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PRO-LIFER VARIES METHODS TO SAVE BABIES.

There’s more than one way to save an unborn baby.

As a full-time pro-life missionary for six years, Colette Wilson used some tried-and-true methods, and created some unique ways of her own.

In 1994 Colette, then a practicing attorney, decided to try sidewalk counseling for one week.

“I had two saves, so I was hooked!” she told pro-lifers at a July 21 luncheon on the Face the Truth Tour.

Colette learned sidewalk counseling basics – Where do I stand?  What do I wear?  What do I say? – at a seminar by Karen Black.

At first, she supported her counseling by alternating between legal secretary temp jobs for a few weeks and sidewalk counseling for a few weeks.

But through a Scott Klusendorf seminar in the fall of 1994, she learned how to raise funds to support her pro-life work.

“As an individual missionary, I raised money from individuals, one-on-one.  They would support me with donations ranging from $10 to $200 a month.

“It made me a full-time pro-life missionary and it raised my standard of professionalism.  

“I organized my work better, and put out a regular newsletter.  Working full-time, I had the luxury of coming up with major pro-life projects.”

At a Helpers of God’s Precious Infants seminar, she was struck by a practice described by Sister Dorothy Rothar.

When a woman was leaving an abortion clinic, Sister would give a rosary to her and say, “Take this rosary, begin to pray, and you will never come back here.”

Colette, a non-Catholic at the time, thought, “That’s a great approach!  Now, what can I use besides a rosary?”

She told Lucy, a fellow sidewalk counselor who was Catholic, “I can’t hand out rosaries – Protestants won’t accept them.”

“Yes, they will, said Lucy.  “Sister Dorothy didn’t say you have to pray the rosary, she just asks women to pray.”

So Colette started giving out rosaries.

“It was phenomenal!  They would stop the car and roll down the window – the rosaries opened the door.  The women knew I wasn’t judging them; I was loving them.”

In 1997 Colette and her husband Tim, whom she had met through Operation Rescue, learned that Family Planning Associates, which operated 20 abortion clinics in the Los Angeles area, sent all their aborted babies to a pathology lab in Los Angeles County.

“We went to the pathology lab and looked through the window,” she said.

“You could see all these shelves with margarine-type plastic tubs, each with the woman’s name and the date she went for her abortion.”

They could even, in some cases, see head and body parts through the translucent containers.

Colette and Tim returned with a powerful camera and took photos of the containers through the window.

Colette began to show these pictures to the women she was sidewalk counseling.

The women realized that the baby they were planning to abort would not magically disappear, but would end up dead in a labeled plastic container on a shelf.

“I had a lot of saves that way,” she said.

In 2001 Colette went back to practicing law, joining other defense attorneys in the NOW v. Scheidler case.

She is presently an attorney for the conservative U.S. Justice Foundation, and lives in San Diego with her husband and their three adopted children.