They Were Available: Chris Corbett
#100forLife: When Chris Corbett was still in his twenties and new to Christianity, he helped found Southern California's only crisis pregnancy center.
Chris Corbett thought talking to a church about abortion would be easy. It was 1984, 11 years and 12 million deaths after Roe v. Wade. All of America’s war dead from the Revolution to Vietnam amounted to a mere a fraction of the babies aborted in the decade following that epochal Supreme Court decision.
Such statistics would handily jolt God’s people into action, the title insurance clerk in his late-twenties thought. Wasn’t the Bible clear that abortion was murder, and wouldn’t that spur Christians to jump on the pro-life bandwagon?
Not so fast, warned his friends, a young military veteran and a middle-aged doctor. Chris was a newly official member of Christian Action Council (CAC, precursor to the pro-life Care Net), and on a Wednesday night in San Diego, he tagged along with his friends as they went to speak about abortion before a church group of young professionals.
“I really thought they were going to get thrown out physically of the room,” he said.
Mitch was tough. He’d fought for his country and sported tattoos before it was common. But standing outside the church building afterwards, Mitch cried. “How can Christians act like this?” He wondered.
Chris’s own voice was not without tears as he recalled the shock he felt that night. “That was the kind of environment we were in.”
From Atheist to Activist
As a young man, Chris prided himself in his stout atheism. He remembers getting a call from a friend who’d gotten his girlfriend pregnant. Unsure of what to do, he turned to Chris to ask whether his girlfriend should get an abortion. “It’s a hard question,” Chris conceded, but ultimately counseled his friend to make the “practical” decision — abortion. Ironically, he would soon hear arguments that would begin to change his mind.
In 1980, at the age of 24, Chris accepted Jesus Christ. A 1978 speech by Alexander Solzhenitsyn at Harvard University challenged his atheism. Solzhenitsyn asserted that you couldn’t have freedom without morality, and you couldn’t have morality without religion. That led Chris to ponder whether a “higher intelligence” had designed the universe that way, which led him to ponder whether God might exist. It also helped him understand why people would oppose abortion on moral grounds.
A flyer for San Diego County Crisis Pregnancy Center, founded in 1984.
After his conversion, Chris delved into Scripture and apologetics with the help of other believers. He read biblical passages like Psalm 51 that convinced him of life’s sanctity, and authors like Francis Schaeffer who advocated Christian involvement in culture and politics.
As for the friend Chris counseled toward abortion? They’re still best friends to this day, and both believers. Chris acknowledged they have both struggled with feelings of guilt, but know they are redeemed.
As a new Christian, Chris didn’t wait to take action. A gifted writer and armed with fresh zeal, he often wrote his own tracts on a typewriter, took them to a print store and handed them out on 8.5×11 sheets, sometimes while picketing outside abortion clinics. He ran with other young Christians who were involved in starting the San Diego chapter of CAC, which Chris soon joined.
When CAC national leadership wanted local chapters to start founding crisis pregnancy centers, that’s what the San Diego chapter did. Chris became the chairman of the board of San Diego County Crisis Pregnancy Center.
Getting the center up and running was a battle — especially when Chris had to fire the man selected to be the center’s director after just one week. A seminary student, the director refused to offer confidentiality to women up front, even though doing so was a legal requirement for opening the center. Chris asked Karen Deaner, a young woman at his parish, to interview, warning her that the center couldn’t pay her. She got the job. A year later he proposed. (We’ll hear Karen Corbett’s story tomorrow.)
The Ongoing Battle for Life
Though Chris’s long-term plans originally included law school, God took him another path. After their wedding, Chris and Karen moved to Michigan and then Texas. Even though they’d left the San Diego County Crisis Pregnancy Center behind, the Corbetts continued speaking at churches about the pro-life movement, and advised others who were founding a new crisis pregnancy center.
“Our goal was to eradicate abortion,” Chris said of the early movement, adding that while that obviously hasn’t happened, he’s encouraged by the movement’s success.
“Doing the right thing as God commands you to do it is never wrong,” he said. “I don’t think it has been a failure. Saving millions of lives that otherwise would have died brutally and bringing millions of women to Christ — and men also — and making impact on the culture, I would not say that’s a failure at all.”
Chris also said it’s encouraging to see young people who are a part of the movement today. One concern Chris and Karen have, however, is that young people who are a part of the pro-life movement today merely see it as a “cool” thing to do, but lack the passion needed for success.
“We felt a little bit like the civil rights workers might have felt in the ‘50’s or ‘60’s, that we were kind of out there alone but on the cutting edge,” Chris, now a writer based in Texas, said of their days in San Diego. “And we were really driven by a sense of righteous indignation and sadness — with that came a lot of purpose and mission and energy … That’s what I hope young people in the pro-life movement today don’t miss, that they keep that same kind of fire going.”
Because as Chris and Karen — now parents of four — learned, the only qualification needed to make a difference is making yourself available. “There was no reason we should have succeeded,” Chris said.
Karen agreed, directing credit upward. “It’s amazing how God used a little group of people and blessed it enormously with success.”
We’ll hear more of Karen’s own story tomorrow in part two of “They Were Available.”