Abstinence proponent Pam Stenzel brought her message to Starke County last week.
“I don’t know what medical information you have that I am unaware of, but last I checked, abstinence works 99.99999999999-percent of the time, and the one time it didn’t work, we had Christmas!” she told the audience, during Bella Vita Pregnancy Resource Center’s annual fundraising banquet.
She condemned what she called a “culture of death” that often equates pregnancy with a disease. “The answer to a crisis pregnancy is not to end the pregnancy,” she said. “It’s to end the crisis. And that takes love and that takes the Gospel and that takes Bella Vita coming in and walking alongside these young women and saying, ‘We can help you.'”
Stenzel also praised the efforts of people around Indiana for the installation of “baby boxes.” They’re kind of like climate-controlled safe deposit boxes that provide mothers with a last-resort option to abandon their children safely. So far, they’ve been installed at two Indiana fire stations, one in the Fort Wayne area and the other near Michigan City. “At the [Coolspring] Fire Department not far from you, we’ve had seven babies abandoned within seven miles of [Coolspring] Fire Department there,” Stenzel said. “The little corridor of people running between Chicago and up through 80/90 into Michigan and Detroit is a very, very high abandonment rate of babies, and so we wanted to make sure that we had a presence there.”
The devices automatically notify emergency responders. Stenzel notes that each time a “baby box” has been used so far, a firefighter has responded within five minutes.
