KC pro-life volunteer: Is Missouri ready to pay high cost of near-total abortion ban?

You know all about those weirdos who volunteer in crisis pregnancy centers, right? About how dishonest they are, trying to trick unsuspecting women out of getting the abortions they want?

Those stick-figures never seemed real to me, maybe because my mom supported pregnant women in crisis until pretty recently. She never worked in a center, but was someone who women who wanted to keep their children and were struggling to be able to do that could call on, in a bunch of different ways, for as long as they needed help. And aren’t women smart enough to know the difference between a Planned Parenthood clinic and a pregnancy center in the church basement? (Trust women, remember?)

Still, even I was surprised to get a long letter from a Kansas City crisis pregnancy volunteer named Janice Stallings, asking why nobody’s talking about the obvious fact that if Missouri really bans abortion after eight weeks, there are going to be many more babies (and later on, kids and adults) with costly health problems.

“I am pro-life,” Stallings wrote. “In fact, I volunteer with a pregnancy resource center,” and has for two decades. But over the years, “I became concerned as conservatives began to spout rage about funding medical care for other people’s children, while claiming almost zero tolerance for abortion. I began to fear that these two stances would not compute.”

Stallings, a 63-year-old retired teacher for children with special needs of all kinds, has run a bunch of numbers and no, they definitely do not compute.

Missouri, which is competing to become the first state in the country without any access to abortion, ranks 43rd out of 50 states and Washington, D.C., in a scorecard that measures health care access, affordability, treatment and outcomes. The state has not expanded Medicaid, and in fact kicked some 50,000 children off of its Medicaid rolls this year. And Missouri regularly ranks near the bottom in state spending on health care — the seventh lowest, at $5,223 per capita, in 2015.

I wanted to meet this non-stick figure pro-life volunteer, and over coffee, got to hear about what Janice Stallings does and why. It’s not her only volunteer gig; she also pitches in at KC Mothers in Charge — “I feel like that’s pro-life because it’s anti-violence” — and at her Southern Baptist church, Oakwood Baptist.

So what made her want to work with pregnant women? “Basically, childbirth,” she said, laughing. “An easy labor is one where you only think you’re going to die for 15 minutes, so I really feel for women who don’t have a healthy baby at the end.”

One stereotype about pro-life volunteers is that the poor sheltered dears have somehow gone through life without ever meeting anyone who’s felt she had to have an abortion, so they know nothing about any grey areas or complicated decisions.

Stallings is from Lee’s Summit, and came back to Kansas City to care for her parents when they got older. Because her husband was career Navy, their family lived all over the country and abroad, too, and “I knew people in different situations,” including some who “very much wanted children” they miscarried or lost early or felt they had no choice but to abort. “Let’s just say there were a variety of different and sad situations in which I knew the woman really had wanted that baby, but there were circumstances.”

At Birthright of Kansas City, the non-denominational, faith-based pro-life nonprofit where Stallings volunteers, the clients generally aren’t confused about what the group does and does not do, she said.

“Mostly those are phone calls asking, ‘Do you do abortions?’ ’’ — some because they are trying to find a clinic that does offer that, and others because they want to avoid such a place.

One woman, Stallings remembers, did come in thinking it was an abortion clinic. “She was very frantic, and I felt so bad. I told her I’m so sorry, I wish we could help you in some way.”

Most of those who come, though, in Stallings’ experience, do so because “they’re scared and want to talk things through. Women come to us with very personal issues: ‘I don’t want to have an abortion, but I’m afraid.’ It’s an honor to be with them whatever decision they make.”

And she tells them what? “I level with women,” she says, and “listen the best I can,” sometimes using what she learned in college psych courses. “If she says, ‘I feel like I can’t see this pregnancy through,’ I say, ‘You feel like you can’t take it anymore.’ I know I can’t make choices for them.”

What she can do, she says, is offer moral and some modest material support, like maternity and baby clothes. She can help sign them up for Medicaid and give them referrals for training, scholarships and various services. Including, unfortunately, those for women in violent relationships. A few times, Birthright has paid a utility bill.

Stallings’ goal, as she sees it, is not to talk anyone into or out of anything, but to try to help a woman who wants to have the baby she’s carrying figure out a way around terminating a pregnancy for economic reasons. That’s hard, she says, because having and raising a child costs so much.

And it’s harder than it has to be because if lawmakers really care so much about unborn children, “why don’t we make it a priority” to make sure that a woman never feels forced into an abortion? “If what’s standing in the way is money, why isn’t the child more important? Why can’t we make those supports more available? It’s so sad to hear, ‘I didn’t want to, but I had to.’ Why couldn’t somebody have stepped in and helped? We have a major blind spot” as a society, she said, when we say no to abortion but also no to helping families say yes to a child.

Sometimes, of course, Stallings meets with a woman who ultimately does decide to terminate her pregnancy. And then? “I say, ‘Whatever you do, I care about you.’ ’’

Stallings has no interest in what she calls pro-life politics: “You’re never going see me in a parade or carrying a sign.”

And she isn’t a partisan, period. “I believe in advocating for people in need,” she says, “but I’m not a member of a political party. I may join one so I can vote in the presidential primary, but if I do, it will be a first.”

Stallings can give a fearful pregnant woman what the government can’t: Love is what it boils down to. But she’s also acutely aware that that won’t pay the bills. And she’s right that the disconnect between Missouri’s determination to ban abortion without providing any additional support looks a lot like love’s opposite.

This story was originally published November 25, 2019 at 5:00 AM.