Since 2002, Liberty Women’s Clinic (LWC), located in Liberty, Missouri, has sought to minister with the love of Christ by empowering people to make informed, life-affirming choices about pregnancy, sexual health, and relationships. Through the ERLC’s Psalm 139 Project ultrasound machine donation, LWC was able to expand their services and ministry.
What type of community do you serve?
Liberty is a community of approximately 60,000 which includes Kansas City addresses. Because of our location we serve women from urban, suburban, and surrounding smaller towns. During COVID-19 closures, we actually provided virtual services to women in every single county surrounding Kansas City.
How has the Psalm 139 project affected your pregnancy resource center?
The Psalm 139 project provided our clinic with a second ultrasound machine, offering the opportunity to double the number of scans within the current facility and hours.
How has the Lord used the sonogram machines to influence Kingdom work?
A woman who is in the valley of despair between choosing life or death for her unborn child will change her mind almost 80% of the time after viewing her baby on an ultrasound. She is shown mercy, grace, truth, and the love of Christ during her interaction with staff and volunteers, perhaps affecting her entire future.
How many women or couples come for advice, resources, and other services?
In 2019, God worked through LWC with 3,900 services provided during 643 transformational client visits and 195 ultrasounds. We had 225 known decisions for life. Our 2020 numbers will look different. At the halfway point of 2020, we were only slightly lagging our 2019 services provided number even with the temporary closure of our physical clinic due to COVID-19. We’ve seen a spike in women leveraging our virtual services plus an increase in inquiries about abortions and abortion pills. We were blessed to stay “open” during this time to assist these women and continue to carefully provide client services as we worked slowly toward a full reopening.
Do you have any additional information you can share that highlights the importance of pregnancy resource centers?
There are 13,300 abortion-related searches online each month in the Kansas City area. Approximately 3,708 pregnancies are ended yearly in the Kansas City metro area.
And from March–June 2020, LWC staff fielded 75 phone calls from abortion-minded women during our critical time of offering exclusively virtual services. This is in addition to calls and texts from non-abortion minded women. We know of 45 life decisions and two decisions to abort made during that same time period.
Can you estimate how many pregnancies are saved per ultrasound machine at a pro-life pregnancy center?
There were 225 lives saved at LWC during 2019, but we do not keep statistics per machine. However, the ultrasound machine we received from the ERLC is our first choice when it is available because the technology newer and superior.
Pregnancy resource centers are vital to proclaiming the dignity and right to life of preborn children, mothers, and fathers in unplanned pregnancy situations, and maybe especially so during trying times like a pandemic. LWC’s mobile services coordinator summed up best the work of these centers—and the call for every Christian as we stand for life: “In this unique time of uncertainty, our clients are not only facing an unplanned pregnancy, but also the fear of COVID-19 and their futures. Because we serve a God who is sovereign, we can be the voice of hope on the other end of the phone. It is my prayer that this pandemic will open up more opportunities to share the hope that we have in the person of Jesus Christ.”
Editor’s note: Updated 2020 numbers will be available later this year.
