“I didn’t know a place like this existed.”
Why I started Alpha Life Pregnancy Center
In February of 2004, I found out I was pregnant, and I scheduled an abortion.
I want to tell you how I got there, because I think there's a version of my story that sounds like a decision and isn't. It was mostly just math.
I was an active duty Air Force radio operator. In the spring of 2002 I deployed in support of Operation Enduring Freedom, and I came home seven months later to a marriage in ruin, on the verge of bankruptcy, trying to find care for my three-year-old daughter as a brand new single mother at the height of a war.
I leaned on my own mother until she couldn't hold the weight either. The next summer she had the first of two spinal fusion surgeries that left her permanently disabled, and I spent months in Oklahoma taking care of her.
Then I went back to my unit, and I found out I was pregnant.
I did the math the way anyone would. One child I was already struggling to raise. A mountain of debt. A job that could send me anywhere. No partner in the same state. I called a close friend and asked what she thought, and she said an abortion was the best option for me, and I believed her, because it looked like she was right.
I told myself it would be the best for everyone.
I made the appointment.
A movie ticket
A few days before the procedure, my supervisor invited several of us to see The Passion of the Christ. His name was Mr. Barth, and he was also the pastor of a local church, and his church had bought the tickets.
I said no because I almost never had childcare. But I said yes to dinner with my team.
As dinner was ending, a coworker offered — casually, like it was nothing — to have her daughter watch my little girl so I could go. She lived right behind the movie theater. It was no trouble at all, she said.
I dropped off my daughter and got back as the movie was starting. I slipped into the last available seat, in the front row.
What Mr. Barth didn’t know was that I had been saved on a little white church bus when I was nine years old. I said yes to a man named Jesus and somebody handed me a little white Bible. I carried that Bible around the world. But I never saw Him.
Not until that moment.
It was as if God sat down in the seat beside me and said: Danita, do you see me? Do you see that I died for you? What are you doing?
After the movie ended, I picked up my daughter and drove home. Late that night I called the baby's father and told him what had happened. I asked him, "Do you know that Jesus died for us?"
He said, "I do."
I said, "Then I have to have this baby."
What came after
She was born that September.
Everything changed. I gave up my Air Force career. I sold my home. I moved two thousand miles across the country to start over with no idea what was coming. He and I eventually married and had another child. Today our family has four children, two son-in-laws, and five grandchildren.
I won't pretend the years after were simple. They weren't. We carried real grief about how close we came, and it took a long time to put it down. There were nights I sat on the bathroom floor and cried. I'm telling you that part because I don't want you to think I walked out of a movie theater and into an easy life. I didn't. I walked into a hard one that I am grateful for every single day.
What I learned in those years is that God's love is bigger than the worst thing you're carrying, and that his grace shows up on bathroom floors. Salvation is immediate. The healing can take a lifetime. Both of those things can be true at the same time.
The part I need you to hear
Here is what I think about most, twenty years later.
I didn’t know that pregnancy resource centers existed.
Nobody told me. Not one person. I was a woman in crisis, surrounded by people, and I did not know there was a place I could walk into where somebody would sit down with me, tell me the truth, help me figure out what I actually needed, and not charge me a dime or judge me for asking.
If I had known — if one person had handed me a card, or said a name, or driven me to a door — I believe my life would have been radically different.
That's why there's a building in Raeford with our name on it.
In 2011 I started serving in a pregnancy ministry here in North Carolina. In 2018 we became a nonprofit, and in July of 2020, in the middle of a pandemic, we opened the doors of Alpha Life Pregnancy Center.
When we sat down to write our mission, we could have said our mission was to save babies. But that was never my burden to carry. Only God can do that.
What we said instead was this: no woman walks alone.
What actually happens here
When a woman comes to Alpha Life for the first time, we offer her coffee or tea or water and we sit down together on the couch in our waiting room, and we talk.
Everything in that building was given by somebody else. Grants, churches, businesses, people in this community who will never meet her. I tell every new client that, because I want her to know something that is very hard to believe when you're frightened: despite everything you see out there, people genuinely do care about you. Strangers gave all of this so that you would know you are not alone.
We offer free pregnancy testing. Someone to talk to who will not tell you what to do. A two-year parenting program with real classes and real support. Diapers, wipes, car seats, and a layette for every mother — everything she needs to bring her baby home. Referrals for medical care and for the other things families need. We also offer miscarriage grief support, abortion recovery and adoption referrals, because not all women bring babies home from the hospital.
All of it is free. All of it is confidential.
The women who come here are mothers, soldiers and students, deacons' wives, nineteen-year-olds who work at Bojangles. Some are pregnant. Some already have children. Some have lost a child. Most of them are scared, and most of them are afraid they won't be good parents, and they don't know which way to go.
So we sit with them, week after week, and we love them as much as we can.
If you're the one reading this
If you are facing an unexpected pregnancy right now, I want to say two things to you.
The first is that whatever you're feeling, it makes sense. Fear makes sense. Doing the math makes sense. I did it too, and I was not a bad person for doing it, and neither are you.
The second is that you don't have to figure this out by yourself, and you don't have to know what you want before you call. You can just call.
We're in Raeford. Everything is free and confidential. You can reach us at Info@alphalifepc.org or (910) 565-2031.
Nobody handed me that card in 2004.
I'm handing it to you.
If you'd like to be part of this work — through prayer, volunteering, or giving — we'd be glad to hear from you.
All my love to you,
Founder & Board Chair, Alpha Life Pregnancy Center
