Clients say pregnancy resource centers change lives by supporting life

It was a routine Wednesday morning at the Women’s Life Care Center, a pregnancy resource center in Little Canada.

A certified nurse sat in the ultrasound room, awaiting the day’s appointments or walk-ins. The executive director prepared to install a child seat in a woman’s car. A volunteer answered a phone call from a Spanish-speaking woman as another opened the clinic’s front door to a Somali woman. Upstairs, donations of diapers, baby clothes and baby toys were sorted to give to women in need.

Pregnancy resource centers such as Women’s Life encounter women on the front line of unexpected pregnancies. Many offer free services and goods such as parenting classes, certified life coaching, job resources, diapers and maternity clothes, with the mission of empowering women to make informed decisions about their pregnancy — and backing them in choosing life.

Some centers offer medical services such as ultrasounds performed by a licensed sonographer or trained registered nurse, and testing for sexually transmitted diseases and infections.

Catholic parishes, schools and other ministries assist many of the centers with fundraising, volunteers and donations.

At least 86 pregnancy resource centers dot the rural and urban Minnesota landscape, according to Minneapolis-based Minnesota Citizens Concerned for Life.

Recent criticism leveled by Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison in an Aug. 23 consumer alert claims that pregnancy resource centers “pose as reproductive healthcare clinics despite not providing comprehensive reproductive healthcare to consumers,” and some don’t provide any health care services at all. The alert also claims that the centers “attempt to prevent or dissuade pregnant people from accessing their constitutionally protected right under the Minnesota Constitution to a safe and legal abortion.”

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‘MIRACLE FOR ME’

Risa Cobb, a young mother from St. Paul, said seeing her baby via ultrasound was nothing short of miraculous.

“They showed me my baby on the ultrasound, which was a miracle for me to see that with my own eyes. I knew it was the right thing to do to keep my baby, and I had enough time to think about adoption,” Cobb said.

Cobb visited the Women’s Life Care Center in Little Canada in 2019 after searching for ultrasounds on the internet. She was terrified to tell her parents and boyfriend about her unexpected pregnancy.

“It’s not shoving any information down your throat,” said Cobb. “They are not pushing you to believe what they believe; they are simply guiding you as you share with them what is going on. They will ask you questions and help you figure out what you really want.”

Through information offered and questions asked, Cobb decided she really did want her baby.

“It has been a huge, huge blessing to have (the center). I don’t know what I would have done without them,” said Cobb, in a telephone interview. “The more courses I took, the more confident I felt as a mother.”

Life coaching offered at the center paved the way for Cobb to finish her degree in communication studies and mass media. She plans soon to transition to a job in which she can use her degree, while she participates in multiple Bible studies.

Her son, Johnny Rocket — named in honor of his remarkable progress as a premature baby — is doing well.

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The alert — and similar alerts in states including Massachusetts and California — use the kind of wording found in, or refer directly to, a recent study of crisis pregnancy centers by a group called The Alliance: State Advocates for Women’s Rights and Gender Equality. Publishing data from centers in nine states, including Minnesota, the Alliance claims that crisis pregnancy centers “are generally failing at their purported mission to reach and dissuade ‘abortion-minded’ people,” since most of the women who come to pregnancy resource centers are not abortion-determined. On its website, alliancestateadvocates.org, the Alliance also claims CPCs are “a Surveillance Tool of the Post-Roe state.”

But clients, executives and staff at pregnancy resource centers — sometimes called crisis pregnancy centers — say women are not coerced in any way to keep their child. The centers simply aim to meet the needs of pregnant women and mothers at sites such as Birthright and Abria Pregnancy Resources, both in St. Paul, Women’s Life Care Center in Little Canada and Guiding Star Wakota in West St. Paul.

Karen McCann, a 55-year-old mother of two and director of Birthright, said the staff cares equally about the women who visit the center and the child they carry. Birthright recognizes that abortion ends a life and harms women emotionally, spiritually and sometimes physically, McCann said. While most of Birthright’s services center on supplying free diapers, formula and baby clothes to women in need, they also refer women to prenatal care if they don’t already have a doctor. The center does not claim to be a clinic and it doesn’t advertise any medical services.

“They say ‘fake clinic,’ but we never have called ourselves a clinic, so they’re putting that on us. We are a help center,” McCann said. “We’re not medical but we are very much practical. We’re just trying to help them with emotional and practical things and just being a friend for them.”

Joyce Thomas, a mother from north Minneapolis who serves as a life coach and advocate at Abria Pregnancy Resources, said she helps women whether they are considering abortion or need extra support.

“They’re scared,” Thomas said, noting that some clients are pregnant with their first child. “When we offer the services and the program, they can take the lead where they want to go.” Women helped by Abria can participate in pregnancy and parenting classes, life coaching, learning about healthy relationships and other offerings. Licensed professionals at Abria offer pregnancy testing, limited testing and treatment for sexually transmitted infections, and ultrasounds that can confirm pregnancy, find the location of a fetus and verify gestational age, but are not used diagnostically.

Jacinta Lagasse, 35, the executive director of Women’s Life Care Center, said most of the mothers coming to the center are unwed, in their 20s, and from minority populations. Out of every 1,000 clients, about one-third are Caucasian. About two-thirds of the women are abortion-minded or are vulnerable to obtaining an abortion if support falls away, and one-third are not considering ending their pregnancy, she said.

“We want to see (women) fly on their own, give them the skills so that they can go out and move forward in life, and be in a good place, and send other moms to us who are in more vulnerable or tenuous situations,” Lagasse said. Women pursuing college degrees, a job or other goals find support and resources at the center, she said.

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‘LIKE FAMILY’

Samantha Dinsey, a native of Ghana in West Africa now living in St. Paul, said that Women’s Life Care Center “was a life-saving place” that helped her “feel like living again” after the child in her womb was diagnosed with a fatal condition and died two and a half months after she gave birth.

Dinsey was referred to the center after she sought opinions from multiple doctors, some of whom encouraged her to get an abortion.

“No woman should have to go through what I went through, but Woman’s Life Care Center made me feel like I was not alone,” Dinsey said. After her baby, Martha, was born, the center continued to support her and take her to appointments as she spent her days with Martha in the intensive care unit.

Despite predictions of the doctors, Martha grew and lived for two and a half months before she died. The center provided Dinsey with a life coach and helped her apply for jobs after Martha’s death.

“They did not leave me there. They helped me, I went to school, they helped me with my job application, everything, my resume, this center helped me with all that,” Dinsey said.

She gave birth to a healthy daughter, Emma, in 2021, and plans to take her into the clinic to show her to the staff.

“Everybody in my family knows the center, they were like family,” Dinsey said.

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Expanding services

“In my experience, when women come here and they are abortion minded, it is because they feel they have no other choice,” said Anne Swanson, 42, director of client services at Wakota Guiding Star, which offers an array of resources to help women in that situation, including rent assistance, job information, entrepreneurship classes and fertility awareness training.

The center offers a program that supports men in their role as fathers, and it plans to expand into a clinic offering gynecological services and an on-site therapist for mental health needs.

“We know that the mother is not going to choose life for her child unless her needs are met first, so we do everything possible to meet her needs, so that she can have the option to carry,” said Kelly Huber, 34, the center’s director of operations.

That is precisely what happened for Kenyatta Hardaway, 46, who now works as a certified life coach at Guiding Star Wakota. When she was pregnant with her first child, Hardaway considered an abortion because of the sickness associated with her pregnancy and her needs at the time. With help from a pregnancy resource center, Hardaway kept her baby.

After teaching for 21 years, Hardaway now helps other women develop their life skills and work toward their goals. If her clients are open to it, she incorporates her Christian faith into their sessions.

“I love it,” said Hardaway. “This is a ministry, not a job.”

As of Oct. 12, Wakota had served 917 women this year alone. Hispanics make up the greatest percentage of their clientele, followed by African Americans and then Caucasians. Most of the women are single and in their 20s. Of those, 59% of women intend to carry, while the rest are unknown, undecided or plan to abort, Wakota executives said.

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ADDITIONAL ASSISTANCE

Pregnancy resource center offerings have changed dramatically over the past few decades, said Ann Dickenson, a member of St. Joseph in West St. Paul and an early leader in the state’s pro-life movement.

“I’m pretty amazed at how they’ve changed,” Dickenson said. “They were just like holes-in-the-wall. You wouldn’t even want to go in there.”

In 1973, the year that the U.S. Supreme Court ruled abortion was a constitutional right in Roe v. Wade, a decision overturned in June, Dickenson founded Cradle of Hope, a nonprofit that provides financial aid to women in crisis pregnancies. Pregnancy resource centers such as Birthright, Women’s Life Care Center and Guiding Star Wakota serve as liaisons for the organization.

Rather than simply referring women to welfare — as when Dickenson was first involved in the movement — PRCs now can provide financial assistance through Cradle of Hope. Since 2019, Guiding Star Wakota alone has received $25,093 for rent assistance and 291 cribs from Cradle of Hope to distribute to women.

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Pivotal influence

Many women report that pregnancy resource centers have had a pivotal influence on their lives, including Ashly Bonin, 39, who said she heard about Guiding Star Wakota from staff at a food shelf when she needed diapers. She and her three children had left an abusive husband and had next to nothing. She arrived at the center in tears.

“I was very lovingly welcomed,” said Bonin, who at age 18 had conceived her first child and kept the baby despite threats from her boyfriend. She spent the duration of her first pregnancy in a homeless shelter, while working full time until the day she gave birth. Nearly 20 years later, she found Guiding Star Wakota after her third child was born. She said she can only imagine the difference it would have made if she had found the center sooner. It changed her life, she said.

“I’ve done everything in my life so alone, and suddenly I didn’t feel alone,” Bonin said as she, and a social worker with her, Betty Lamb, began to cry. “It’s not like these people were just doing their job. I could feel they truly cared about me.”

Bonin said she was raised Catholic but fell away from her faith as she struggled with abandonment, drugs and alcohol. She credits the center for her return to a life of faith.

“They never pushed religion on me,” Bonin said. But once the center helped stabilize her situation, she found herself seeking God. She now attends a Lutheran church and feels that she has a personal relationship with God.

“This place made me feel great about myself again and acknowledged the gifts in me and have those pointed out to me,” she said. The center encouraged her to teach an art class, which brought her a great sense of worth and purpose.

Now Bonin plans to lead a group under the National Alliance for Mental Illness as she continues her own healing. She hopes to inspire parents who struggle with mental health, past trauma or abuse.

Aimee Keenan, a 39-year-old from St. Paul, said she received help from Women’s Life Care Center when she became unexpectedly pregnant two years ago, while fleeing from domestic abuse. The father of her four other children had cut her off financially when she obtained a protection order.

“I just didn’t know what to do,” Keenan said in a telephone interview. When she arrived at Women’s Life, which was the pregnancy resource center nearest to her home, she wondered if she could carry her child to term and care for her other children.

The center provided her with a life coach, car seat, baby clothes and maternity clothes, and connected her with a food shelf and a program in finances that allowed her to earn a minivan. At Christmas time, when Keenan could not work because she had a high-risk pregnancy, the center supplied gifts for the children.

“I don’t have one iota of regret in my decision to choose life,” Keenan said. Asked if her experience with a pregnancy resource center made her feel coerced into keeping her baby, she said, “absolutely not. I never felt that. Those words were never spoken to me.”

Some women otherwise happy to carry their baby can change their minds if their child is diagnosed with trisomy 21 or another developmental condition, Lagasse said. Women’s Life tries to establish a relationship with the women before they become vulnerable to an abortion.

“Happy-to-carry moms experience road bumps, too,” Lagasse said. “You know, we’ve seen moms where everything was going well and then there’s an adverse diagnosis with the baby and all of a sudden, everything changes. We’re really, really, grateful when those women call us to get help and advice and resources because, depending on their doctor, they might be offered an abortion at the 20-week stage,” she said.

Sometimes, women carrying their pregnancies to term refer other women to the clinic, Lagasse said. One happy-to-carry woman who had been helped with material needs by the center referred her niece to the center when her niece became pregnant and was considering an abortion, she said.

Patty Bradway, a registered nurse trained to administer ultrasounds at Women’s Life, said women often cry when they see their babies’ heartbeats on the screen — expressing a range of emotions from elation to fear.

“We can’t push, we can’t judge,” Bradway said.

Executives and staff at pregnancy resource centers also emphasized the importance of prayer in helping people struggling with unexpected pregnancies.

“We see those prayers really, really make a difference,” said Lagasse at Women’s Life, which sends text messages to a thread of 80 supporters asking for prayers when a woman comes in who is considering an abortion.

“We see women open up,” Lagasse said. When people are praying, “they warm up to the idea of keeping their baby.”

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 A BRIEF HISTORY

The first pregnancy resource center in Minnesota was founded on the north end of St. Paul, followed by another on the University of Minnesota campus, shortly after the 1973 Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision, which legalized abortion in the country. (That decision was overturned in June, returning the question of abortion to the states.)

Those two centers were founded by Sister Jeanne Therese Condon, a sister of St. Joseph of Medaille, one of seven orders that joined in 2007 to establish the Congregation of the Sisters of St. Joseph.

Sister Jeanne Therese, who died in 1992, was an undaunted supporter of the pro-life cause, among other social justice movements, said Mary Sand, a certified life coach at Women’s Life Care Center in Little Canada who has researched the religious sister’s life.

Galvanized by Sister Jeanne Therese, those two centers multiplied into 17 centers at the time of her death, and eventually evolved into Eagan-based umbrella organization Elevate Life, with 37 locations in Minnesota and Wisconsin, including Women’s Life Care Center, Guiding Star Wakota in West St. Paul and Abria Pregnancy Resources in Minneapolis and St. Paul, said Vaunae Hansel, president of Elevate Life, which provides training for staff and volunteers, liability insurance, and policies and procedures for medical services offered at the centers.