FEATURING GUEST SPEAKER Harold Cassidy
Our theme is 40 Years of Yes! We want to make this a celebration of our Center's 40 years of service to our community, empowering mothers and fathers to say "yes" to life for four decades.
FEATURING GUEST SPEAKER Harold Cassidy, “widely recognized as the leading attorney in the nation in protecting pregnant mothers against the excesses and abuses of an abortion industry which violates the rights and interests of the women of the nation.”
Harold Cassidy has successfully litigated numerous precedent-setting cases of public importance. He was selected by Who’s Who as one of the top one hundred lawyers in North America, and a member of "National Trial Lawyers – Top 100." For his achievements, he was selected Person of the Week by ABC World News with Peter Jennings.
Mr. Cassidy is considered by many to be the leading attorney in the nation as a defender of the rights of pregnant mothers. He was chief counsel in the internationally famous Baby M case, the first case that declared surrogate mother contracts were against public policy and exploitative of women. He obtained the only ruling in the nation, from an en banc panel of the US Court of Appeals, to hold that an abortion kills a whole, separate, unique, living human being, and a separate en banc decision of the US Court of Appeals holding that an abortion places a pregnant mother at increased risk for suicide ideation and suicide.
Even his pro-abortion adversaries respect his work. In 2011 Mother Jones magazine, in a six-page article profiling his work wrote: "And while these ideas have become part of the vanguard of pro-life thinking – protect the woman, not just the unborn – few have heard of the man who helped bring them to prominence ... Cassidy ... sees the mother-child relationship as ‘almost sacred.’ Those beliefs have put him at the forefront of pro-life’s biggest rebranding in recent memory ..."
In a 2010 Columbia Law Review article, Harvard law professor Jeanine Suk stated: "It is no coincidence that the lawyer considered most influential in carrying the abortion trauma argument into courts and legislatures is Harold Cassidy. ... Concerns about psychological harm, coercion in women’s reproductive choices, and women’s right to be informed seem to run directly from his work on surrogacy and adoption to his work on abortion. The consistent thread is the idea of protecting women when they make choices that are, in fact, not fully voluntary, and then regret their decisions and suffer trauma." (110 Columbia L.Rev. 1243, 1248, 1249) Lee Silver, a famous molecular biologist who discovered some of the regulatory genes in the human being, testified on behalf of the abortion industry in opposition to Mr. Cassidy. Silver wrote admiringly of Cassidy as an opponent in his book Challenging Nature: "The problem with (Cassidy’s) strategy is that it’s brilliant and effective."
Our Emcee is Sheila Qualls
Sheila Qualls is a writer for Alpha News, Minnesota’s largest conservative news outlet. She covers hard hitting issues impacting families and education and has extensively reported on the dangers of Critical Race Theory, gender ideology, and poor academic performance plaguing our schools. She writes to give parents a voice in the echo chamber of public education.
In addition to writing for Alpha News, Sheila is the Executive Director of TakeCharge. An organization she and her husband Kendall founded in 2020. TakeCharge supports the notion that the promise of America is available to anyone, regardless of race or social station. She is editor of the organization’s bi-annual magazine The Washington Perspective
She maintains an active blog at Patheos.com. Her work has been published in the Star Tribune, the Christian Post, MOPS blog, Scary Mommy, the Power of Moms, The Upper Room, and Grown and Flown. She speaks nationally on issues of faith and family. Sheila holds a Masters Degree in Communication and formerly worked as an award-winning journalist and editor. She chose to stay home to raise and educate their five children. She has been married to Kendall for almost 37 years, and in addition to their children, they have one grandchild. She and Kendall live in Medina with their Black Lab, Largo.