Updated
ESTERO, Florida (LifeSiteNews) — A Florida-based professional minor league ice hockey team is devoting over 30 percent of its ticket proceeds to pro-life pregnancy centers scattered throughout the state.
The Florida Everblades Hockey team is donating $6 from every ticket purchased through a special fundraiser site to Community Pregnancy Clinics, which estimates that it saves over a thousand babies a year from abortion.
The tickets win entry to an April 14 match at the Hertz Arena in Estero, Florida, about 30 minutes south of Ft. Myers.
Community Pregnancy Clinics, Inc. (CPCI), founded as one small crisis pregnancy center 49 years ago, has since grown to seven clinics across the state of Florida. CPCI has a remarkable success rate in encouraging women to choose life for their preborn children. Over 90 percent of the women they serve chose life and CPCI walks alongside them every step of the way. As CEO Scott Baier recently shared:
When a woman comes to us, we’ll walk with her through that crisis pregnancy. We’ll give her three years of material assistance, including counseling, including just being there with phone calls and support and diapers…They have the tunnel vision thinking they have no other options and they think they have to choose abortion. But when they see what’s available in their own community with the hands and heart and voice of Christ who’s reaching out saying, ‘Here we are, we’re here for you’, often that woman chooses life.
Ultrasounds are a powerful part of CPCI’s client experience.
PG Schafer, a registered nurse who works at the CPCI clinic in the college town of Gainesville, shared with EWTN in October how she watched a woman “transform” after Schafer showed her an ultrasound of her baby.
“I saw this panicked, upset woman go from ‘deer in the headlights’ to a smile on her face. I literally watched her transform,” said Schafer.
“We were absolutely committed to recreating in Naples the breathtaking ‘conversion rate’ reported in other parts of the country among abortion-minded women,” Patricia Bucalo, a past board member, previously explained to LifeSiteNews. “When they actually had a chance to see the babies on ultrasound, everything changed for them; we wanted to be as much help to them in that process as we could.”
CPCI provides other free services to pregnant mothers including pregnancy testing, counseling, material assistance, abortion pill rescue, and adoption agency referrals.
CPCI was one of the first 13 crisis pregnancy clinics to open in the United States in response to Roe v. Wade. It was established in 1974, when a parish pro-life ministry in Collier County decided to counter the legalization of abortion with “life-affirming choices for abortion-vulnerable women.” Since that time, they have saved over 21,000 lives from abortion and that number continues to grow.
Visit Prayforbabies.com/CPCI and sign up to receive a text message whenever a CPCI mother needs prayers and visit supportcpci.com/donate to support their work.