40 Days for Life offers prayers

WORCESTER – He’s the director of a highly influential campaign. But he told local students they have an influence he doesn’t have.

Steve Karlen, North American director of the 40 Days for Life campaign to end abortion, had just given a talk to kick off the campaign here when he was introduced to Leah Boudreau and Vanessa Zeglen, seventh graders from St. Joseph Elementary School in Webster.
The kickoff was held Sept. 18 outside the Planned Parenthood abortion facility at 470 Pleasant St. and Mr. Karlen challenged the students not to let this be the last time they come to pray there. He said he can pray at such places, but, as young women, “you’re going to connect with your peers” – in a way he won’t.
“The older I get, the more I love to see people your age out here,” Sandra A. Kucharski, a member of the diocesan Respect Life Committee and Sacred Heart-St. Catherine of Sweden Parish, told the students.
The girls, members of the National Junior Honor Society, had joined the kickoff with about 50 other people, including their mothers (Beth Boudreau, St. Joseph’s principal, and Sonia Zeglen) and St. Joseph’s teachers Karen Lefebvre (National Junior Honor Society adviser) and Felician Sister Jeanne Marie Akalski.
Father Anthony J. Kazarnowicz, a long-time advocate for the unborn who is associate pastor of St. Joseph Basilica, the school’s parish, offered the opening prayer. The Rev. Robert Hall, a retired pastor who’s now a member of The Church on Seven Hills, closed with prayer.
Mr. Karlen, a Catholic husband and father from Wisconsin who was available afterwards to sign his books about speaking up against abortion, encouraged participants to continue praying outside Planned Parenthood during the Sept. 22-Oct. 31 campaign. 40 Days asks individuals and groups to sign up for time slots to pray. The campaign also calls for fasting and community outreach. The campaign opened
locally with a candlelight vigil from 6:30-7:30 p.m. Sept. 22, Wednesday.
Organizers said this fall’s campaign, with 612 cities around the world participating, will be the largest since 40 Days started as a national campaign in 2007.
Mr. Karlen used stories and figures to illustrate the campaign’s success over the years.
One story was of a woman 20 weeks pregnant, whose doctor advised abortion, saying the baby had a serious disability. The woman wouldn’t listen to her husband’s repeated pleas not to abort their child. When she made an appointment with Planned Parenthood, her desperate husband locked her in the house. She called the police, got to the abortion facility – and saw people praying outside.
A few months later she gave birth to a baby boy – who had no disabilities!
“I don’t think the root of this crisis is necessarily abortion,” Mr. Karlen said. He suggested the root is despair, because people are immersed in a culture that does not know Jesus.
He told listeners that during the campaign they might meet a girl afraid to tell her parents she’s pregnant, or a woman who was assaulted. There are not easy answers to such crises, he said. But the solution shouldn’t be: “We’re going to take your money and kill your baby.”
Mr. Karlen told listeners that perhaps nothing interesting will happen when they pray outside Planned Parenthood, but they are part of a larger campaign that is now in all 50 states and many other countries.
Speaking of God answering prayers, he said they know of 19,000 lives saved from abortion, most during the campaigns, since 2007.
While participants might rather be elsewhere and the weather might be inclement during their time slot, a woman scheduled for an abortion might see their smiles and drive away from the facility, he said. Years later, women have reported that they didn’t abort their babies because people were praying outside.
Julie Koss-Stephany, of Our Lady of Czestochowa Parish, recounted a personal experience from when she was praying during one of the 40 Days for Life campaigns. A woman stopped her car and showed off the fruit of such prayers: the child she’d decided not to abort.
Mr. Karlen said former abortion facility workers have said that as many as 75 percent of the appointments for abortions have not been kept when people are praying nearby.
Nobody is beyond God’s grace, even people who earn their livelihood from abortions, Mr. Karlen said. He said 114 abortion facilities have closed permanently since 2007, during or after 40 Days campaigns. Listeners cheered and applauded.
He also told of a woman who had three abortions and later gave birth to two children. When those children were teenagers, they led music for a 40 Days rally outside the facility where she’d had her third abortion. It was her first time going back there – this time to witness against abortion. Mr. Karlen quoted God’s words in Rev. 21:5: “Behold, I make all things new.”
He said God could end abortion, but “he chooses to invite us” to be part of that work.
He asked listeners to increase the number of hours they plan to pray during the campaign and to invite others to pray, going with them the first time if they’re nervous. The number one reason people don’t come is because no one invited them, he said.
People talk about giving a voice to the unborn, he said, and he thinks the babies would want to say, “Thank you.” He said that even if a child was aborted during a participant’s time slot, that child was loved because that person was there.

Editor’s note: Those seeking more information or to sign up for prayer time slots are asked to visit the website https://www.40daysforlife.com/en/worcester or call vigil coordinator Lee Crowley at 508-887-1064.