Join us for an inspiring conversation with Dr. James Dobson as he welcomes Sidna and Tom Massey, who have dedicated decades to supporting pregnancy centers nationwide. This heartfelt dialogue uncovers the unsung heroes working tirelessly to save lives and offer hope and healing to those facing crisis pregnancies. Hear compelling stories of courage, faith, and the relentless pursuit of giving every child a chance at life.
Welcome everyone to Family Talk. It’s a ministry of the James Dobson Family Institute supported by listeners just like you. I’m Dr. James Dobson and I’m thrilled that you’ve joined us.
SPEAKER 02 :
Well, welcome to Family Talk. I’m Roger Marsh, and today we’re bringing you a powerful conversation about hope, healing, and the important work happening in pregnancy centers all across America. Our guests once again are Sidna and Tom Massey, who have dedicated multiple decades to supporting these life-saving ministries through their organization called Rama International. Sidna’s own journey through post-abortion healing led her to become a passionate advocate for women facing crisis pregnancies and those dealing with the aftermath of abortion. She’s also written about her abortion experience in a book titled Her Choice to Heal, Finding Spiritual and Emotional Peace After Abortion. Together with her husband, Tom, who shares his own touching connection to this issue, they have trained workers at over 2,200 pregnancy centers nationwide. Now, yesterday, we heard Sidna’s powerful testimony of finding healing and forgiveness after her own abortion and how God transformed her pain into ministry. Today, she and her husband, Tom, will share about the vital but often overlooked work of pregnancy resource centers all across America. We’ll pick up the discussion with a question from Dr. Dobson about how pregnancy resource centers are faring today.
SPEAKER 05 :
It’s in the talk about the workers and the directors in crisis pregnancy centers or pregnancy centers.
SPEAKER 06 :
They are unsung heroes.
SPEAKER 05 :
Are they hurting?
SPEAKER 06 :
They are hurting. Most of them are all independent, relying on churches. This is one of the few areas in our country where ministries combine. You have Catholics, Protestants, Lutherans, all of them working together as volunteers. And they all get along and they can all share Christ in the way they feel like God is instructing them to. But they’re underfunded. They’re so greatly underfunded that most of them are just praying every single day that they can get a paycheck and most go without.
SPEAKER 05 :
I don’t understand that. I mean they’re saving babies. You know, I remember – you wouldn’t remember. You’re too young. But there was a little child named Kathy Fiscus. who fell down a well many, many years ago. People gathered around for days trying to get that child out. And when they brought that little girl up, I’m referring to Kathy, when they brought her up, you know, she was swollen, her face was dirty, and the whole nation cried. Because of one baby. And now you have these crisis pregnancy centers that are saving babies every day, and they can’t get the funds to pay for their meager salaries. Something wrong with that, too.
SPEAKER 06 :
Well, the political side of abortion is where most of the funding is going. And it’s interesting that we, in pregnancy center work, we stop abortion every single day, one life at a time. Legally, we certainly support all the efforts that are going on. Abortion is a horrific thing to have on our books as a legality. But in the pregnancy centers, they are just being Jesus.
SPEAKER 05 :
What do they say to you, Sidna, when you’re talking to them on the phone or face-to-face? What are these workers saying to you?
SPEAKER 06 :
Most of them are thanking me just for talking to them because they have no emotional support. Many of them have asked me to just say to you today, thank you. Thank Dr. Dobson for us.
SPEAKER 05 :
And you’re still at it, Sidna. That’s how many years? Twenty. Twenty years you’ve been.
SPEAKER 06 :
Tom and I have been doing this a long time.
SPEAKER 05 :
Talk a little more about Rama, your ministry, and what you’re trying to accomplish.
SPEAKER 06 :
Rama started out predominantly for a need. There was an unmet need. We did not have enough for post-abortive people. So initially, we started training all these beautiful pregnancy center people. And invariably, obviously, I had a book that came out. It was called Her Choice to Heal, Finding Spiritual and Emotional Peace After Abortion. Had a lot of response to that. And as we moved through the years, we found that the Lord wanted us to come back around and realize that When a woman chooses abortion, she’s very likely to choose it again and again and again. And that pregnancy center individuals, graciously beautiful-hearted people, were feeling disqualified to work with post-abortive people. We’re here. They were here. They were ministering. But I’ve never had an abortion. How can I ever minister to someone who has? And my point was, we need you. All we need is God’s calling. Don’t be intimidated. And I have this wonderful thing I say, which God gave me, is never be embarrassed of not having an abortion. It’s a good thing. And we need the stability and the strength of these people. So we started doing a lot more to help pregnancy centers understand why women abort and how simple and easy we are to minister to. And that transformed into a large other ministry where we take an awful lot of calls. We talk directly to abortion vulnerable people. And we’ve just really been blessed by kind of operating underground. Mm-hmm. And keeping clear of anything but the pregnancy center work. That is our focal point.
SPEAKER 05 :
Well, you just used the word we because you’re not in this thing alone. No, I’m not. And your husband, Tom Massey, is here with us today. And he’s been very, very quiet through these two programs. But, Tom, you quit your job and are working with Sidney. We’re really full-time trying to accomplish the same thing, aren’t you?
SPEAKER 03 :
Oh, yes, sir, yes. I love the Lord with all my heart, with all my soul. I love the Lord. And I see in Sidna the Lord moving in monumental ways that I could never fathom before.
SPEAKER 05 :
Yeah.
SPEAKER 03 :
In my being. Unbelievable. And I stand behind her in everything that God is doing through her and help in any way that I possibly can.
SPEAKER 05 :
And you’re a computer specialist?
SPEAKER 03 :
Yes, sir. Yes. I work with designing websites. I designed RamaInternational.org, our website.
SPEAKER 05 :
You have a sense of fulfillment from what you’re doing?
SPEAKER 03 :
Oh, yes. Again, my sense of fulfillment is standing behind my wife and her ministry, our ministry, and encouraging the work that she does.
SPEAKER 05 :
Tom, it’s really interesting to me that you have dedicated your life to this work that the Lord gave Sidney to do. And then I found out in a conversation in my office an hour ago that you have also had an experience with abortion. I don’t know how many times you’ve told that. I don’t know if you’ve ever told it, and you may not be comfortable in dealing with it. But if you are, tell us what that connection is.
SPEAKER 03 :
Well, Dr. Dobson, I am post-abortive. When I was 17 years old, my girlfriend got pregnant, and she had an abortion. And I did not know she was pregnant, nor did I know that she had an abortion. When we broke up, she told me, oh, by the way, I aborted your baby. I would have—I was head over heels for the girl. I would have— Married her and had that child and lived happily ever after. But God had other plans. And someday I’ll see my child in heaven. And dealing with post-abortive men is an issue that really isn’t addressed.
SPEAKER 06 :
greatly and it does need to be addressed because it affects the there’s two people involved in a crisis pregnancy both of them we have a very few men that contact us very few men searching for that there’s this element of was it really my child do i need to worry about it and yet there’s so many that say yeah i know it’s in my heart but i don’t know how to approach it And the night that I told Tom about my abortion, as we sat in the dark, I’d known him two weeks. I knew I was going to marry him. He was a man of God, and I had been looking for someone like that. And I remember being terrified that because of my abortion, he wouldn’t want to marry me. And I knew truthfully you couldn’t start a marriage on a lie. And honesty was something that he so valued. And as I shared my story with him, fully prepared to lose him, He said to me, Sidna, when I was 17, my girlfriend aborted behind my back. And the one thing that has always stuck with me was his next words is, I know your pain. I know your pain. And he didn’t bring it up again because he was concerned that it would hurt me. And I hear this in more men that how can I talk about the abortion because I’ll make her cry. I don’t want to bring that pain to her.
SPEAKER 05 :
I bet you there are men listening to us right now who will identify with you, Tom. And they have stuffed it down and never really dealt with the pain and the emotion of that experience.
SPEAKER 03 :
It’s hard to have your hands tied and not be able to do anything regarding your own child, having absolutely no rights to your child that’s in a woman’s womb.
SPEAKER 05 :
Now, you all have a 501c3. Yes. And you do this incredible work with how many crisis pregnancy centers?
SPEAKER 06 :
It’s about 2,200 around the United States.
SPEAKER 05 :
Yeah.
SPEAKER 06 :
Internationally, there’s more.
SPEAKER 05 :
Get this, 2,200. And how much is your budget each year?
SPEAKER 06 :
I think right around $150,000. Is that incredible?
SPEAKER 05 :
They take that little widow’s mite, that pittance, and spread it around to how many centers and who knows how many babies. And I don’t think we’ve said anything quite like this, and certainly not in a year. But if people would like to contribute to this 501c3 program, They can send the money to us, and we will pass it on to you guys so you can do your job better.
SPEAKER 06 :
And supporting the pregnancy centers as well in their areas. This is the place where God’s at work. They’re sitting there day and life. I’ll come off a conversation, and Tom will be sitting at his desk next to me. And one day he said to me, It had been an hour and a half call, and I was exhausted. And the Lord had been there. She was a young girl that reminded me so much of myself. And it was, the Lord just said, give her your soul. And we poured out, and she gave right back to me. It’s always, he who refreshes others will himself be refreshed. And Tom stood there, and I said, I think I’m done for the day. And he had tears in his eyes, and he said, you have absolutely the best job in the world. And I said, really? He says, how many people can sit there on a telephone line and talk to someone who’s considering life and death and be used by God to give her a little bit of information and send her to a wonderful center? And for that, I hadn’t really ever looked at the honor and privilege it is to take this incredible dynamo that’s abortion and break it down on a person-by-person level and just talk to them normally. It’s all they need. Some of them have no support at all. Some of them don’t know Christ. Most of them don’t. I’ll ask a question. What’s your spiritual background? And depending on their answer, I will go one way or another. If they find out they believe in God, we’ll ask them, what do you think God thinks of this? And sometimes scripture just does all the work. They just need to be reminded. And so many times you hang up the phone and you walk away and you just thank the Lord. But then there are those days when you pick up the phone and the girl is saying, I had my abortion. I did it. I aborted. One time I had been working with this beautiful woman on the Internet. She wouldn’t call. She wouldn’t visit her center for six weeks. She was 18 weeks pregnant, and she just casually said, I had my abortion yesterday. And I just rolled back in my chair and was horrified. I was horrified at myself. I said, what did I do wrong, Lord? what did I do wrong that she would take the six weeks? And I walked out, I walked around the block, and I was just asking God for some sense of this. And he said something deep into my heart, which is one of the things that Tom always reminds me of in our hard times is, praise me, praise me. And I said, Lord, I can’t praise you for abortion. He says, I’m not asking you to praise me for abortion. I’m asking you to praise me for what I’m going to do in her life. Because of this. Who are you to know what I’m going to do with this? And you need to have faith that I’ve got a plan even when the child’s born.
SPEAKER 05 :
Look what he did in your life.
SPEAKER 06 :
Amen. And it’s incredibly hard to surrender that to the Lord when you know what these women are going to go through in the future. And she disappeared from my email. She’s out there somewhere. And there’s not a day that I don’t remember her and pray for her. That might be the honor God’s giving me is that I’m one of the few that’s able to pray for her. And in the midst of that, I realized that all these pregnancy center people are going through the same thing. When they abort anyway, we grieve these children. It’s not a 100% job. But if God created the life, then he knows what he’s going to do with that life.
SPEAKER 05 :
You may remember a long time ago, we had a conference for the directors of crisis pregnancy centers. That was a large group. I think they were 500 or 700. You were turning them away. All the details, don’t you?
SPEAKER 06 :
I had to decide who could come and who couldn’t.
SPEAKER 05 :
Well, I do remember that day and how many women told me. I mean, we set up microphones and they came and talked to me. How many women told me that the hardest part of their job was not fundraising, as difficult as that is. The most difficult part was working with these lost, lonely girls and bringing them through the pregnancy and have them get halfway through or three-quarters of the way through and then deciding to abort. And there is that sense of failure. What did I do wrong? Just exactly what you were talking about. That’s hard. That is tough.
SPEAKER 06 :
And it’s what Jesus has set us to do, is to talk and reach these people and love them regardless. I often address the emotion and the anger that you can have against these women because you’re grieving. And one thing I realized when I was going through my healing process was anger was a tool that I would use to keep grief at bay. If I was angry, I wasn’t crying. And these are the women on the picket lines of the pro-choice movement. They are the ones that are screaming. They’ve yet to cry. They’re very angry because their grief is so close. And so for these women who watch these children pass away, they’re angry initially at themselves. They can be angry at the mothers. But most of the time it takes, they have the Holy Spirit there to say, calm down.
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I’ve got a plan.
SPEAKER 06 :
I’ve got a plan. I’m going to use her. I’m going to use this. You may never know it, but wait for it, because I’ll make sure it turns to my good.
SPEAKER 05 :
You know, when I leave my garage and I drive to Family Talk every day, I have to drive past the Planned Parenthood building that has just recently been constructed there. It’s a beautiful building, and I’m sure some of our tax money… went to build that structure. And every day I look over there and I see cars that are there. Some days there are none, and I’m grateful for that. But some days there are six or eight cars, and I can imagine what’s going on inside that building and that organization. And thankfully, there are Catholic people who stand in the driveway there. They can only get within about a block and a half from there. And they stand there and they pray for those women. and walk back and forth. They’re not angry. They’re not calling people names. They’re not trying to start a fight or anything. They’re just there praying for those babies and those women because it’s not just the babies that they care about. It is the women and the men, their husbands too and their boyfriends too.
SPEAKER 06 :
And I pray for the workers. A lot of these people are praying for the workers as well, the people in the clinics doing the work. I’ve met some incredible people who’ve come out of the work, and God can use them in an incredible way. While we were yet sinners.
SPEAKER 05 :
As we close this conversation today, I would like to make an appeal to those who have listened to us and their hearts have been touched. people who have heard a call that they really ought to be doing something about this, about these unborn children. Some won’t even talk about it because there’s such a stigma politically, even within the Christian community. But it’s not political. It’s babies. And some might want to join that little band of people who are out there representing life are those that are praying for, as you said, those that are actually working in Planned Parenthood clinics and others. Whatever God calls you to do, I hope people will yield to it. You want to add to that?
SPEAKER 06 :
You know, it’s one of those things that Henry Blackaby said one time, find where God is working and go there. Well, God exists in these centers. God exists in a way that I’ve seen him only rarely exist in churches. And most of these women are not going to churches. It’s not that they don’t know God. They don’t know Christ. And they see a little sign that says free pregnancy test. And they walk in or they Google on the internet and they find their local center. And the one thing that most people say when they’re considering working for pregnancy centers is, this is too big. I’m just a little person. And I say, it has nothing to do with you. It has everything to do with God working through you. So take the pressure off and know that God can use you.
SPEAKER 05 :
Well, Sidney and Tom, thank you all for what you’ve done for these 20 years. And thank you for your influence in my life. I’ve enjoyed working with you. It’s been a long time. But you came here today and asked to see me. I didn’t even know that you were in town because you live in Arkansas or someplace like that. Northwest Arkansas, home of the Razorbacks. Good to have you all here. We love you. Keep up the good work. And any last thing you want to say?
SPEAKER 06 :
I would just want to thank you again, Dr. Dobson. I am a life that was changed because you made a decision to run an incredible work and just obey the Lord. And I have never since ever stopped praying for you and been so incredibly proud to serve you in whatever way I can. Thank you.
SPEAKER 05 :
We hadn’t planned to do a radio program.
SPEAKER 06 :
No. No.
SPEAKER 05 :
We just talked and we’re both in tears, all three of us.
SPEAKER 06 :
And the work that you have done on behalf of pregnancy centers has been very unique. And on behalf of these centers, I want to thank you. I want to thank you for loving them and standing up and encouraging them and for all that you’ve done for the unborn.
SPEAKER 05 :
Do you look forward to the day when you hear the words, well done, thou good and faithful servant?
SPEAKER 06 :
You know, I do look forward to that. I have my mother and my father in heaven with my son. And I look forward to that. And then I want to go give him a hug.
SPEAKER 05 :
My dad still has tears in his eyes for what’s happened to the unborn child. Bless you. Enjoy the work God’s called you to do. And come by and see us when you’re in town.
SPEAKER 06 :
Thank you.
SPEAKER 05 :
Thank you, Dr. Dobson.
SPEAKER 02 :
Well, you’ve been listening to Dr. If you’d like more information about Rama International, or if you’d like to share today’s broadcast with someone who needs to hear this important message of hope and healing, visit drjamesdobson.org forward slash family talk. Here at the Dr. James Dobson Family Institute, we are committed to defending the sanctity of human life and supporting those on the front lines of this crucial work. Programs like the one you just heard today are made possible by friends like you who share our passion for protecting life and supporting families. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. The brand new JDFI Multilingual app is available, providing you with convenient access to Dr. Dobson’s biblically-based teachings. We’re talking about the new Dobson Marriage Podcast, the Dobson Parenting Podcast, and the popular newly remastered Dr. Dobson Minute. Now, the Family app is currently available on Apple devices in both English and Spanish. Now, three additional languages are also in the works for 2025, as well as an Android version as well, to seek to reach as many people, millions, all over the world for the Lord. For more information on how you can download the new JDFI Multilingual Family app, go to drjamesdobson.org. Well, I’m Roger Marsh. Thanks so much for listening to our program today. On behalf of Dr. Dobson and the entire team here at the JDFI, we pray that you have a wonderful rest of your day. And be sure to join us again next time right here for another edition of Dr. James Dobson’s Family Talk.
SPEAKER 01 :
This has been a presentation of the Dr. James Dobson Family Institute. With today’s Dr. Dobson Minute, here’s Dr. James Dobson.
SPEAKER 04 :
Many years ago, my wife Shirley was working around the house one morning when a knock came at the front door. When she opened it, there stood a young woman in her late teens who called herself Sally. I’m selling brushes, she said, and I wonder if you’d like to buy any. Well, my wife told her she wasn’t interested in buying anything that day, and Sally said, I know, no one else is either. And with that, she began to cry. Sally turned out to be an unmarried mother who was struggling mightily to support her two-year-old son. We took her to the market and we did what we could to help her get on her feet. Now, Sally is obviously not the only single mother out there who’s desperately trying to survive in a very hostile world. And they could sure use a little kindness to babysit, to have a meal brought over, to have someone repair the washing machine or just show a little thoughtfulness. Not only will it bring encouragement to the mom, but one or more children will bless you as well.
