The phone rang at the Frontline EMC Pregnancy Center in Brooklyn, NY, this week, and the director assumed it was another call from a woman needing crisis pregnancy counseling. This phone call stopped the clinic director in her tracks. It was a credit card company who was excited about the new health law.
“I couldn’t believe what I was hearing,” Linda Marzulla, director of the EMC Pregnancy Center in Brooklyn, stated. “He said they were now doing credit cards for girls who wanted to get an abortion and could put the cost of the abortion on the credit card. He was excited because he said ‘This was something new we’re offering’.”
The credit card representative thought he had called an abortion clinic. Marzulla’s Pregnancy Help Center sits on the top floor of an office building that also houses two abortion clinics on Court Street in Brooklyn. They had called the wrong place by mistake.
The marketing tactic is to have abortion clinics offer credit cards to women who can’t afford to pay cash for their abortions. “They are going to have a low interest rate credit card to give to the girls who have an abortion and have them pay as they go. It’s like the credit cards they give college students. Unbelievable!” Marzulla noted.
Marzulla asked if this had something to do with the new health care law. He told her yes, they have to move forward to give women what they need.
The 11-year veteran of counseling women and men then tried to talk the credit card employee into leaving his job. Marzulla thought he sounded like a nice man, but he should quit this job. “I told him, ‘Don’t you realize you are fostering abortion? Why are you doing this?’ You know what he answered me? He said, ‘They have a choice’.”
Marzulla didn’t waste a second to inform the credit card man what that choice was all about.
“They have a choice? A choice between life and death is what we’re talking about. You are making it easier for women to choose death for their babies!” Marzulla told the man on the phone.
What the pro-life counselor couldn’t believe was how fast this was happening with the abortion health bill just being signed into law.
“This just happened and you’re jumping on the band wagon to make more money off these poor women!” Marzulla told the man.
Talk about a wrong number! When the call with the credit card rep ended, Marzulla called Vitae Foundation to give her accounting of the incident. Vitae has partnered with Frontline EMC Pregnancy Centers by placing ads in subways and busses in the Burroughs of New York City. The ad campaigns have been tremendous, saving over a thousand babies last year.
“When the Vitae ads were on the subways and busses, it really helped. Having that advertising, you have no idea! These kids were coming in droves, there was such turnout,” Marzulla explained. “If you don’t save the mother you aren’t going to save the baby! Forget it!”
Marzulla told Vitae how we as pro-lifers need to mobilize now and be in the media. “We just have to mobilize because all these credit card companies are going to be sprouting up like a grassroots thing because he thought I was Planned Parenthood, that’s why he called me. We’re in the same building and a lot of times the numbers get crossed,” the pro-life counselor explained.
The girls are looking and longing for help, according to Marzulla. “I’ve never really met a girl who wanted an abortion. They’re just backed up against the wall. The kids today know what they are up against so the abortion clinic people tell them, ‘The economy is bad…you aren’t going to be able to afford it…the baby is going to ruin your life.’”