By Ashley Perham
For HDMedia
There’s a buzz at St. John’s Episcopal Church as the new CICADA Center prepares to emerge for its grand opening Sunday.
The facility offers reproductive counseling, referrals and supplies, from safe-sex supplies and pregnancy tests to maternity clothes and diapers.
CICADA, which stands for Compassionate, Informative, Caring, Accessible, Dignified and Autonomous, is a partnership between the church and WV FREE, a reproductive rights organization.
Neutral Counseling
The office provides counseling on options for women facing an unplanned pregnancy. There are maternity supplies, diapers, baby items and even donated breast milk for those who need it.
The counseling is not religiously based, but spiritual counseling is available upon request.
Margaret Chapman Pomponio, executive director of WV FREE, said the CICADA Center is a response to crisis pregnancy centers, which are “cloaked often as health care providers, but they’re really religiously based anti-abortion centers.”
“ I’ve been to a crisis pregnancy center as a 19-year-old in Colorado,” Pomponio said, “and it was horrifying.”
CICADA will be giving people “true information that they can rely on and access to resources” as opposed to “junk science,” Pomponio said.
Pomponio, who attends St. John’s, said CICADA has been a personal dream for many years.
She said the counseling at CICADA is unbiased and provides all options for women, including abortion, adoption and parenthood. Counselors can also provide referrals to abortion providers, adoption agencies, midwives, prenatal and postnatal care, mental health support and other resources.
Pomponio and Terri Byrd, outreach and advancement manager, are the two CICADA counselors for now. They plan to train volunteers on anti-racism, non-discrimination, bias, stigma and trauma.
“There are all kinds of stigmas and unknown biases that come into play around pregnancy, whatever option it is,” Pomponio said. “And so, we want people to be aware of those so that we are providing the true, better antidote to the crisis pregnancy center.”
A parish ministry
This type of ministry is not new for St. John’s. The church was the first home for the Women’s Health Center of West Virginia.
“This is a parish that really wants to be connected to community in meaningful ways and giving back to the community,” Pomponio said.
The Rev. Eric Miller, rector of St. John’s, said inclusion, belonging and justice are core tenets of his congregation.
“In the state of West Virginia, we want to make sure that women have all of the health care that they need,” he said. “And not only that they have the health care that they need, but they have the freedom of choice and their health care.”
He said he wanted women at the CICADA Center to have options and information without persuasion.
“As baptized followers of Jesus Christ, respecting the dignity of every human being is also respecting the dignity of the woman’s right to choose how she’s treated medically,” he said.
A need for CICADA
Pomponio said the need for a place like CICADA is great. Byrd said around 420 pregnant women reached out to WV FREE last year.
West Virginia also has “maternity deserts” as hospitals close.
“That’s only going to get worse, and that goes hand in glove with the abortion ban,” Pomponio said. “We are stepping in at a critical time where reproductive health care options are shrinking in West Virginia.”
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