Abiding Love Charities adoption support ministry has developed a peer support and healing program designed to accommodate use in the pregnancy center.
Abiding Love Adoptions is a licensed agency uniquely serving expectant and birth moms (rather than adoptive families as well) in Florida, Georgia, and South Carolina. Abiding Love Charities offers support coaching services for all parties in the adoption process, birth mothers, adoptive families, and adoptees. Abiding Love Charities operates nationwide.
The Seen Birth Mom Support Group is a monthly curriculum established to connect moms for healing and thriving. Groups are a safe place for birth mothers to share their experiences and move toward healing together in a judgment free zone, according to the Abiding Love Charities website. All birth mothers are welcome regardless of where they placed their child or children for adoption. Group sessions last approximately two hours and include time for fun.
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Abiding Love CEO Carrie Murray Nellis stresses the need for post-placement care to be available in pregnancy centers as an effective way to best keep the door open for adoption consideration. Pregnancy centers, not just agencies, are a great place for this kind of care.
“A woman's going to feel much more comfortable outside of her agency to be real about some of the feelings that she had regarding the adoption,” Nellis said.
Cheryl Bennett is one of the pregnancy center directors that has used the Seen curriculum and concurs with the need for ongoing support on the center setting for birth mothers.
“In our center this has been a game changer,” said Bennett, who leads New Gen PRC, Spring Hill, Fla..
Seen has be used in over 30 pregnancy centers across America so far, with 17 currently active locations listed online across 10 states.
Along with pregnancy centers, churches and right to life organizations have also served as group facilitators. The curriculum is available for organizations anywhere in the nation that wish to facilitate the support group. End users are given training in starting up and advertising their local group, and monthly check-ins with Abiding Love staff provide ongoing support.
The support groups serve birth moms whether or not she placed through the Abiding Love agency. The curriculum invites women to process their adoption stories and also goes into deeper questions of identity and healthy relationships as well.
While many centers already partner with adoption agencies to provide support for women after placement, Abiding Love sees an advantage if the pregnancy center can offer it in-house as well. For example, a birth mom who worked with an agency for her adoption may feel as though she cannot be fully honest in processing her experiences with the same agency that arranged her adoption. Thus, the pregnancy center provides a neutral support space.
Another center using Seen is Guiding Grace Family Support Network in Nebraska. Gina Tomes founded Guiding Grace to provide assistance and support beyond the timeframes typically addressed in pregnancy help. Guiding Grace decided to add the Seen program to their service offerings because they saw it as a fundamental part of this ongoing care approach.
“The women we serve carry wounds that cannot be healed in one specific way,” Tomes explained. “And we believe Seen helped us address this critical need to support the adoptive courageous mother.”
“We chose to bring the Seen program to Guiding Grace because we believe lasting transformation begins when a woman discovers her inherent dignity, recognizes her worth, and experiences the healing power of authentic connection,” she said.
There is often birth mom grief with adoption and this deserves ministry.
Elizabeth Edmonds, Georgia pro-life activist and facilitator of Abiding Love Seen support groups, described her own experience as a birth mother.
“My adoption experience was good,” Edmonds said. “I wasn't exploited [nor did I feel that people] pressured me to do it or anything like that. But even in the best-case scenario, even when everything is ‘perfect’ for the birth mother, she is still making an adoption plan for her baby. And our hearts, as mothers, we’re not wired to carry a baby in our womb and then place that baby into the arms of another family.”
Now facilitating Seen groups for birth mothers with all kinds of adoption experiences, Edmonds has seen women experience deep healing.
Edmonds told the story of one of the mothers that attended her Seen support group who at first looked sad and heavy. She’d had a baby in college and didn’t even tell her parents about it. Over time, she told her parents and started looking and feeling better - so much better, in fact, that Edmonds said she glowed.
“She realized that it wasn't this deep, dark secret that you have to keep forever,” Edmonds said. “It's not. You're not the worst person who's ever lived. We're always begging moms, don’t keep it a secret. Everything done in darkness always comes in light.”
“Shame dies when stories are told in safe places,” she said. “The whole goal of birth mother support is just so that she knows that there is a God who sees her, and he cares about her, and he has a plan for her, and that her grief is not new to him. It's not a surprise to him. And that he can redeem it, restore it, and give back the years that the locusts have eaten.”
Tweet This: The whole goal of birth mother support is just so that she knows that there is a God who sees her, and he cares about her.
