World News Editor Max Montana sat down for an interview with Christopher Slattery, BC ‘77, father of four children, and the founder and president of Expectant Mother Care (EMC) FrontLine Pregnancy Centers in New York City.
MM: Could you tell me more about your background growing up and then later going to and graduating from Boston College?
CS: I was born in Manhattan in 1955. I attended Catholic school and then later a private prep school on Staten Island … Then I went to Boston College and did a junior year abroad at the University of Durham in England with a half-a-dozen other Boston College students at the time … I returned to New York [after college] and I started a career in advertising. I came back to my faith strongly, which I kind of lost in regular practice when I arrived at BC, [where] I did not get good direction. Those were pretty strange days of age 18 drinking on campus. … But I did have a heart for fighting the Vietnam War and for hunger and stuff like this. I got involved in various campaigns at Boston College. Not too long after I moved to Manhattan and started a career in advertising, began to take my faith seriously and came across the pro-life movement. I didn’t really have a pro-life commitment at that time. I was just not interested and was apathetic, but I was drawn to the social teachings of the Church and the Sacraments again.
MM: Could you talk more about returning to the faith and your involvement soon after your reversion to the pro-life movement?
CS: There were lots of influences, I think the death of John Paul I and the election of John Paul II was very intriguing. My exposure to Opus Dei was pivotal in my return to the faith and I joined the organization in 1980, and I became a daily communicant and have been literally until this past week. I’ve missed a whole week of Mass for the first time in 40 years since I’ve been pretty sick recently. I was drawn one morning to a plaza in front of an office building on Park Avenue where I was passing by on my way to the subway on the way to work, and the woman who was calling me over was an acquaintance and she said: “Chris did you know that they’re killing babies upstairs?” And this is a 50-story office building, and I said: “Really? I had no idea.” I lived right around the corner from the two biggest abortion clinics in New York City and I didn’t realize it … I was drawn to try sidewalk counseling there and without any experience or training I was able to rescue a mother, a 15-year-old, being brought in by her mom for an abortion. About six months later I was holding that 15-year-old mother’s baby in my arms, so that really made a big impression on me and then I realized that there were no pregnancy centers in New York City and New York had legalized abortion in 1970. Here I was in the early 1980s and there was really very few services … so I found a guy who was trying to expand pregnancy centers around the country, and I brought him in and I opened the doors to our first center in 1985, having signed a lease in 1984 and renovated [the space] over a six month period … I was still working in advertising, but a couple of years later I met Operation Rescue, got involved, arrested, sued, and fired; I changed my life, I burned my bridges to the advertising business in 1990, and I decided to commit myself full time. This was a big leap, I had two children at that time and my wife was expecting a third. I had no experience fundraising, no contacts. There’s more to it all, but that’s the beginning … I couldn’t have done this without my wife’s help, because after our last child was in kindergarten, she went back for her Masters in early education and became a school teacher and was able to get health insurance and create a second income, which we desperately needed to be able to raise our family in New York City … In 1995, I expanded our offices into the Bronx, in 1999 into Brooklyn, and in the early 2000s into Queens.
MM: What were some of the most rewarding parts of your experience in the pro-life movement?
CS: Well it was realizing that you could actually save lives, and over these years we’ve saved tens of thousands of lives [starting] from that one child on the sidewalk on Park Avenue. These are mothers who would have aborted their kids. They come in and many of them are considering an abortion so [we help them] figure out how they can do this. A save or two per day for decades is pretty exciting, some days we’ve had as many as six saves. In the early stages I was counseling women on the weekends … I’ve recruited and trained thousands of people over the years, but in the early 2000s, I found it very difficult to recruit local volunteers, so we were paying staff and started an intern program. My first recruits were from World Youth Day in Toronto, but I went up there and started talking about coming to New York and working for these international students. In 2007, I got a couple of guys from Spain and that led to over the next 13 years, us recruiting over 400 interns from Spain and good Catholic families … and we bought a house in 2008 to house them. We call it the ‘Life House’, it’s in the Bronx, we have three men living there now.
We relaunched sidewalk counseling in 2007 and started a mobile clinic and became a model for Save the Storks, they studied us and they created a mobile pro-life van clinic ministry. We had a couple of RVs and mini-buses and we took them out to abortion clinics throughout New York City and we did that for about 8 years. It became very difficult to manage with drivers and parking, and the city created new laws that required us to have a nurse present whenever I was open and that was the final straw, just too much expense for a very difficult mission especially in the winter in New York. We dropped the mobile ministry, but we’ll get back to sidewalk counseling when we get back to recruitment [coming out of Covid-19]. We’ve been doing ultrasounds here since the mid-1980s, this was one of the first pregnancy centers in the country to use ultrasound. We started in 1986 and have been doing it ever since. We have ultrasounds being done every day in New York City and it’s an instrument to help persuade a mom to choose life and to bond with her baby, or babies sometimes.
MM: How has your Catholic faith kept you grounded even during frustrating times in this ministry?
CS: It’s been essential to me, because I’ve had to transmit the need [of] Christ to the mothers. I have to practice what I preach, I have to [be] sustained all through the Lord. I have to appeal to Him for help through all our crises, we’ve had many. We’ve had many legal attacks over the years, court battles galore. The faith has been there for me to nourish the ministry, nourish my work, and keep me going through thick and thin. The Blessed Mother has watched over us closely, too, the Rosary is very important, the Marian devotions, daily Mass and Communion, weekly Confession, it’s very important. Four months ago, I got a terminal stage four cancer diagnosis. When you’re extremely sick, it’s very difficult to pray and you can’t go to worship … If my doctors are correct and I have two-and-a-half years to live, I’ll be working hard to be ready, I’m not going to presume anything. If all the prayers and sacrifices being offered for me and all the medical care give me an extended life, I’d love it and be able to rescue more children, train more people, involve more young people in our cause, especially in these blue states who will probably never outlaw abortion until hell freezes over.
Max Montana is a senior studying philosophy and theology. When not writing for The Torch, he enjoys reading more about the Catholic faith and philosophy, serving the unborn and mothers in need, and hanging out with friends. Max is honored to hail from the state with many gators and the bishop of the moon: Florida.
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