Fifteen years ago, Mary Cunningham Agee was devastated by a second-trimester
miscarriage. "Our baby's death carved a deep grief into my soul," she says.
"I was initiated into a sorority of loss, listening in the darkness for the cry of a
child that I would never be able to hold or comfort. "
In the depths of her suffering, an idea came to her.
"If I could feel this much sorrow over the loss of my child through a miscarriage, what kind of anguish must a woman who aborts her child feel?" Agee wondered. That question persisted, and as Agee prayed, she felt called to help such women. "I'd like to believe that it was the Holy Spirit who whispered to my heart the possibility that the life of many could be born out of the death of one," Agee says.
A Harvard MBA who, along with husband Bill, had enjoyed great success in the corporate
world, Agee relied on her business acumen to bring to fruition her dream of helping women
in crisis pregnancies. First, she needed to find out which women were most likely to
choose abortion and why. She was amazed at what she discovered.
"The vast majority of women who abort are not the stereotypical teen from an
impoverished ghetto," Agee says. " About eighty percent are eighteen to
twenty-six-year-old women, from middle class backgrounds, who have at least completed a
high school education." Agee was moved to talk to women who had aborted, so
she contacted ten abortion clinics across the country and ask that her number be given to
any woman willing to
discuss her situation. Ninety-one of the first one-hundred women who called Agee admitted
that they "would
have preferred to have given birth, if only someone had offered them a practical way to do
so."
Agee aimed to do just that.
She saw that "freedom of choice" was a misnomer. "Most women, " she
says, "abort out of a sense that they have no other choice." She found this
particularly true of women who are in college or just starting a
career. For them, the stigma of a crisis pregnancy is especially severe. They need
concrete help: a quick college transfer, a job relocation, a place to live while pregnant,
counseling.
"The real issue was not being addressed, "Agee adds. "The rhetoric about 'freedom of choice' was cruel and hypocritical; after all, the choice to give birth seemed unavailable to many women. This choice takes a lot more financial support, practical resources and personal nurturing." In 1985, the year her daughter was born, Agee opened the first Nurturing Network office. Her son was born in 1987, and while the Agee family grew, so did the number of women seeking help through the Nurturing Network.
"We are very practical in our orientation," Agee says. "Our results are
tangible. There's never a doubt in a donor's mind or a volunteer's mind about the
Nurturing Network's mission -to provide all the practical support a mother needs to give
birth to her unborn child. We're hands-on and very personal in our approach. Christ healed
one broken life at a time, and in the most particular tangible way. He never kept a safe
distance. He was not a theoretician. He taught in concrete parables that people could
easily relate to. The Nurturing Network tries to serve as a living parable, as we step
into the lives of individual women and offer our concrete resources."
"Today, the organization has assisted more than 12,000 mothers-to-be: women like
twenty-seven-year-old Julie, who came to the Network pregnant and unmarried. She enjoyed
her work as a youth counselor but, for the sake of her young clients and to spare her
co-workers embarrassment, she wanted to leave her job while keeping her pregnancy
confidential. With the Nurturing Network's help, Julie relocated from the East to the West
Coast, where she moved in with a Nurturing family, found employment in a similar field,
and received professional counseling to help her decide between parenting and adoption. Eventually, she chose
adoption for her child. In a note to Agee, Julie says she "painfully learned a lot,
but things have worked out great...Everyone at the Network helped me to see that joy is
possible and that there truly is a future for my child and myself."
Stories like Julie's would be impossible if not for the more than 22,000 network
participants who aid pregnant women in a variety of ways. Doctors provide medical care,
employers offer jobs, donors give funds and
families open their homes.
But it's not just mothers and their unborn children who benefit.
"Our other apostolate is to offer a society that is confused and in denial over this issue a meaningful way to participate in building a culture of life," Agee says. "Most people don't want to spend their time arguing. This is not a topic that lends itself well to debate. Conversion of the heart is more often than not experiential. When you see up close the brokenness of a woman struggling in this situation, and you have the opportunity to offer her hope, to give her whatever she needs to give birth to her child, a genuine conversion of heart often occurs. This has been one of the miracles of the Nurturing Network. When people offer to be a Nurturing Home, they may not consider themselves to be 'pro-life,' but in the process of serving 'the least of these,' they come to understand that life is infinitely valuable. They often feel betrayed by how the rhetoric has been used in the past. They arrive at this enlightenment by rolling up their sleeves and helping another person. Our work is as much a gift to them as to the pregnant mother."
