The June move of the Women’s Care Center, a pregnancy resource center in Baltimore since 2016, was a short one in physical distance.
But in terms of visibility, the Little Pink House on Belair Road, next door from its original strip mall location and now across the street from the Whole Women’s Health abortion clinic, is now considered more effective, with a recent 20 percent increase in women coming in for pregnancy tests.
The new location “hits all the marks,” Katherine Manion Kelly, the center’s director, told the Catholic Review.
“Women traveling to the abortion clinic will see our center first and come for the free services, free ultrasound or simply a second opinion,” she said.
Archbishop William E. Lori, who administered a June 8 blessing, is on the center’s board, and was instrumental in bringing the Catholic-affiliated facility to the city. The archdiocese also provides financial support to Options@328, a non-denominational pregnancy resource center on Howard Street downtown. The archbishop is the former chairman of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops’ Committee on Pro-Life Activities.
“He takes his role very seriously,” Kelly said. “He really has good instincts about what makes a pregnancy center work.”
And that means, she emphasizes, intensive training of the center’s six full-time employees and a handful of volunteers, and a focus on counseling.
Some numbers fill in the center’s story:
The Women’s Care Center, originating in South Bend, Ind., is part of a chain of 34 in 12 states founded by Janet Smith, a theologian known for her vigorous defense of “Humanae Vitae,” the 1968 encyclical by Pope Paul VI considered the foundation of Catholic pro-life teaching. Smith is a former professor of moral theology at Sacred Heart Major Seminary in Detroit.
“It’s hard to teach,” Smith said of “Humanae Vitae” in a 2021 interview with the Population Research Institute, “but it’s hard to teach because everything in the culture is against it. And then the priests have not been taught in seminary that they should be preaching this.”
The current president of the Women’s Care Center, Ann Manion (Katherine’s mother), doesn’t take a salary.
The Woman’s Care Center is one of 18 similar centers, with various faith affiliations, across Maryland, which, unlike some other states, does not provide taxpayer funding for them.
It is funded by “wonderful donors,” and is “emphatically Catholic,” Kelly said. Often, “when our clients walk in the door, they don’t know that.”
But she said the staff is trained to provide “radical hospitality” to anyone facing a crisis pregnancy.
“To anyone who is not Catholic, it’s very accessible, too,” she said
The Women’s Care Center has served 1,160 “unique women” – meaning, clients using one of the center’s services at least once – over the last year.
Kelly credits the center with the births of 675 babies who may have otherwise been lost to abortion.
As for how women arrive there, 46 percent of the clients are the result of referrals by friends or family members.
The facility provides ultrasounds – 804 over the last year. They are administered by a licensed nurse or sonographer, and all the scans are reviewed by a radiologist who is a volunteer.
The small staff is “all highly skilled,” Kelly says, with the goal of being “nonjudgmental about women considering an abortion.”
And the ultrasound becomes perhaps the single most vital tool in that.
“It changes a woman’s mind from ‘This is my pregnancy’ to ‘This is my baby.’ It’s incredibly helpful. That’s really important to the women,” Kelly said.
The center offers diapers, baby clothing, parenting classes and help with insurance, including Medicaid.
The pink color of the structure is a marketing tool. As a building hue, “that’s something you don’t see very often,” Kelly said.
Two states – Illinois and Vermont – recently passed laws aimed at pregnancy resource centers, accusing them of deceptive advertising and pitches made by sidewalk counselors trying to keep women from entering abortion clinics. A federal judge in Illinois has entered a preliminary injunction against that state’s centers, which will wend its way through the courts in the coming months.
No similar legislation has been proposed in Maryland, and Kelly said she couldn’t speak about those cases.
Any sidewalk counseling there, when it occurs, is not by center staff members, but by outside organizations.
“We want women to come to us at the very moment they need us,” Kelly said.
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