Drawing on a mother’s love
Maggie’s Place card campaign supports women who choose life

By Ambria Hammel, The Catholic Sun
May 3, 2007

Catholic children of all ages find ways to honor their earthly and heavenly mother each May.

This year, they can honor even more moms who embrace the gift of raising children.

Maggie’s Place — a Catholic-based nonprofit group that operates three houses of hospitality across the Valley for expectant mothers who are alone or homeless — is encouraging Catholics to support its second “Honor Your Mother” campaign by purchasing handmade Mother’s Day cards.

“As Catholics, we have a special place in our heart for motherhood generally: for Our Lady, for pregnant women, for the gift of life, for the different ways that moms sacrifice in order to provide for their children,” said Mary Peterson, executive director of Maggie’s Place.

The campaign supports the work of motherhood. Proceeds provide pregnant women with the practical resources and spiritual support they need to start a new life for themselves and their child.

Angie Boggs, the organization’s director of development, said buying a card is one way to share the journey of motherhood with Maggie’s Place moms.

“It’s a way of saying that you support them,” she added, “and it’s a way of making our pro-life beliefs a reality and putting it out there in the world.”

Boggs knows that many of the women Maggie’s Place serves “are faced with the easy choice of abortion,” she said, because of their unplanned pregnancy. “The ones who come in here don’t want to take that option. They think it’s wrong.”

Sharae and Malessa are two of them. Both chose life for their unborn children while living at different Maggie’s Place homes.

The new moms were so grateful for the support of Maggie’s Place through their pregnancy and first six months of motherhood that they wrote and designed the greeting card used in the “Honor Your Mother campaign.”

“I want my daughter to be able to say all of these things about me. She’s my inspiration for this poem,” Malessa said of the words inside the card that describe a mother’s characteristics.

She added that the poem doesn’t apply to just one, but all moms.

That is what Sharae intended the maternal angel on the card’s front to represent.

It also symbolizes Maggie’s Place, which has been an angel to more than 175 expectant women since opening its first house of hospitality on Mother’s Day 2000.

The angel is dressed in a soft pink gown and has golden wings forming a heart behind her. She tenderly holds an infant as both appear against a baby blue sky.

The card also says a gift has been made to Maggie’s Place in the recipient’s honor and features a perforated flap about the organization that can be used as a bookmark.

Cards are available in both English and Spanish.

“Your gift will show a love and thanksgiving for your mother that will also benefit a woman who finds herself in an unexpected pregnancy and who sacrifices for motherhood,” just like the Blessed Mother Mary did, said Peggy Adams, director general of the Michael House which opened in March in Glendale.

The organization has a corporate sponsor willing to match each gift of its 300 employees and is open to more. Maggie’s Place hopes to raise $50,000 through the campaign.