ABORTION: NO CLEANUP; PUSH REGULATION

A remarkable speaker visited our community week before last in the person of Carol Everett. This grandmother had long wanted to achieve millionaire status and had a plan to get there by 1984. Somewhere along the road, however, Carol Everett had a dramatic change of heart. After years of marketing and selling abortions to young girls, she now is speaking nationwide against the multibillion-dollar abortion industry.

Everett was guest speaker at the Vitae Society fund-raising banquet, which attracted 500 people to the Holiday Inn Convention Center. The society, whose name means "life" in Latin, is launching an informational campaign against abortion by using television and radio commercials in local markets. During her years as an abortion clinic operator in Dallas, Everett said, many clinics operated on a marketing strategy much like a business selling a product. "We had goals," she said of the industry. As manager, she earned $25 for every abortion performed at her clinics. "In my last month there were 545 abortions," she said. "That's $13,625 in abortions, and that wasn't a bad month."

Everett held the audience spellbound as she related her sad tale. She told stories of girls who died within the last year after complications from abortions. "Just because it's legal doesn't mean it's safe," she said. "I don't just want to clean up the industry, I want to regulate it because when you regulate it they go away. With some minimal standards, you can close 50 percent of the clinics."

Carl Landwehr of Jefferson City is president of the organization in Missouri. He says commercials have been running in the Cape Girardeau-Paducah television market since early October and will continue throughout the year. To ensure this, more donations are needed, but Everett's moving remarks yielded pledges totalling more than $40,000 that evening. Said Landwehr: "Our challenge is to keep the issue alive so that people can begin seeing that life is a gift." Good for him, good for Carol Everett and good for the Vitae Society. The almighty God from whom all life flows will surely bless them in this vital work.