SAN ANTONIO, TX – Published in Kristeligt Dagblad.
Two years ago Teresa Haring went to a conservative, Christian fundraiser to get an award. From the podium she heard one attack after the other on Mexicans spilling in to her country, Muslims threatening the American society and the unsafe borders.
“These guys are supposed to be Christians, so I reached for a program and on the back of it wrote GOD HAS NO BORDERS with big letters. And I walked around with it the whole night,” Teresa Haring told me when I talked to her in 2016.
A few days earlier, Teresa Haring voted for Donald Trump. The Republican candidate who promises to build a wall and kick out illegal immigrants of the United States and who says that many Syrian refugees are “definitely in many cases ISIS aligned“.
“I don’t like Trump. I can’t stand Trump. But I got to look at: who is Trump going to appoint for supreme court?,” says Teresa Haring.
Teresa Haring runs the ‘Allied Women’s Center’, which is against abortion and assists women who choose to give birth. Inspired by Finland all the clients get a box with clothes, food and other necessities. Total worth of the content is $200 and the box works as a crib the first four months of the baby’s life.
I wrote about Teresa Haring for the Danish newspaper Kristeligt Dagblad during the presidential election campaign in 2016.
She is a so-called single-issue voter. For her, the fight against abortion is the issue, which in short means that she will vote for the candidate who supports her battle against free abortion. This year, that issue is more important than usual because the coming president gets to nominate justices for the Supreme Court. The justices has the ultimate say in feuds between states and the federal government, i.e. when it comes to gay marriage, transgender rights and abortion.
So it is important whether the majority of the justices are liberal or conservative minded and here, Donald Trump has promised to go conservative. Hillary Clinton the other way.
One of the two houses, where ‘Allied Women’s Center’ is located, is stuffed with clothes and things for children. Here is the kitchen.
Teresa Haring runs the Catholic based, non-profit organization ‘Allied Women’s Center’, which is against abortion and tries to convince doubting women to keep their child. That is why the conservative, Christian organization gave her an award.
The center offers free pregnancy tests as a way of getting potentially pregnant women to enter the center. Then Teresa Haring or one from the staff starts telling them about life, which they believe begins when the child is conceived, plus showing them both a video with graphic footage from an abortion and plastic models that resembles a fetus at week 10, 12, 16 and 20.
A plastic model of a fetus at 10 weeks.
According to Teresa Haring, her organization successfully talk 80-90 percent of the conflicted women out of getting an abortion. Last year, 338 babies were saved, as she puts it.
Women who choose to have the baby can get help with everything from diapers to clothing, baby food, strollers and money for rent. Last year the organization handed out more than 42.000 diapers and almost 20.000 pieces of clothes. It all comes from donations.
I stayed with Teresa Haring and her family eight years ago in San Antonio, Texas, when I crossed the States for the first time, and then I came back again this year. She has room for a lot of people (both physically and mentally), the front door of her house is always open, and she does not see open borders as a huge problem.
And then she has this one issue, which is more important to her than anything else. She calls the act of voting for someone who supports abortion an ‘intrinsic evil’.
“If you’re not born, nothing else matters. Because you’re not here. You’re defenseless. Nobody’s gonna speak for you. As an immigrant you can speak for yourself,” she says.
In the interview she also talks about respect, (too much) federal intervention in religious matters and her hope for the future.
“Do you know what would be the greatest thing? That Trump got tired (of it all) and decided to move on to something else and then let Mike Pence take over. I really like Mike Pence.”
If I translate the whole interview at some point, I will post it in here. It is interesting.
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