Umm, I'm the Community Education Coordinator at CPC.

GT:  Okay. One thing that occurred to me after we talked was that I was wondering why…I don't mean, sorry, this may come off badly, but I'm curious, why they have hired a man to do community education on the topic of abortion?

DK:  Ah, I don't do community education on the topic of abortion at all. I talk about healthy sexuality and so mostly it's abstinence and talking a lot about pornography as well, and just encouraging kids to make good sexual choices. So, I guess I'm almost the preventative outreach for our centre, talking about just making good sexual choices.

GT:  OK, thank you, that clears that up. I was curious after the fact.

DK:  For sure.

GT:  All right. Can you just tell me a little bit about yourself, a little bit about what you do and then we'll dive into the questions.

DK:  My name is Dallas Kornelsen and I am the Community education coordinator at the Crisis Pregnancy Centre of Winnipeg. I've been here about 13 years and my principal job is to talk to kids about healthy sexuality to encourage them to make good choices based on God's truth. But I do fill a variety of other roles here at the centre as well.

GT: Thank you, OK, that's great. And just to say I've been down to your centre just earlier this week to talk to you to meet some of the other staff, the counselors; the counselors are all women, right?

DK:  We have… all the counselors are women, yes.

GT:  Okay, which makes a lot of sense to me and you said then that your staff had a combined experience of how many years was it?

DK:  Oh, that's a good question. I should have double checked it is it is nearly, it is well over 100 years. The staff members who have been here have a lot of longevity and so we have a lot of experience in our missionary staff team.

GT:  Okay that's terrific, it's a good thing. Abortion has been in the news a lot in the US and in Canada. And, uh, you have been around a long time, so this is something that I think it's important that you are able to speak to some of the issues and specifically what crisis pregnancy centres are doing. Some of the information that you sent out suggests that you walk a bit of a tightrope. on the one hand, you do have a preferred outcome regarding pregnancies, but you try to take a non-judgmental approach and you are supportive of the woman. Can you explain a little bit, your approach and how you arrived at it.

DK:  Sure, that's a great question, Erica. So we see that our clients realize that abortion could be a solution to their problem of unwanted pregnancies, but it seems to us that it's not the one she most often longs for. We hope we can connect with this deep longing that our client has to keep her child cutting through all of the competing voices that may be encouraging her to abort. Kind of this respectful non-judgmental approach that we have we feel is our best hope at connecting with our clients perceived or her desire to keep her child. But it also leaves the door open in the future if she say does have an abortion and wants to come back when she recognizes that she may need some healing, so during our centres’ almost I guess 40 years of existence and I guess it's been 37 years to be exact, we've always used this foundational counseling model called “responsible for and responsible to”, and like I said, it's foundational. We base all of our counseling around this very simple model. And so I've kind of written it out for you guys 'cause I didn't want to get the wording wrong and I'll read it to you as we explain it on our website. So in a summary, “…we believe that it's inappropriate to try and take responsibility for someone. By this we mean that a client's decisions must always be her decision. The client must be responsible for her own choices. After all, she's the one who's living her own life. At the centre we have the responsibility for being, ummm, or we have the obligation of being responsible to the client. We have the duty to be honest and compassionate and to help the client non-judgmentally in her distress with truth and consideration. This is a critically important aspect of healthy caregiving and counseling and I guess maybe just to add that to a bit. In regards to what we believe a woman would ultimately want for her pregnancy, uhm, sometimes there are blockages in our hearts for the decision that God may want us to make or the right decisions perhaps. And we believe that there are blockages in some of the women hearts that we see that prevent her from making the decision that she may truly want with her pregnancy. So, we lovingly try to remove those blockages with questions. So an example of this would be why do you…..a client may say to us, “I don't want to have this baby, I need to have an abortion because I believe I'll be a bad mother”. We have the freedom to ask those questions, why do you think you would be a bad mother? She may answer, “Well, my mother was a terrible mother. I think I'll be the same way”. “Why is that? Do you think you could make decisions different than the decisions your mother has made?” And so I suppose that's just an example of how we try to respond to the women that we see and the blockages that we perceive that they have.

GT:  Great, thank you. You have a specific outcome that you would like you would like people, you would like women to have their babies. How hard is it to stay objective?

DK:  Umm yeah, that's another good question. So I get this from my female coworkers (I'm not actually in the room with the women who are making these decisions), so I've talked to my female coworkers about this and they say without a doubt it can be challenging when they have their own desired outcome for the client. We do want our best for the clients. We want them to make the right decisions and we want them to know the truth of the life that they hold, but we want them to be in a place where they will also hear the truth and not rejected because they feel that we have an agenda and so we recognize that it's not unreasonable for us to have a desired outcome for our clients. After all, addictions counselors want their clients to choose not to make addictive choices; Couples’ counselors want their clients to hear and understand each other and family counselors want there to be harmony in the families that they talked to. So again, abortion may be a kind of resolution, but it's not the one that we see most of our clients most deeply longing for. If we can help women see this for themselves without coercion without manipulation, just by loving them and asking them very thoughtful questions, I feel like we've done much to assist her in making a decision that she might most deeply desire.

GT:  Is that common? Like do most women in your experience, if you're talking about their what they deeply desire, it is to have the baby. Is that what you're seeing?

DK:  Yeah, when you when you when you mention it, Erica, this this stat comes to mind and it's a study that was done down in the States and it was a question that was asked of women who were desiring an abortion. But because of legislation or because of laws, were unable to obtain an abortion and end up having the baby. So these are very abortion minded women, who did not want to give birth to their baby. But they all ended up doing that because of the circumstances. Now 95% of them after the baby had been born or shortly afterwards said that that this was beautiful, that they are so glad they didn't abort and this is the outcome that they ultimately wanted. And so I mean, you can take those stats in a number of ways and read into it in a number of different ways. But to me this just shows maybe that disconnect that is there and that these women didn't maybe realize their deep desire to have this child until they were actually holding that child. Now there's a course to 5% who said this is still our undesired outcome, we wish we would have had the abortion and I'm not sure how to treat that 5%. I mean, we live in a sinful world. People experience all sorts of trauma and we live in a world where the father of lies is trying to deceive us. So, I guess what speaks to me most about that stat is at 95% of these women were still very glad they had had this child, even though they wanted at some portion of other pregnancy to avoid it. Sorry, does that get to your question there, Erica?

GT:  That's a good answer, yes. Of the women who come into your centre who are struggling with an unwanted pregnancy, who are you seeing? What is the average age, kind of economic status are we talking, relationship status?

DK:  I would say yes. All of them.

So we see women in all ages and stages of life, every demographic. Girls as young as 12 all the way to their late 40s. Married and single, poor and rich, educated, non-educated, religious, non-religious. Most of the abortions I would say that we see other women that come through our doors are women who are relatively affluent, so they have cash and they're relatively well educated as well. Maybe one of the saddest pieces of it all is - and maybe to illustrate this, I'll use a stat of a study done down in the states - that one in four women in the United States will have an abortion and the simple fact is that that in the church in the United States, the stats aren't that different that approximately one in four women in the church in the United States will have an abortion as well, so you know, you can't always directly cut and paste stats and studies from the states to Canada, but I think that's fairly indicative of our clientele here and in Winnipeg as well.

GT:  That's all worrying. It raises a number of other questions. What would be the most common reason women would consider abortion? Why are they contemplating that?

DK:  Yeah, no, this and that might be almost the most important question you ask, I think today Erica. Because it's so important I wrote it out a bit, so I'm going to kind of read and kind of go off the cuff both here, but I just wanted to make sure I get my got my wording right. So again, what are the most common reasons that women get abortions? And this is what we see here at our centre in short. It's abandonment and pressure, it boils down to those two pieces. So it's our belief in what I kind of call the context of abortion, that women do not contemplate aborting their child in in isolation. The woman is never alone in her decision. She has 1000 voices whispering her to abort. Often women have worked because they've been abandoned by their father of their unborn child, who by either his covert silence and his passive resistance, or by his overt insistence joins her in this decision to abort. Other women abort because of unrelenting external pressures they face where someone has heavily persuaded or has even manipulated her to do so. The pressure to have an abortion for many of them is absolutely insurmountable. The movies, the music, the medical and legal communities, the entire educational system, politicians, cultural icons, gurus, social media and sometimes even family and friends expect a woman to have an abortion. The pregnant woman has been abandoned, literally, by our society, and has been pressured from literally almost every direction.

Paul Swope wrote a paper. He's a pro-life dude down in the States and he wrote a paper and outlines it in in a different way. In almost a more simple but more graphic way, he says that the woman who is considering an abortion has to weigh two deaths. The death of her unborn child and the death of her way of life if she has a child. And literally, it's a decision between life and death. And that's what it feels like for many of our clients that come into the centre to see us here.

GT:  This is rather graphic. One of the things that I've seen in, uh again, all the things that are out on abortion now is that for many, it's an economic decision. They don't know how to… how they will live going forward? How they can juggle, especially for single women who have been abandoned by the father. How they're going to juggle job and family or education and job and family? How are they going to manage? Is that another of the reasons you see?

DK:  Certainly, that's an astute observation. I would say Erica and it kind of falls into the choice between the two deaths that I mentioned as well that when a woman is considering her own death to her own way of life, there's the financial, the educational, the relational, all those issues that she has to navigate. And we don't lie to her; it's not an easy decision either way and there may be financial, there may be relational, there may be educational ramifications that that that she won't be able to come to reconcile. So, all that we can do is speak to those and tell her, hey, we're here for you emotionally, we're here to help you with any counseling needs you have. We can resource you to all of these organization, both government and private, that will help you with your education that can help you with finances. And we're here to help you with the practical needs as well. I mean, we've got clothing, we've got diapers, formula, we've got all of this stuff that we just want to give you up to help make this work. So yeah, those considerations are very real Erica and the reason the crisis pregnancy Centre exists is try to alleviate some of those burdens that she has.

GT:  I want to get back a little bit to the comment you made earlier about that the number of abortions among Christian women is almost the same as among people without a faith background; are the pressures on a Christian woman different than they are on a woman without a faith background?

DK:  Good question. So, there are the pressures in the isolation that I just talked about a little while ago, and both the Christian and the unchristian woman are going to feel that, and so I've kind of got two angles here actually. So, the first is a comparison between the Christian woman and the non-Christian woman. And so, I think for a Christian woman there may be added guilt there if she's grown up in a church that that I'd be accustomed to growing up in in. There may be a guilty feeling there because of the pro-life stance that the church has. This isn't necessarily a bad thing. Guilt helps us make right decisions when we're faced with the choice of right and wrong, what can be appropriate or inappropriate I should say is some of the shame and condemnation that some of our clients have talked about from the faith communities that they've been a part of if they've had an unwanted pregnancy or chosen an abortion. I remember one quote that one of our clients had, and we've gotten the OK to share this quote, and she quoted saying that that with her abortion that let me get it right here, her quote was, “I have to get an abortion. I know God will forgive us, but our church never will”. So we have to extend love and that practical help to those who are experiencing an unexpected pregnancy and have an abortion. So that was kind of the first comparison. I'm sorry Erica, ahead.

GT:  That's a hard thing to hear.

DK:  Yeah, I Oh my goodness is it ever? So that was my first thought between the difference between a Christian woman and a non-Christian woman. But then there's this distinction as well. And the comparison is between the Christian woman and the Christian man. So, the focus is so often on the Christian woman because she physically shows her sin in the form of a changing body. And this kind of reminds me, and it's driven home by something that [James] Dobson, founder of Focus in the Family in the States, dealt with a few decades ago. And it was where Christian universities down in the States were expelling women, single women, who'd gotten pregnant, out of wedlock from their campuses. But they weren't expelling the guy that got her pregnant, he still got to stay in school, so such a duality there and why was it and rightfully so? Dobson called the colleges out on this practice. First of all, you know, why aren't you dealing with the dude in this and you know is it right to expel these people,. to expel women in the first place? So all that to say women always bear more of the emotional weight of a pregnancy.

GT:  The crisis pregnancy centres have been under some pressure in Canada and in the US both. And, so my question is, if you were to lose your charitable status, what would that look like?

DK:  Yeah, I mean very practically, people who would donate to us would no longer receive the tax refunds for it. And in addition to this, what a lot of people don't realize is that with their loss of charitable status, we would almost certainly have to give up all of the assets that we've accumulated in our decades of being here in Winnipeg, so again, anything we've accumulated would have to be given away to like-minded charities or ultimately the government would seize it if we didn't do that. So again, we'll be starting all over again and it would be quite a significant hit.

GT:  When we spoke earlier you said there are two levels of the way it could happen with the charitable status. Can you explain that a bit more?

DK:  You're right, good catch Erica. So, the government has two options when they revoke a charity. They can annul your charitable status, which means they remove the charitable status, but they allow you to keep all of your assets. The second level is called a revocation, when they revocate your charitable status, they not only do they remove your charitable status, but that is the condition I was talking about that you have to then divest yourself of all of your assets that you've accumulated. Now with the legal people we've talked to, it seems that the revocation piece is almost always the direction that the government goes when they're removing charitable status, and so I suppose we're expecting the worst in our case that removal charitable status would mean a revocation and we'd have to, we'd have to get rid of all of our assets.

GT:  Including your buildings.

DK:  Including the buildings. Yeah sadly so.

GT:  OK. In light of that, what would your options be?

DK:  Umm, so very simply, we'd have to start all over again in regards to our finances. Now, our hope would be that we could still count on our supporters to give, but the truth of it is, it may be a significant hurdle to overcome. We're not sure how; perhaps many of our supporters would react, and so the sad reality is, is that one option would be that we would have to close our doors, perhaps permanently, if we didn't have adequate funds to continue.

GT:  I guess this is an obvious question, but I'll ask it. How could churches or individuals respond?

DK:  Yeah, no, you know our hope would be that people continue to give even though they wouldn't have the tax benefit coming to them. If we do indeed lose our charity charitable status and our, let's say, worse comes to worse, we have to close our door. You know, I would just invite the church community to help those who do not have a place to go now. I mean, we see eight clients a day. We've seen thousands and helped thousands of clients over the years of our existence. So maybe a challenge perhaps to individuals and churches. So if we disappear, who will then step forward to take care of these women and these children, these families that we've been supporting.

GT:  Is there anything else actually I'm going to back up a little bit because I think when we spoke earlier this week, you said something that that struck me and that is it's back to that question of pressure that's on a woman. And that is that when a woman who is in crisis and she’s dealing with an unplanned pregnancy and everything that means and she comes to your office to be able to speak to somebody who is not going to…who's going to listen objectively seems to give her some real space to process her own thinking, to process to take the pressure off. And that struck me as quite significant. Because we hear the opposite, we hear that pregnancy crisis centres apply pressure, and in fact what you're doing is you're taking pressure off.

DK:  No, I think you're exactly right, Erica in that a lot of our clients just feel relief at this burden that they can now share, and the lightening of the burden because they can actually talk to somebody about. My feeling is from our counselors, or my coworkers that I talked to, that a lot of these women do not have a place to go to share this burden. And as you mentioned, we've gotten response from our clients. We've had hundreds of exit interviews, and these exit interviews are simply pieces of paper that clients can fill out and respond how their experience at our centre has been, and we have a spectrum that they can rate us on all the way from a very good experience, all the way to a negative experience. And out of the hundreds of feedback forms we've gotten, the worst we've gotten is a neutral response, and that was one. All the rest of the other responses we've had has been either good or very good. So to me that indicates we're doing something right and women feel, heard, and ultimately they feel loved by us.

GT:  That to me was a very encouraging thing to hear, and even better than what I expected. I had high regard for crisis pregnancy Centres, but that was even more than I expected, I think. So my final question is just it's open-ended. What would you like the EMC Faith community to know either about abortions generally or about crisis pregnancy centres specifically, or about your crisis pregnancy centre specifically?

DK:  Yeah, maybe I'll chuck a few facts at you guys. So, like I mentioned before, we see about 8 clients a day. We extend emotional help to our clients in the form of counseling. We extend physical help in the way of baby and maternity clothes, diapers, infant formula and all sorts of gifts to families who are having a baby for the first time. And we do this all free of charge. No strings attached because of the generous donation of our supporters. And that's just one centre here in Winnipeg. In Canada there's over 80 centres that are doing exactly the same thing and supporting women right across the country. I'm going to give you guys another quote here and this quote was by C. Everett Koop who was a surgeon general down in the states a few decades ago and Francis Schaeffer, a noted American theologian; they were some of the fathers of the modern CPC movement here in North America.

And their quote was a challenge to the churches and this was their quote I've got it here for you guys.

“Churches and other groups opposed to abortion must be prepared to extend practical help both to the unmarried woman who is pregnant and to the married woman who may be faced with the question of abortion. Merely to say to either one, you must not have an abortion, without being ready to involve ourselves in the problem is another way of being inhumane.”

So the CPC here in Manitoba is a huge part of how the church has practically - as Koop and Schaefer put it - involved ourselves in the problem and been humane here in Manitoba. So we believe what we say on our website and I'll read it because I want to get the wording just right.

“If a client of our centre obtains an abortion we love her. If she carries to term, we love her. If she releases a child in an adoption, we love her. If she grieves after the abortion with zero judgment, we will mourn with her. If she is in need during parenting, we will care for her. If she struggles after the adoption, we will support her.”

Now, God willing, we're going to be all around a long time to do the work that we're doing. But again, if we're not, who will continue to do the work that we cannot do?

GT:  Thank you very much Dallas. This has been an encouraging interview and it's lovely to talk to you.

DK:  Thank you, Erica. You've been brilliant and I just appreciate your time and your effort. Thank you very much.