The Diocese of Fresno through Family Life Ministries is partnering with Options United to offer hope and support to abortion-minded women by helping them to choose life
Abortion-vulnerable women in the Diocese of Fresno will have wider access to pro-life counseling and medical services, under a collaborative of pregnancy resource centers that launched Friday, December 15th.
In cooperation with the Diocese of Fresno, Options United will bring clients to dozens of local centers and clinics serving thousands of families. Currently, these clinics operate at about 30 percent capacity. The plan is to build capacity, collaboration, and community via digital marketing while respecting the autonomy of each individual pregnancy center or clinic. Similar efforts in Southern California have generated 15,000 inquiries from women looking for abortions per year with over 5,000 women referred to local pro-life centers and clinics.
“I am proud to have the Diocese of Fresno through Family Life Ministry collaborate with our other Catholic archdioceses and dioceses throughout California in promoting Options United and its App for Life. “ Bishop Armando X. Ochoa said, “I pray that many lives will be saved, healed, comforted and well resourced through Options United that offers options for life.
“The percentage of women who actually call the helpline, keep their appointment at the recommended pregnancy center/clinic and then choose life is remarkable,” said Thomas Rudkins, Founder of Options United.
Options United, a Pasadena-based a nonprofit pro-life digital advertising provider, and call center. Options United helps crisis pregnancy centers that often feel isolated and overwhelmed by the ever-changing marketing and communication challenges of today. Funds generated are used by Options United to place ads on the Internet and operate a call center. The ads appear in search engine results and on websites. The call center is Internet-based.
Call responders with a wide variety of backgrounds receive extensive training to enable them to respond to callers, most of whom are abortion-vulnerable women asking for help with an unwanted pregnancy and often wanting to terminate it.
The diocese of Fresno consists of 35,239 square miles of the Southern San Joaquin Valley of California, a portion of the Sierra Nevada and some eastern valleys. The diocese consists of all of the Counties of Fresno, Inyo, Kern, Kings, Madera, Mariposa, Merced, and Tulare. The total population of the diocesan region is about 2.4 million inhabitants, of whom 1,074,944 are registered Catholic.
The Diocese of Fresno is looking to leverage the Options United comprehensive model to give true life-affirming options to women who are facing unplanned pregnancies. The Diocese of Fresno is looking to use these programs to save, on average, twenty lives a month.