National Adoption Month Series: StandUpGirl and Love’s Choice

http://www.standupgirl.com

StandUpGirl is a 501(c)3 charitable organization dedicated to providing pregnant or at risk adolescent and young adult women with insight into alternatives to abortion. The mission is to change hearts and save lives by educating young women on the development of the unborn child and alternatives to abortion. Standupgirl.com is a rapidly growing website whose scope is world-wide. We have volunteer “StandUpGirls” who moderate the site’s chat rooms, blogs, forums and respond to emails – from across the United States as well as in Canada, Africa and Japan.

Young women from all over the world are coming to StandUpGirl looking for information about pregnancy. They find educational material, real answers to their questions, and a community of women they can talk to about their unplanned pregnancies. StandUpGirl.com currently has over three million visitors each year, and while it is a great encouragement to see this many young people coming to the site, we are barely scratching the surface of the potential number of visitors on the internet.

Perhaps the most important component of the website is the real-life stories of girls facing their own crisis pregnancies and how our StandUpGirl team provides personal and individual guidance and encouragement to help these women make a choice that they and their baby can live with. The team provides visitors with contact information of local pro-life pregnancy centers where they can get the support and resources they need to journey through their pregnancy. Most guests remain on the site an average of 23 minutes, looking at phenomenal fetal development photography, life-like illustrations and remarkable videos. StandUpGirl.com is one of the most visited abortion-related website in the world! This energetic and beautifully designed website can now be viewed in several foreign languages and the StandUpGirl App can be downloaded from the Android and Apple markets.

http://www.loveschoice.com

Love’s Choice was created to take an honest look at the painful beauty of adoption, and to provide tools to help each woman honestly assess the choices before her.

For girls out there that might feel overwhelmed as they try to make the best plan for their child, Love’s Choice is here to help and encourage, providing facts about adoption and tools to help them plan for birth, and either adoption or parenting. And, most importantly, Love’s Choice shares personal stories from real people who have experienced adoption –  adopted children, adoptive parents, and other birthmothers.

We want the girls that visit Love’s Choice to make an informed, confident decision about adoption or parenting. If they choose parenting, we hope the process of answering hard questions will make them a better, more intentional mother.

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StandUpGirl and Love’s Choice are not adoption agencies, nor are they in any way affiliated with any adoption placement programs. For more information about them, please visit them at www.standupgirl.com and www.loveschoice.com and on Facebook and https://www.facebook.com/standupgirl.

Unplanned Motherhood: Stories of Teen Moms and Motherhood Monday LinkUP #4

I’ve got an exciting series planned for you this week! One of my mom friends teaches a parenting class at an alternative High School Program called “Create” in the little town where I live. Create is a place where students who aren’t able to keep up with the normal classroom routine can finish up their credits with additional support. It’s also a perfect place for teen mothers because of the on-site child care provided.

Outside of class, my friend began to meet and mentor some of the young woman through YoungLives. YoungLives is a fabulous organization aiming to meet teen mothers on their turf, while trying to show them God’s unconditional love and grace through mentoring and monthly activities. For more information about YoungLives or how you can get involved with the program, please visit their website here.

After teaching a class in Parenting Basics, my friend decided that the world needed to hear what these girls have to say and she thought that M2M was the perfect place to do it! When she sent me four different girls’ accounts, I was completely blown away by the passion, heartache and struggle that emanates throughout their stories. In spite of the crudeness in their typing, broken English and their evident youth depicted by their simple and sometimes explicit vocabulary, their tender, young hearts and their love for their children and  families shines through to weave a beautiful picture of the essence of motherhood, no matter their age.

In order to capture and show you the purity of their stories and the integrity of who they are as teenage mothers, I have done very little, if any, editing, including their use of profanity, so please be warned, some of their stories, in addition to being choppy, are raw, unadulterated and may not be suitable for all readers. Despite this, I hope you will take a journey with me this week into the hearts and lives of these four very young mothers, witness their struggles and trials, and get just a tiny glimpse at the pure and powerful love of a mother, in the simplest and almost child-like form.

I hope you enjoy and are moved by them as much as I have been as I post a new one, each day this week, starting tomorrow.

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And now for the Link Up! Please also visit M2M on Twitter @made2mother and like on Facebook.com/madetomother!

<div align="center"><a href="http://madetomother.com" title="Made to Mother"><img src="https://madetomother.files.wordpress.com/2014/06/mmlinkupbutton.jpg" alt="Made to Mother" style="border:none;" /></a></div>

Grab the Link Up button!

The Made to Mother Project is dedicated to encouraging, supporting and inspiring women by sharing their stories of motherhood. I hope that this link-up will continue to grow our community of mothers. Please read the guidelines below for information on how to join!

Link Up Guidelines

• Please post family-friendly topics/websites. Bonus points if they have to do with mothering!
• Be sure to link back to your blog post not your homepage.
• Share the Linky love – visit a page or two linked up here and leave them a nice comment.
• Oh, and a link back to Made to Mother using the button above or a sweet shout-out would be awesome, too!