A North Carolina woman with three unplanned pregnancies and two abortions in her past plans to help women find the hope and confidence to not travel that same path. Heartbeat International will walk alongside her.
Sarah Dove plans to open Arms of Grace Pregnancy Resource Center in Burlington, North Carolina, in early spring with help from a Heartbeat Life Launch grant. The steps taken began years ago.
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Sarah’s story
When Dove attended college, she took a path that conflicted with her upbringing.
“I had a wonderful Christian raising, but it was, for the most part, sheltered, so I didn’t know anything out there,” Dove recalled. “I was a young, naïve person. When I discovered the world, I wasn’t ready.”
She didn’t tell anyone about the two abortions. When she became pregnant a third time, she considered abortion again. However, the father of her child altered her course.
“My now-husband, we were dating at the time, looked at me and said, ‘You’ve got to try to stop pleasing people,” Dove said. “You can do this; we can do this. It’ll be fine. You’ve just got to grow up and tell them we’ve done this.’”
“It was only about five minutes, but it was a complete transformation,” she said, “just someone telling me changed my mind set about it. So, I got brave and told my mom that we were pregnant. It was like about two seconds of shock, and then nothing but excitement.”
That pregnancy and that support caused her to reflect upon her previous choices.
“The minute my daughter was born completely changed my perspective on what I had been doing, what I was doing,” Dove said.
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Called to help others
Two years later, she felt a calling from God “to do something” like helping families “sustain themselves,” and decided to volunteer at a pregnancy resource center.
“I thought, ‘What a better way to do that (help families) with the closest thing and volunteer at a pregnancy center,” Dove remembered.
When she shared with the center’s staff that she had experienced abortion in her past, Dove learned about abortion recovery programs. She enrolled to fulfill her desire to volunteer at the center.
“I knew God had forgiven me, but I thought I could go my whole life without telling anybody (about the abortions),” she said. “That recovery completely changed how I looked at what I’d done and been through, and it helped me tell my mother.”
She believes God used that time to move her forward.
“From the time I told my mom, it was just like a steppingstone,” she said. “With each step, I was spiritually growing.”
As a volunteer, she assisted with the Walk for Life, spoke in churches, and conducted sidewalk advocacy. One day, while doing that work in Greensboro, another person came up to her and suggested that a pregnancy center should start in Alamance County where she lived. Dove agreed and said that if one opened, she would volunteer.
Then came affirmation.
“This person said, ‘Well, why don’t you do it?’” Dove recalled. “As they were talking to me, I couldn’t see them anymore – I just felt like God was talking to me.”
A family member had encouraged her five years earlier to start a center in that same county.
“I called my mother and said, ‘Well, we’ve got a new mission.’ So, we started working on it and building connections. It was step-by-step: What do we do next? What do we do next?”
Partnership with Heartbeat
One of those steps led Dove to Heartbeat International, and she learned about the Life Launch Grant.
There are several requirements for a center to receive the grant, including a building, being in an underserved area or near an abortion facility, and raising $15,000. Burlington, North Carolina, lies mid-way between Greensboro and Raleigh, each having an abortion facility.
Heartbeat approved her grant request with stipulations, she said: finding two more board members, raising the $15,000, and securing a location.
“I didn’t know how that was going to happen, but I knew the only way it could happen was if I just started telling people what we needed,” said Dove.
"It is not uncommon for there to be a question mark at the end of a sentence about where a new startup center will be located or how funds will come in to support the efforts,” said Sara Littlefield, Heartbeat’s Life Launch Grant Program Specialist. “But the beautiful thing that we get to witness is God's hand in it all! To watch him clear pathways and direct each and every step along the way is a true joy!”
Honoring her heavenly children
Naming her center became a challenge, especially after discovering the original name she had chosen was close enough for confusion with another organization. Then, another steppingstone clarified not only the center’s name, but also honored one of her heavenly children.
She attended another abortion recovery class to see what that program was like.
“At the very last class, the women were instructed to listen to a song and pray over it,” Dove said. “I had been praying for a name for this center … I closed my eyes and God showed me (a vision). I’d had different visions of my (heavenly) daughters in the past. My first daughter’s name is Isabelle, and my second daughter’s name is Gracie Ann. The song (during the class) was The Arms of Grace, and that’s what they’re singing about: ‘Come to the arms of grace.’”
In the vision, her two daughters walked through a large field, “going toward this massive bright light,” and an angel extended arms in welcome.
“Gracie Ann turns around and she holds her arms open, and the song was saying, ‘Okay, it’s your turn – go to the arms of grace,’” Dove said. “And it was just crazy – it was my daughter that was doing that. Then God said, ‘That’s the name of your center – Arms of Grace.’ And I said, ‘Okay, God, that’s the name of the center.’”
The boutique inside the center may be named “Belle’s Boutique” in honor of her other heavenly daughter, she added.
Materials await. The closure of a nearby pregnancy center provided items needed to stock a boutique.
“She gave me everything they had,” Dove said of the director of the recently closed center. “I’ve got everything, and it’s already stocked.”
Finding a location and donors
Another door opened up for a building to house the center thanks to connections Dove made at a conference.
“She started crying on the phone saying she had been looking for a way for three or four years of how to help women in the situation of unexpected pregnancy who are abortion-minded,” Dove said. “The woman said, ‘And God just threw you right in my lap!’ And I said, ‘Well, I guess He threw you in my lap, too!’”
The landlady even made a significant donation. More contributions flooded in, and by the end of December 2021, Arms of Grace had raised the $15,000 needed for the Life Launch Grant.
The center held a a Visions of Grace event last month at the building introducing the center to the community “to see what the vision is and what we’re doing – how it’s going to be,” Dove said.
She plans to offer free self-administered pregnancy tests, pregnancy and parenting classes, materials assistance through the boutique, and an abortion recovery program.
Next steps on the journey
Arms of Grace is the second center in North Carolina to be awarded a Life Launch grant recently.
Receiving the grant meant monumental milestones for the center, Dove said.
“Having that has pushed us to another level that we did not expect we could be at,” she said. “The Heartbeat grant is going to give us the step-by-step instructions and training that we need to really be successful from the start. It’s also going to make me think of things I would never have thought of without their guidance.”
“With God's guidance, through the faithful work of leadership teams like the one at Arms of Grace Pregnancy Resource Center, and with the generous gifts of pregnancy help supporters, we will continue to see communities transformed for life!" Littlefield said.
The grant provides training for board, staff, and volunteers. Those benefits, plus generating greater awareness of the life-affirming center, and interior construction of the building are her focus points right now.
“I want people to know we’re here … and I want to be the first place they come,” she said.
“It’s definitely God, 100 percent,” Dove added. “God has just provided in so many ways, and He orchestrated this into my life since I was a young child.”
