(LifeSiteNews) — In an anonymous article published by The Federalist on Tuesday, a teen mom expressed her heartfelt gratitude for the pregnancy resource center that gave her the love, support, and supplies necessary to choose life for her son.
“I never dreamed I could be surrounded by the warm love and happiness I experience today,” wrote the young woman, who said she had become pregnant to her “utter dismay” at just 15 years old.
“If someone had told me just four short years ago that my life would be marked by more blessings than I could count, I would have looked at them with complete incredulity,” she said.
The writer said that “[g]etting an abortion was my immediate decision” after she discovered she was pregnant. The oldest of four children in a family with a drug-addicted mother, the young woman said she “could barely take care of myself let alone my three younger siblings.”
“The mere thought of bringing a new life into this messy situation at my age was more than I could bear — or so I thought,” she wrote.
That’s when a high school teacher recommended she reach out to the Leesburg, Florida Pregnancy and Family Care Center (PFCC), part of the Christian Care Center affiliated with the Leesburg First Baptist Church.
PFCC provides ultrasounds for women considering abortion “to help mothers see the miracle of the life entrusted to their care and to consider the consequences of their decision.” Mothers who choose to keep their babies are provided with a full range of support “including adoption planning or childbirth and parenting education,” while those who get abortions “are offered support through post-abortive counseling.”
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“After speaking with the thoughtful, compassionate female staff at PFCC, I was given a complete list of all of my options, in addition to more information about the abortion procedure itself,” the teen mom said in her Tuesday article. She recalled that she “realized I couldn’t put my child through such a horrific event, and I knew in my heart that I’d never cope with the regret that, tragically, so many post-abortive women feel.”
Confronted with the brutal reality of abortion, she said she “decided to keep my child, which gave me great peace, even though I knew it would be hard to care for another little one … ”
A horror of abortion and the determination to keep her baby weren’t the only things she received through her connection with the pro-life ministry.
While pro-abortion activists claim that pro-life resource centers are “fake” and “dangerous” because they don’t promote abortion, the young woman said her resource center showered her with “more free resources than I could imagine, ranging from ultrasounds to diapers, car seats, baby clothing and food, transportation, hygiene products.”
The teen, who had been raised in a trailer without electricity, said she was even given “new clothes for me to wear at school — something I never had growing up.”
And the resource center had more to give than diapers, food, and clothes.
“The women there became my mentors, my friends, and my family,” the anonymous teen mom said. “Most importantly, they helped me to discover a real relationship with Jesus Christ, accepting Him into my heart forever and then following the Lord through baptism.”
The writer of the article said the pregnancy resource center provided her with “a devoted support system, and a firm foundation to raise my child upon.”
That support system alleviated the young mom’s anxieties “about the atmosphere my son would experience because my world was now packed with kind, loving, and generous people who deeply cared about not only my baby but me and my younger siblings.”
RELATED: Abortion supporters don’t believe women should choose to visit crisis pregnancy centers
Now four years later, the anonymous writer said she has successfully graduated high school and has a “wonderful job.” She and her young son and three siblings all live with their grandfather, something that makes her “thankful we’re still together as a family.”
“My son is, without a doubt, the greatest gift from God. Knowing the immense happiness he brings to my day, he is my greatest blessing,” the grateful mother said, adding that she feels she’ll “never be able to thank” the pregnancy resource staffers “enough or repay them for all they have done.”
“I share my story to show other women that there is hope, love, and healing available to them,” she wrote.
According to a 2022 report by the pro-life Charlotte Lozier Institute, 828,131 lives have been saved from 2016 to 2020 thanks to the work performed by pro-life pregnancy centers, and millions have been saved since the first such centers were set up more than 50 years ago. Today, pro-life pregnancy centers far outnumber abortion clinics nationwide.
Despite the life-saving work that pregnancy resource centers around the country perform every day, however, pro-abortion politicians have frequently maligned them as “fake” and worked to shut them down because they do not encourage women to kill their preborn babies.
Last year alone, in the lead-up and aftermath of the overturning of Roe v. Wade, activists vandalized and firebombed dozens of pro-life pregnancy centers and threatened staff-members.
Despite threats from lawmakers and activists, however, the number of pro-life centers continues to grow across the country, offering vital emotional, material, and spiritual support to mothers undergoing unexpected or crisis pregnancies.