2026 Pro-life Voters Guide

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All of the candidates listed below are believed to follow pro-life (anti-abortion) principles.

Why local candidates' abortion views matter (especially City Council)

In 1992, we first brought these concerns to the Bakersfield City Council, being typically met with an apathetic response (Council members Mark Salvaggio and Jacquie Sullivan were the exceptions over these decades, as they took the time to listen to our concerns and often provided key help with the problems).

In the summer of 2012, God first led us to advocate a Human Life Ordinance in Bakersfield (due to the new Planned Parenthood facility which was being built on 16th Street, which experts said was designed to be an abortion facility). After we (along with many pastors and others) spoke at every City Council meeting for 15 months, eventually a vote was held, but several Council members chose to make a mockery of the process, preventing any legitimate consideration of this proposal and attempting to prevent future discussion on this topic.

At those Council meetings in 2012-2013, one concern often expressed by the Council and staff was that a Human Life Ordinance had never been attempted in any city. But a few years later, the leaders of a small Texas city declared itself to be a "Sanctuary City for the Unborn." Eventually, 100 cities and counties passed similar ordinances.

One of those cities is very similar to Bakersfield: Lubbock. When the Lubbock City Council passed their Sanctuary City for the Unborn ordinance, abortions immediately ended at Lubbock's Planned Parenthood (this was before Roe v. Wade was overturned, and before the State of Texas had curtailed abortions).

Bakersfield not only missed the opportunity to be the leader in this national movement, but most importantly, missed the opportunity to save the lives of thousands of Bakersfield children, and to save thousands of Bakersfield mothers from a lifetime of suffering (and in some cases we witnessed, from serious injury and possibly death).

We are thankful that God has used us to save countless thousands of babies since 1984, but many times over these decades we have faced opposition from the City of Bakersfield which seemed to be unjustly oppressive. City officers harassed and threatened citizens who displayed our pro-life yard signs on their lawns, confiscated crosses we had legally displayed near the abortion chamber in memory of babies who had been killed here, and even prevented us from using our own property to display pro-life signs!

These draconian actions by Bakersfield officials ultimately led to our decision to close down our LifeHouse pro-life ministry center, and almost destroyed our ministry. But in spite of many obstacles, our pro-life ministry efforts are still continuing in this fifth decade of local ministry, with many babies and mothers saved this year (though our efforts to re-establish our pro-life ministry center have not yet been realized).