A place of peace.
That is how Columbus’ Women’s Care Center could be described. From the wall colors to the music playing to pictures of mothers holding their babies, the center offers beauty and respite for the woman facing a decision to choose life for her child to the woman navigating motherhood.
“There’s a lot of thought put into the Care Center,” said Madeline Pesavento, the senior outreach director for the Columbus Women’s Care Center. “I think it’s because we want her to feel like it’s a place of peace away from the chaos of her life.
“The people she’s taking care of, the influences that she’s having in this decision – that all stops the moment that she walks through our door.”
Inside the doors of the Women’s Care Center, which has two locations in Columbus – one on East Broad Street and another on East Main Street – women can find parenting classes, childcare, individual counseling and ultrasound. The Women’s Care Center offers a range of tangible support, Pesavento said, from baby essentials to strollers and car seats.
Staff members are working to serve an increasing number of mothers in need.
Visits have increased by 42 percent, she said, and pregnancy tests at the center are up 18 percent. As of the beginning of July, women made 5,418 visits to the Columbus Women’s Care Center so far this year.
Each service offered by the center is geared toward helping a woman choose life for her child and beyond that decision, providing wraparound care for her.
More than 50 percent of women who visit the Women’s Care Center come seeking an abortion. However, 91 percent choose life.
The center’s mission is to help women recognize their dignity and ability to mother, and then to help them through their pregnancy. Pesavento said staff members help a woman to be self-sufficient but also walk with her throughout her parenting journey.
She said the Women’s Care Center recognizes that, as much as they want a mother to say ‘Yes’ to her baby, the individual has to be able to say ‘Yes.’ And so, they are there to help her each step of the way.
Pesavento credited the center’s counselors who dedicate their time to serving women in need. Between the two locations in Columbus, roughly 22 counselors are on staff either part time or full time.
Several counselors have been with the Women’s Care Center for 10 or 15 years. Their work in counseling vulnerable women has notably changed.
“The job has become so much harder, truly. When the counselors talk about the early days, it’s a pretty quiet center. Maybe a couple times a week you’d have a woman that was set on abortion – we’re having more than five a day at each center,” Pesavento said.
If the job has increased in difficulty, the Women’s Care Center has risen to the occasion.
The center offers an array of services, including classes for mothers expecting their first baby. In recent years, the center has expanded to offer more subjects for parents, such as technology in the home, what to expect in the next season of parenting and parenting a strong-willed child.
The center also offers a “Strong Fathers” series for men who come to the center, Pesavento said, that is taught by Catholic men.
“They tell us the topics that they want incorporated,” she said of the clients. “I think there’s so much discussion in the classes it becomes an opportunity to hear what other people are going through.”
The Women’s Care Center offers a weekly Spanish-speaking class, and it recently began offering a monthly class for the Haitian-Creole and French-speaking.
Classes are offered five days during the week, and class attendance has increased by 70 percent, Pesavento said. Some class subjects are offered multiple times per week.
“Toddler Story Time” and “Mommy and Me” classes are also offered weekly.
Both Columbus locations include an ultrasound machine. And while the center might be widely renowned for its supply of diapers, Pack ‘n Plays and newborn onesies, the resources offered extend beyond a woman’s pregnancy or her baby’s first year.
“Women have eight-year-olds that come to the Care Center. There’s no moment in time that we’re no longer a resource. We’re always a resource. She can come here for as long as she wants,” Pesavento said.
The Women’s Care Center is also assisting women in unforeseen situations they might encounter in daily life outside of the center.
“We’ve been able to help a lot more often in those challenging situations of, like, your car breaks down. Now, we have a fund at Miracle Motor Mart to help fix her car, or she’s having a hard time paying rent, we’re able to help in those situations, or she’s put a deposit down for her abortion, she makes that choice for life, we’ll pay that out for her. Those sorts of things have grown here in Columbus,” Pesavento said.
Hospitality is a central focus for Care Center staff. All of the center’s counselors read “Radical Hospitality: Benedict’s Way of Love” by Lonni Collins Pratt and Father Daniel Homan, OSB (Order of St. Benedict), which offers Benedictine wisdom on welcoming a stranger into the heart and home.
The staff recognizes that their interaction with a woman they serve influences her choosing life for her child.
“There’s such an important decision in front of her. A lot of that is just through the way in which we interact with the woman,” Pesavento said.
She pointed out an example of a client who recently visited the center and said to a counselor, “‘I know that I am truly blessed to have met you, and not because of the material things but just helping me find the strength I needed to be able to do this.’”
As the staff members work to serve mothers in need inside their doors, the Women’s Care Center spruced up their exterior, too.
The center recently painted its Main Street house pink. The house, located on one of the city’s busiest streets and along the central bus line, is perhaps where women need it most.
Beyond accessibility, however, the house needs to be a place that women want to come, Pesavento said.
With its warm, blush pink exterior and bright pink front door, the Main Street location is an inviting presence that could draw women in for years to come.
“As she’s traveling down that road, she’ll see Women’s Care Center first,” Pesavento said, “so she can see that big sign for free pregnancy test, free ultrasound, and then, come in for that second opinion.”
Donations raised last year by the Women’s Care Center’s annual Luxury Bingo event will fund an interior expansion of the center’s Broad Street location. The expansion, which is set to begin in August, will include a maternity boutique, dedicated space for childcare at the center and a second ultrasound machine.
“Ultrasound is such an incredible tool and very often the moment a woman first falls in love with her baby,” Pesavento said. “Because of the generosity from this community, the project will ensure every woman receives a same-day ultrasound.”
The center’s Luxury Bingo event will be held this year on Thursday, Aug. 1.
The Columbus Women’s Care Center is currently hiring. Individuals interested in applying should email Alanna Wills, client care director, at awills.wcc@gmail.com. Available positions currently include: nurse/sonographer, parenting program coordinator, office assistant and counselor.
The Women’s Care Center has 36 centers located in 12 states. Founded in 1984, the resource centers serve thousands of women annually.