Edward C. Allred made a fortune owning a chain of abortion clinics, personally aborting hundreds of thousands of fetuses, and currently owns gambling venues in California and New Mexico. In 2010, La Sierra University founded the “Edward C. Allred Center for Financial Literacy and Entrepreneurship" in his honor. It hardly seems possible that La Sierra University, which still purports to be a Seventh-day Adventist school, would name anything after a man who has left such a trail of wreckage in his wake, a man who made his fortune eliminating two generations of humanity, and now spends his days devising ways to separate gamblers from their money. And yet they did. But apparently they are not proud to be associated with his life work, as shown by the misleading information on their website:
Dr. Allred has always been an entrepreneur, whether in his innovative and financially successful medical practice or in his lifelong commitment to the sport and business of quarter horse racing in the United States and Southern California in particular. To both he has brought not only sound and creative business practices but also a deep interest in his colleagues and employees and a genuine care for their well being.
To characterize a business with annual revenues of $70 million from 23 outlets in two states as a “medical practice” goes beyond spin and crosses over into dissimulation.
In 1969, Dr. Edward C. Allred, a graduate of La Sierra University and Loma Linda University, founded the “Avalon-Slauson Medical Group,” which was later renamed “Family Planning Associates.” Although this was before the Supreme Court effectively legalized abortion nationwide in Roe v. Wade (1973), California had already legalized abortion in several situations, and hence many women traveled to California to have abortions. “We had planeloads of people coming in,” recalled Allred to a Los Angeles Times reporter in 2002, “We'd meet them at the airport with a bus.”
In 1980, Allred claimed to have personally aborted a quarter of a million fetuses in the preceding 12 years. It may seem difficult to believe that one man could perform so many abortions, but Allred tried to spend no more than five minutes with each pregnant woman. “We've been pioneers in so many ways,” he once told a reporter. “We streamlined, we made efficiencies, we employed the suction technique better than anyone, and we eliminated needless patient-physician contact. We usually see the patient for the first time on the operating table and then not again.” Spending only five minutes per patient would have allowed Allred to perform as many as 100 abortions in a 10-12 hour working day, and 200 working days per year (50 four-day work weeks) would, over 12 years, add up to 240,000 aborted fetuses. So Allred's estimate of the number of abortions he performed during that time is credible.
You might wonder how a person who has aborted a very large city worth of human lives salves his conscience. The pioneers of abortion, such as Margaret Sanger, were quite explicit in favoring it as a means of weeding out undesirables and the unfit, and there was general agreement that the black race was undesirable. Dr. Allred has, at least on one occasion, voiced similar thoughts.
Population control is too important to be stopped by some right-wing pro-life types. . . . The Aid to Families with Dependent Children program is the worst boondoggle ever created. When a sullen black woman of 17 or 18 can decide to have a baby and get welfare and food stamps and become a burden to all of us, it's time to stop. In parts of South Los Angeles, having babies for welfare is the only industry the people have. Edward C. Allred, M.D. quoted in Anthony Perry, "Doctor's Abortion Business is Lucrative," San Diego Union, October 12, 1980, pages A-3 and A-14.
Family Planning Associates expanded to the point where Allred owned 21 abortion clinics in California and two in Chicago. According to a 2001 article in Forbes Magazine, Allred's business generated $70 million in annual gross revenues and $5 million in annual profits. Just as McDonald's founder Ray Kroc pioneered efficiencies and economies of scale in the hamburger business, Edward C. Allred pioneered efficiencies in the abortion clinic business, causing some to call Allred “the Ray Kroc of abortions.”
But things did not always go smoothly; there have been post-abortion deaths, and Allred has been sued many times. One abortion technique Allred used in the early days was saline amniocentesis--injecting saline in place of the normal amniotic fluid--which slowly poisons the baby while burning its skin. This method was usually used in late-term abortions, and the baby typically took an hour to 90 minutes to die. In 1977, Gianna Jessen's 17-year-old mother went to Dr. Allred's Avalon Clinic in Inglewood, California, seeking to abort a pregnancy of 29 weeks (seven months). Dr. Allred used the salt poisoning method, underestimating the amount of saline necessary to kill the fetus, which began struggling to escape the deadly womb. Gianna Jessen was born alive, and Dr. Allred is listed on her birth certificate as the doctor who delivered her. Gianna suffers from cerebral palsy, which she calls the gift of cerebral palsy, and today has become a prominent spokeswoman in the pro-life movement.
Dr. Allred sold Family Planning Associates in 2005, and has retired from the abortion business. He devotes his time to a hobby and passion he acquired while still in medical school: horse racing. Dr. Allred now owns Los Alamitos Race Track in Cypress, California, and Ruidoso Downs, in New Mexico. Horse racing is a very dangerous “sport,” and the exploitation of jockeys is one of the most under reported aspects of that “sport” (really just an excuse for gambling).
Jockeys are independent contractors who earn on average about $38,000 per year; for a basic “mount fee” of as little as $60.00 per race, they risk death and paralysis. In a typical year, at least one or two jockeys are killed or suffer catastrophic spinal cord injuries, and yet the tracks do not carry adequate insurance. A paralyzed jockey will typically burn through a million dollars in medical bills in the first 2 years after the accident. This isn't a theoretical concern; on September 2, 2011, Jacky Martin suffered a broken neck in a fall at Ruidoso Downs, is now a quadriplegic, and needs mechanical help to breathe. Ruidoso downs reportedly carries only $500,000 in accident insurance, and, as in almost every case of this type, that is grossly inadequate to provide for Jacky Martin's ongoing medical needs.
These men and women risk death an catastrophic injury almost solely to provide an occasion for gambling. At Los Alamitos, the daily “handle,” or total dollar amount of bets taken in, was reported to be $1.3 million. Allred decided to simulcast Los Alamitos races to other venues, thus enabling gamblers to bet and lose money on races that they did not attend. Ruidoso Downs had been losing money, but Allred and his partners made the track profitable by adding 300 slot machines, some of which are proudly shown on the track's website. Attendance at horse racing venues has sharply declined in recent years, and industry insiders say the “sport” cannot survive without casino-style gaming at the tracks. But is saving the tracks in the public's interest? According to the National Gambling Impact Study Commission (NGISC), more than one in three racetrack patrons is a pathological or problem gambler, so the tracks cause financial problems for the patrons, as well as causing jockeys to risk death and quadriplegia.
Back to La Sierra University. The Board of Directors is stocked with Adventist Church leaders. Pacific Union president Ricardo Graham is Chairman of the Board of Trustees, and all the affiliated conference presidents within the Pacific Union are also board members. These are all decent men, so it is difficult to understand how they could have allowed La Sierra to become associated with such a person as Edward C. Allred. This sad incident, along with previous stories—such as the issuing of tax-free bonds that came with a secularizing bond covenant, and the ongoing failure to prevent Darwinism being inculcated as truth—call into question whether the Board of Trustees is exercising any meaningful oversight at all.
If the church leadership in the region cannot reform La Sierra, world church leadership must take action. If La Sierra cannot be reformed, it must be clearly and publicly separated from the official church.