As director of the Women's Pregnancy Center in Peoria, Illinois, Myfanwe Saunders had never thought about doing prison outreach. But a television interview with convicted murderer Carla Faye Tucker -- who was executed by the state of Texas despite pleas for leniency from religious and anti-death penalty groups -- planted a seed for a new ministry for Saunders' organization.
"As I was listening to Carla Faye Tucker speak, I began wondering how many incarcerated women are post-abortive," Saunders said. "This led to the thought that I should start investigating this. I didn't know how to go about it, so I just prayed that if God wanted me to look into this, He would open a door to make that possible."
The next day, Saunders said, she received a call from Sydna Massé of Ramah International. Massé told Saunders she had received a letter from an inmate at the Logan Correctional Center in Lincoln, Illinois, asking for help in dealing with her post-abortion pain.
"Sydna asked if I could meet with this woman in Logan," Saunders explained. "I really felt God had been preparing me for Sydna's call. Even a week before I would have been very hesitant about meeting this woman -- very fearful and doubtful. This was just not a segment of the population that I had ever really thought about before."
But, seeing the phone call as an answer to her prayer, Saunders told Massé to give the woman her name. Shortly thereafter, she received a letter from "Sally," the female prisoner who had asked to meet with her. Enclosed was a card from the prison chaplain, whom Saunders would have to contact before visiting Sally.
Saunders tried unsuccessfully to contact the chaplain for two weeks, only to be told that he no longer worked at the prison. Instead, she talked to Jim Simmons, who serves as a liaison between the prison and the Illinois Department of Children and Family Services. Many women in the prisons have children who are in the foster system or who are being cared for by relatives.
"I talked to Jim and explained the situation," Saunders said. "He was very interested and asked me to tell him about our organization and what we would have to offer these women. He invited us to give a presentation to the women at Logan. I explained that we would be talking about God and asked if that would be a problem. He said, 'If we don't have God and family, what do we have left?'"
In response to this invitation, Saunders and two other volunteers from her center went to Lincoln last spring, to give a presentation to the women prisoners at Logan. The first two speakers talked about parenting and abstinence. Then came Saunders' part in the program: to talk about post-abortion issues.
"When I got up to talk about post-abortion, suddenly a lot of the women had to leave the room to go to the bathroom," Saunders said. "There was a little gal in the front row who reached down and got her coat and crawled right under it. The pain in that room was so evident. But afterwards, there were so many women who came up to us and asked us to do a program for them to help them work through those issues."
With the help of the new prison chaplain, Saunders and several volunteers were able to do two post-abortion Bible study programs at Logan last spring, helping about a dozen women through the programs. They repeated the post-abortion healing program Bible studies last fall, with about another 15 women.
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