By Claire Williams
Sarah, a 16-year-old who lives in a low-income area of Bryan, remembers when she found out she was pregnant. She felt frightened, confused, anxious, excited — but alone. At first, when she shared the news with her boyfriend John, he seemed encouraging and confident in their ability to raise a child together. But around the eighth month, Sarah noticed a change. John would come home late at night and when she confronted him, John began yelling at her. Then she started to smell alcohol on his breath. After the baby arrived, he started physically assaulting her.
Living with her boyfriend’s family, and no support from her own family, Sarah felt she had nowhere else to turn. Months of domestic violence followed, but before Sarah could leave, John vanished with their baby girl. He refused to let Sarah see her.
Sarah felt completely lost and helpless.
It was then Sarah learned about Aggieland Pregnancy Outreach in College Station. Over the course of the next several months, APO staff helped Sarah go to court to regain custody of her child, move out and away from her abusive ex-boyfriend, and get back on her feet. It was a process.
Sarah started by attending the weekly Mama Club support group for teen moms. Suddenly, Sarah had an entire team of support on her side. Sarah met Rachel, a middle-aged mom who volunteers with APO. Sarah shared everything that had happened in her life with Rachel, including all of the pain and heartache.
Today, Debbie Hillner, director of Mama Club, reports that Sarah feels more free, joyful, and loved than ever before. Sarah can now focus on raising her baby girl in a loving and healthy environment.
While the names in Sarah’s story have been changed to preserve privacy, this story is not unusual to the staff of Aggieland Pregnancy Outreach, who help mothers in similar situations regularly.
APO is an adoption agency and a faith-based ministry, which focuses on helping children born from unplanned pregnancies. APO’s desire is to see these children raised in loving, nurturing homes — never to suffer the harm of abuse or neglect. They provide support services to anyone facing an unplanned pregnancy, outreach to teen parents, and fully licensed adoption services.
Marlar Family
APO was founded in 1997 by Kim Schams, who modeled it after an adoption agency in Oklahoma. Schams and her husband were already parents to two adopted sons and desired to adopt a third child when they stumbled upon a unique agency. It was not only an adoption agency, but also a Christian ministry for women with unplanned pregnancies.
In the same week that Schams learned about this ministry, Planned Parenthood announced it was adding abortion services to the family planning clinic, she says. Amidst the uproar between pro-life and pro-choice activists, Schams encountered a newspaper article.
“[The author wrote], ‘I’ve yet to see you pro-lifers take this girl into your home. I’ve yet to see you walk in her shoes, I’ve yet to see you buy her groceries, I’ve yet to see you adopt her baby.’ All these things she was accusing pro-lifers of not doing, this other place was doing,” Schams says.
Instead of adopting another baby, Schams started APO. Within two months of reading that article, Schams traveled to Oklahoma to receive training, asked lots of questions, did research, and was mentored by professionals in the world of adoption, she says. By March 1998, APO was a reality.
The first adoptive placement was in December 2003 and since then 112 babies have found their adoptive parents through APO, Schams says.
APO approaches adoption in a unique and thoughtful fashion, says Katie Pfeiffer, the adoption family caseworker for APO. There are three principal regulations for the adoptive families. The parents who wish to adopt must be married for a minimum of three years, they must be Christians attending a Bible-believing church, and one parent is asked to be a stay-at-home parent until the child begins kindergarten, or at least work no more than 20 hours outside of the home, she says.
In addition to these regulations, the adoptive parents must embrace the concept of open adoption, Pfeiffer explains. While staying connected with the birth parents differs from case to case, open adoption is not co-parenting, she says. It may be texts, letters, phone calls, or maybe even visits over the holidays.
“Open adoption really benefits the baby to have the opportunity to get to know their birth family, know their roots, where they came from, especially when they get older to be able to look their biological parents in the eyes and say, ‘Tell me what really happened,’” says Don Campbell, child placement manager. “You start right then so that they know that it was a hard decision made out of love.’”
Marlar Family
Most birth moms struggle with open adoption, says counselor Karla Wilson.
“Most of them go in thinking, ‘I just want to place this child and get on with my life,’ and I think they realize that they can’t and it’s not the best thing for them or for the child,” Wilson says. Usually, after the birth they want pictures, then letters, and then it starts to open up, she says.
The open adoption model allows for the birth moms to have a voice in the process. Once the adoptive families complete the thorough process of becoming adoption-ready, the birth parents get to choose the family and begin developing a relationship with them, explains Pfeiffer.
“We usually like to delay them choosing a family until their seventh or eighth month because of the connection they’re having with that child,” Wilson says. “We want to make sure their head and their heart can be as much as possible in the same place.”
As a counselor, Wilson helps the women explore their options for free, so they can hopefully choose the best possible scenario for their children.
“We’re here to help babies get into good homes, whether that means improve the quality of life with the [biological] family ... or placement into [an adoptive] home,” says Wilson.
She, along with other caseworkers from the agency, are on call 24/7, Wilson says. They occasionally get a call from the hospital informing them a girl has given birth and wants to place for adoption. Wilson says she will drop everything and spend the next 48 hours helping the mom through the adoption process.
She notes that most of the mothers don’t have anybody, so she ends up going through the delivery with them as well.
APO Mama Club
The APO staff strives to change the trajectory of the child’s life by changing the birth mom’s life, says Hillner.
“Being very pro-life, it didn’t feel right to not help teen moms who decided to parent,” says Hillner. “Being pro-life means caring for the baby, not just when the baby is in utero, but when the baby is born. That’s how Mama Club got started.”
Mama Club began in 2006 with just one volunteer, Claire White, says Schams. Since then, it is reinvented every year and now averages an attendance of about 35 teen moms per week, she says. About a dozen women in the community volunteer as Mentor Moms to the teens and several college students volunteer through a ministry called Young Life to make Mama Club happen each week, Schams explains.
While there are other programs for single parents, most of them are geared toward older moms, says Hillner. Teenagers can be caught in a tough spot because they aren’t offered as many resources, she says.
“We try to minister to the whole person regardless of what decision they make,” says Tara Otto, parent educator at APO. “It’s holistic in really thinking about the whole person, not just one aspect of what could happen in an unplanned pregnancy.”
APO works with 18 key resources to benefit teen moms, according to an APO press release. They guide girls on how to get resources for themselves or their children, help in domestic violence or sexual abuse situations, parenting help, direction in getting housing, and more, says Hillner.
APO is a nonprofit organization that receives funds primarily through private donations, but also through grant funding sources such as United Way of the Brazos Valley, Community Foundation of the Brazos Valley, State Employee Charitable Campaign, and the Strategic Philanthropy class of Texas A&M University.
Schams says she still has dreams for the future of APO. She hopes to start a home visiting program, as well as a long-term housing program for teen moms. At the end of the day, Schams says it’s all about helping the children.
