Scott Swanson
Of The New Era
Mel and Peggy Wagoner got interested in the issue of unwed mothers 20 years ago after someone “close” to them became pregnant out of wedlock.
At the time, their pastor at the Free Methodist Church (now Hillside Fellowship) had just returned from a seminar on how Christians should respond to the then-recent U.S. Supreme Court decision Roe v. Wade, which legalized abortion.
It wasn’t just the one young pregnant woman they were concerned about.
“The high school had a number of girls — 14 or 15, I think — going to school who were pregnant,” Mel Wagoner said. “We wanted to do something positive, to say there are other ways to handle this besides abortion.”
What resulted was the Willamette Crisis Pregnancy Center, founded in May 1985 by the Wagoners and others, which opened above a storefront at 1025 Main St.
The orginal board members were Mel Wagoner, Gary Wells, Karen Winslow, Donna Carpenter, William Toffler and Robert Snyder.
“For the first few years it was a struggle, like everything else,” Wagoner said. “But it was amazing, the results we saw. A lot of kids had no other place to go. We showed them that here’s the support you can get.”
Today, 20 years later, the pregnancy center still serves Sweet Home, now under the name “Sweet Home Pregnancy Care Center.” And it’s busier than ever, open every Monday and Wednesday from noon to 5 p.m.
Tucked behind two vacant storefronts at 1344 Main St., the center is on track to what will be a record year for client visits. And considering that current Director Karen Bostrom and volunteer Olive Hodson saw more than 370 clients last year, Bostrom says the number may total more than 400 this year.
The center offers free pregnancy tests, maternity and baby clothes for needy women and their infants, baby furniture and car seats, and prenatal vitamins for clients. It offers most of these things on one condition: that clients also get some training in raising children.
“We’re pro-life, but we’re more than pro-life,” Bostrom said. “We’re trying to be practical. We’re helping mothers raise their own children.”
In most cases, she said, mothers are required to undergo some training before they can get the free supplies the center provides. The center offers a wide variety of videos on pregnancy, taking care of one’s self, care for newborns, child discipline, and other topics relating to the parenting process.
Bostrom said about one-third of the center’s clients are seeking a pregnancy test. The others are women looking for help. All of what clients tell center personnel is confidential unless the woman is being abused, Bostrom said.
Clients range from ages 11 or 12 to women in their 40s and 50s, but the majority are between 15 and 19, Bostrom said. Most are single and some just want a pregnancy test. “Quite a few” are homeless, including some who live in camps in the woods, Bostrom said.
Most of the center’s advertising is word-of-mouth, though it does run small ads in local newspapers and shoppers from time to time.
Bostrom said main reason the center is needed is the economic situation most clients are in.
“We have particular needs in Sweet Home that they don’t have elsewhere,” she said. “We have a huge poverty problem in this community. And a lot of high school girls are sexually active.”
In the beginning, Mel Wagoner was the center’s first director and ran the business end, while Peggy Wagoner ran the day-to-day operations.
Hillside Free Methodist Church was a main force in setting up the center, according to Robert Snyder, a local attorney who has been on the center’s board since the beginning. Both he and the Wagoners are members of the church.
In 1988, Roseanne Culbertson became the director and remained so until she retired in 1997, when Bostrom took over. Bostrom began volunteering at the center in 1989 because “I was concerned about the abortion issue and wanted to do something positive,” she said.
“It’s an issue I’ve always felt strongly about,” Bostrom said. “I’m a Christian and I get angry when I hear about it on the news. That prompted me to get involved.”
With the encouragement of her pastor’s wife, she said, she got training in pregnancy counseling and began volunteering.
Since she became director, the center moved to its current location, at 1344 Main St., in 1990. In 1998 a burglary and fire destroyed nearly all the contents of the building and “we had to start over,” Bostrom said.
Snyder said the center would like to continue to expand its services to include tests for sexually transmitted diseases (STDs) “to extend its ministry and try to help the people in the community in need of information and tests.”
Though the center has carried on for 20 years, it has been a hard slog at times. Bostrom said she and Hodson, who helped start the organization, handle all the clients, working with an annual budget of approximately $20,000. The center gets some support from local churches and organizations, particularly Hillside Fellowship and the Kiwanis Club. It recently initiated a baby bottle drive, in which bottles are handed out to interested attendees at participating churches, who fill them with change and bills, then return them to the center.
Rachel Kittson McQaddish, who recently graduated from law school at Willamette University, has volunteered to help with fund-raising and Joe Stuzer does bookkeeping for the center. Carol Moffet puts together a newsletter.
But with the increasing client load, Bostrom said, the center needs help — both financial and volunteer.
“We need someone to help with the clothing — sort donations, make sure they’re cleaned, organize them,” Bostrom said. The center also could use more volunteers, for whom training is available, to help handle the clients.
Snyder said the two decades since the center was established have flown by and that the need for its services remain.
“I can’t believe it’s been 20 years,” he said. “It feels like five. I believe that the center has served a vital need for young women and girls in supporting and helping with their pregnancies, and will continue to do so in the future.”