Long before she was the executive director of New Beginnings Pregnancy Center in central Arkansas, Janet Dixon was a nurse who chose maternal-child health as her graduate focus and went on to work as a nurse practitioner in women’s health.

“That’s where I really started learning how to do options counseling,” she says.

After years in family practice, prenatal care, and a season at home raising her own children, Janet was recruited to New Beginnings and trained to perform ultrasounds. “I learned ultrasound, became the nurse manager, and I did that for a couple of years before I became the director in 2020,” she says. She has been New Beginnings’ executive director since.

Accompaniment beyond birth

Ask Janet what a day looks like, and she’ll tell you about the two doors that sit side by side. There’s the pregnancy test center, and next to it, a resource center.

“People can come to our resource center every week through their pregnancy and until the child is two,” she explains. Families earn what the center calls “baby bucks” by choosing from over a hundred parenting classes, doing optional one-on-one Bible studies, or donating clothes their little ones have outgrown. They can spend the “baby bucks” on diapers and clothing.

It’s not only mothers who are welcomed at New Beginnings. “We now have a fatherhood program,” Janet says. “The word is slowly getting out that men can come too.”

“We value the fact that we got to see that baby.”

Some of the most sacred moments at New Beginnings are the ones that almost no one else will ever know about.

“When we do an ultrasound, and then that mom goes and chooses abortion, we value the fact that we got to see that baby,” Janet says. “There’s one or two of us, plus the mom, and that’s it. We hold that in strict confidence and consider it a valuable piece of our ministry.”

When the phone rings

New Beginnings is also part of Heartbeat International’s Abortion Pill Rescue© Network, which helps connect women who are seeking a way to reverse their in-progress chemical abortion to providers of the Abortion Pill Reversal protocol, or APR for short.

“[The APR helpline calls] come to my cell phone, so if it’s in the middle of the night, it’s my phone that rings,” she says. In those situations, Janet is one of the first points of contact for a mother seeking to save her baby after taking the first abortion pill.

“Our very first Abortion Pill Reversal client is somebody I’ve stayed in pretty close contact with,” Janet says. “She and I developed a relationship.”

Her very first APR client had driven to another state, taken the first abortion pill, and regretted it once she got back home.

“In a moment of panic, she started the abortion pill process—and she realized she didn’t want to do it, so she did the reversal,” Janet recalls. “It was less than 12 hours later when we were able to come up here in the night, do her ultrasound, get her progesterone…”

It took a whole community to make that night possible, right down to the local pharmacist.

“We have a privately owned pharmacy, and that pharmacist doesn’t mind coming up in the middle of the night with some progesterone,” she says. “We’re all showing this woman value in her ability to change her mind, and value in her baby—that we’re going to do what we can to help save her baby, too.”

That baby is now a toddler.

“That child is two now, and [the mom] is very thankful,” Janet says. She “later invited me to her baby shower, and I’m still in contact with her. These relationships go on and on.”

A team of support

For Janet, that night captures something true about the whole pregnancy help movement: No one has should have to do this alone.

“It’s not one person doing anything. It’s a team of support,” she says. She compares it to the way strangers rush to help in an emergency. “It’s just not a lot different than if I was an EMT or at a ballgame and somebody was choking or having a heart attack. The community would jump in to help.”

“We see that. We see a lot of people will come and help.”

That help doesn’t stop at the delivery room. Just recently, New Beginnings connected a single mother of five with a washer and dryer.

“We don’t personally have all those resources, but we can connect her to them,” she says. “There are so many people who value the life of the unborn.”

And in more than three decades in women’s health, Janet keeps coming back to one thing she has never once heard.

“I don’t know anyone who would say they regret having a child,” she says.

California’s attack on Abortion Pill Reversal

Janet’s hope, that a woman who changes her mind can always find someone to pick up the phone, is exactly what is now on trial.

“I really hope Heartbeat isn’t silenced, and that they continue to have the hotline,” she says. To her, a nurse taking a call from another nurse in the middle of the night is simply good medicine.

“When I get the call from another hotline nurse, it’s just like being in the hospital when you’re receiving report on your patient. It’s a handoff from one nurse to another nurse, and then we step in to help her.”

“To have a national hotline, with real nurses available 24/7 who are trained to help these women over the phone. I can’t even fathom why that’s not a good thing,” she says. “If we didn’t have that hotline and those nurses, there would be states that don’t have it at all. That would be a real shame.”

That APR helpline is precisely what California is trying to shut down. In People of the State of California v. Heartbeat International & RealOptions, the first case of its kind to reach trial, Attorney General Rob Bonta is seeking more than $20 million in penalties to stop two pro-life nonprofits, Heartbeat & RealOptions, from telling women that Abortion Pill Reversal exists.

He wants a permanent gag order and ruinous financial penalties against Heartbeat International, and affiliated Bay Area pregnancy center organization, RealOptions, alleging that their speech about APR is “misleading” and “false advertising.”

For pregnancy center directors like Janet, the case is deeply personal. The outcome will help decide whether the next woman who panics and then changes her mind about her chemical abortion will still find someone waiting to answer her call and help.

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Photos courtesy of Janet Dixon.