Vikki Parker of Cabot has always had a soft spot in her heart for young women who are struggling with pregnancy. She said that’s because of an experience close to home.
Parker started the Options Pregnancy Center in Cabot in 2001, about two years after her teenage daughter found out she was pregnant.
“My daughter Destini was 15 when she got pregnant,” Parker said. “Just walking through that with her and as a family and not knowing anything … I didn’t know anything about a pregnancy center. I didn’t know anything about where to go to get help.”
That led to Options, which opened in September 2001.
Parker and her center, which is affiliated with Care Net, a nonprofit national organization that supports a network of pregnancy centers across, the United States, were honored with a national award from Care Net.
Parker received the Guy Condon Presidential Award on Sept. 6 during Care Net’s National Conference in St. Louis.
“I’m still in shock from it,” Parker said of the award. “We just do what we do, and we do it every day. We don’t think that there is anything special about what we do at Options Pregnancy Center. We don’t even think we should even be recognized, for that matter.
“From what Care Net said and its CEO Roland Warren, the award goes to a center that encompasses the pro-life message that Care Net stands for.”
Condon was the president of Care Net when he died in a car accident in November 2000 while returning home from visiting one of the many pregnancy centers in the Care Net network.
“He opened pregnancy centers all over the United States,” Parker said of Condon. “He would go out and speak at a lot of these centers’ events. He was killed suddenly on the way home from one.”
Being recognized for the work that Options is doing in Cabot, Jacksonville and Beebe is huge for Parker, she said.
“I didn’t know it was that big of a deal,” she said. “Then I get there to the national conference, and it is a big deal. It was such an amazing thing. Here we are in Cabot, Arkansas, and we’re in the room with pregnancy centers from New York, Los Angeles and all these larger cities with much larger centers.
“I don’t even know how I got here. It’s quite amazing.”
Options Pregnancy Center board member Thea Hughes was in attendance when Parker received the award in St. Louis.
“Vikki is one of the most passionate, hardest-working people I have ever known,” Hughes said. “She gives completely everything she’s got to anything that she is passionate about. She’s very passionate about her work at the Options Pregnancy Center.
“To see her win the award, in a way, was surprising, but also, it wasn’t surprising because she does such a good job and works so hard.”
When Parker found out her daughter was pregnant, she said, she was in need of help herself.
“As a mother, I needed to know how to help her,” Parker said. “I was going through my own trauma, so I didn’t know what to do. When the Lord laid this on my heart to do this, I had to go in search of a resource for help to see if there was any such animal.
“I know how it is for the mothers of these young women. Your mind stops thinking. You can’t even think. You’re trying to process it. It’s a trauma.”
Parker said she raised her daughter to be a good person.
“I tell people all the time that we were in church all the time,” she said. “It wasn’t that my daughter was in the streets. She was a good girl. Bad things happen to good people. There was nobody to turn to. I was a mess. You go through the baby’s daddy leaving. He doesn’t stay.”
Parker also knew her daughter needed help because the baby’s father was not in the picture.
“She was traumatized over that,” Parker said. “You’re trying to navigate schools and the relationships at school.”
Parker’s grandson Isiah is now 20 years old.
“The best part of Destini’s life and my life was the birth of Isiah,” Parker said.
Before starting Options, Parker had several career opportunities.
“I worked for a company out of Dallas for 15-plus years as a regional manager, and after my daughter was having my grandson, I went back to my first vocation as a hair stylist to be home and available for them,” Parker said.
Options Pregnancy Center has many programs for expectant mothers, including free pregnancy tests, information on options, limited obstetrical ultrasounds, post-abortion support, parenting education and assistance, community referrals and certified life coaching.
“All of our services are free,” Parker said. “We don’t charge anything. We don’t have government money that we get for the pregnancy center. We just raise funds. That’s how we do it. That’s how we survive.”
Parker said the ultrasounds are beneficial for women who don’t have insurance.
“There are so many different things they can’t get to,” she said. “We can help them to get those things, get Medicaid
done. Then we enter them into a parenting-education program.”
Parker said expectant mothers can earn free baby clothes and all kinds of baby items from the baby store at Options.
“We have 18 certified advocates that we call life coaches,” Parker said. “They can help them in all aspects of their lives, not just through the pregnancy. They can help make sure that they finish school and that they know how to set goals. They can show them how to manage time to get through classes. I have moms who are trying to finish college. They’ve got this new baby, and they have have family support but still don’t know how to get the dishes washed, the house cleaned, keep the baby and get through college, all at the same time.
“We can help them through life coaching, but life coaching alone is so valuable to them to help them work through their situation.”
Parker said there are nine full-time employees with the center.
“All other workers in our center are volunteers,” she said. “If we charged for all the services we do in a year, it would cost an average of more than $350,000, and this is achieved by fundraising and people who sow those seeds to help us continue to do what we do.”
Another service that Parker is proud of is the center’s program for fathers.
“We have seen dads go through our fatherhood program,” she said “You always think about women coming to the pregnancy center, but you don’t think that much about the men. We have a very strong men’s ministry. We work with a lot of dads and help them.”
After the Cabot location opened, Options founded centers in Jacksonville, Beebe and Lonoke. The Lonoke location closed in 2017. However, Options is raising funds for a mobile unit that Parker hopes to purchase early next year to help serve the area.
“In a rural area like Lonoke, people don’t have the transportation a lot of times,” Parker said. “That’s why we’re going to have the mobile ultrasound and pregnancy center, so we can take it to the rural areas.
For more information about the Options Pregnancy Center, visit optionspc.org.
Staff writer Mark Buffalo can be reached at (501) 399-3676 or mbuffalo@arkansasonline.com.