Network's Support Gives Mothers-to-Be Another Choice: Carrying Baby
By JoAnn Jacobsen-Wells, The Salt Lake Tribune, Sunday, Sept. 27, 1992

Beth Sturm Henderson was a 22-year-old nursing student when she got unsettling news: She was pregnant.

Her family and friends counseled abortion—a baby would only mess up her life. Her father and a roommate even offered to split the cost.

"I set up three appointments and canceled all three," she said. "1 didn’t want an abortion, but I thought I had no other choice."

While reading a newspaper, Ms. Henderson learned of an alternative: The Nurturing Network, a national charitable organization that supports thousands of women facing unplanned pregnancies.

The Network was founded by internationally known business whiz Mary Cunningham Agee to provide individually tailored programs of educational and career placement, counseling, nurturing homes, medical and financial assistance.

These types of services make it possible for Mrs. Agee "to sit across the desk or talk on the phone with a pregnant unwed woman and say, ‘We will walk with you. We will carry this heartache with you, and transform it into a growth process in your life,’" Mrs. Agee said.

"You will not only emerge with a live baby, but with your own self-esteem intact and hopefully a clearer direction in your own life."

Ms. Henderson needed that type of support. After she decided against an abortion, her roommates told the unwed mother-to-be that she should get out of the house they shared.

The Nurturing Network found her a home with David and Susan Shannon Davies in Boise. The couple transported Ms. Henderson to doctors’ appointments, cooked her meals and "took care of me in every way," until baby Austin was born 16 weeks ago.

"We have played an instrumental role in the life of that baby," said Mr. Davies. "I don’t know how it would have turned out if the Network hadn’t got the two of us together. We had the desire, Beth had the need and this Network put us in contact."

A few weeks after Austin was born, Ms. Henderson married her high-school sweetheart, Shawn. Austin will stay with his mother—as do some 80% of the babies born to women assisted by Network. The rest are placed through adoption agencies that work closely with the Network.

The Network has helped give more than 3,600 college and working women an "alternative" to abortion during the past decade.

The Network was born in 1983, when Mrs. Agee and her husband William were grieving over the miscarriage of their first child. She thought of the millions of women who experience the loss of a child—not through miscarriage, but through abortion.

"I found myself drawn to the heart of a woman who has had an abortion but who isn’t feeling compassion from other people," she said.

In 1983, more than 1 million abortions were performed in this country. Most of those women opted for abortion because they felt they had no choice, Mrs. Agee said.

Society has stereotyped women seeking abortions as being impoverished, uneducated teen-agers, she said. In truth, the majority of those seeking abortions are white, high school educated, middle-class, and between the ages of 20 and 26, she said.

"There are women who, without support, often feel they have ‘too much to lose’ by continuing an unwanted pregnancy," Mrs. Agee said.

These are the women whose college peers are apt to say, ‘You should have been smarter than that.’ They are the ones whose boss is apt to find a good excuse for terminating their employment and whose family is apt to respond with shame and rejection."

To give them an alternative, Mrs. Agee tapped into her own wide network.

She received a master’s degree from Harvard Business School, had been assistant to the chairman of Bendix Corp. and worked as executive vice president of Seagram Wine Co. Her husband is chairman and chief executive officer of Boise-based Morrison Knudsen Corp., a Fortune 500 engineering and construction company.

Through the sale of a vacation home, Mrs. Agee provided the seed money of $300,000 to start the Network. She recruited professionals nationwide willing to join her cause.

Her force is now a small army of 12,500 volunteers.

"That’s what the Network is—not buildings in every city, but people in every city," said Mrs. Agee. "We are a Network that with one phone call...a woman can receive assistance."

Each Client receives medical care when requested and resources are available.

If necessary, clients are relocated to other states where they live with families selected through a detailed application and interviewing process. The families provide emotional support too often missing during unplanned pregnancies.

Some financial assistance provided through the Network helped Myla Batson-Kinikini cover unusual expenses and continue college.

Ms. Batson-Kinikini, a card-carrying member of the American Civil Liberties Union and abortion-rights supporter, discovered she was pregnant with her second child weeks after her unemployed husband abandoned her.

"Everyone had a lot of advice to not do anything rash, which of course meant abortion," she said. "Everything looked pretty dark, but it now looks like with a little hard work I can make it happen.

The Nurturing Network has avoided the volatile and emotional debate over abortion.

"The Network is not a front for a pro-life organization. It seeks to find some common ground in both the ‘pro-life’ and ‘pro-choice’ camps by offering help to women in crisis pregnancies," Mrs. Agee said.

"Freedom of choice without real options is meaningless. I spend too much time with women who describe circumstances around prior abortions that had nothing to do with choice and everything to do with feeling they had no other choice."

Reprinted with permission from The Salt Lake Tribune