Elizabeth Warren went on television and demanded that pro-life pregnancy centers be shut down across America.
In Mayfield, Kentucky, one of those centers has now been open for 30 years.
And the youngest client who has walked through its doors was 11 years old.
Fifty Volunteers Opened a Mayfield Pregnancy Resource Center on $2,000 a Month
It started with teenagers making a lonely drive.
Karin Thomas, who ran the Hope Unlimited pregnancy center about 25 miles away in Paducah, kept seeing teens from Mayfield and Graves County show up at her door because there was nowhere closer to turn.
So on February 20, 1996, about 50 people from Mayfield crowded into a meeting to fix that.
Executive Director Rebekah Flowers calls them "50 fearless folks."
A steering committee formed that night.
Then, as founding director Beverly Steele later recalled, one young woman in town with very real needs made waiting impossible.
Hope for Life Pregnancy Resource Center was up and running on September 16, 1996 – just shy of seven months after that first meeting.
Money was tight from day one.
By New Year's Eve, 32 volunteers had been trained and 10 clients had walked through the door.
Kentucky Pregnancy Center Became Family to Clients Across Four Counties
The ministry, renamed the Hope Center in 2010, has called four buildings home.
It went from a cramped office to a former mortuary on Water Street, then to a renovated house on Paris Road, and finally to a 6,500-square-foot professional building on East Broadway.
Think about that mortuary for a second.
A building that once prepared the dead for burial became a place where scared young mothers found people ready to help them welcome new life.
Flowers says the center has logged 30,000 client interactions since that first day, with clients ranging in age from 11 to 45.
Eleven years old.
A child who should be worrying about spelling tests walked into that building needing help, and somebody was there to listen.
In 2025 alone, the Hope Center served 1,788 clients across Graves, Carlisle, Fulton and Hickman counties.
Registered nurses on its staff of seven provide free pregnancy tests, testing for five sexually transmitted infections and limited ultrasound.
Moms earn baby supplies through parenting classes, dads get mentoring, women hurting after an abortion find support, and a team of local teenagers called the Hope Student Ambassadors carries a message of value into area schools.
"We have a sign that has been hanging in our front office for the past few years, and we live by it," Flowers said. "'When you are here, you are family.'"
Thirty years in, she says the work is just beginning, with a push to reach more Hispanic families and more fathers.
"It is our prayer that we will always give God all the Glory for what he is doing with His ministry," she said.
Elizabeth Warren Wants Pro-Life Pregnancy Centers Shut Down Nationwide
In July 2022, Warren told a Boston TV station, "We need to shut them down here in Massachusetts and we need to shut them down all around the country."
She wasn't talking about abortion clinics.
She was talking about places like the Hope Center.
That same summer, a pro-abortion group calling itself Jane's Revenge claimed responsibility for at least 18 arson and vandalism attacks on pregnancy centers and faith-based groups.
FBI Director Christopher Wray admitted that 70 percent of abortion-related threats after the Dobbs decision targeted pro-life centers.
By the end of 2022, Joe Biden's Justice Department had indicted 26 pro-life activists under the FACE Act – and arrested no one from Jane's Revenge.
Trump Pardoned the Pro-Life Activists Biden Prosecuted Under the FACE Act
America elected a president who saw it differently.
On January 23, 2025, President Trump pardoned 23 pro-life activists convicted under the FACE Act, a group the Thomas More Society said included grandparents, pastors, a Holocaust survivor and a Catholic priest.
The centers never stopped showing up.
Pregnancy centers nationwide served 1 million new clients in 2024 and provided more than $452 million in free care and support, according to the Charlotte Lozier Institute.
Most of it runs on church basements, bake sales and folks like the 50 who packed a room in Mayfield in 1996.
Warren wants these centers gone.
Mayfield answered her with 30 years, 30,000 interactions and a sign on the wall that says you're family.
Sources:
- Tabitha Goodling, "From 10 Clients to 30,000 Interactions: Kentucky Pregnancy Center Celebrates 30 Years," Pregnancy Help News, October 1, 2026.
- Will Spencer, "Director of the Hope Center Speaks at Rotary," The Mayfield Messenger, February 10, 2026.
- Harold Hutchison, "Head of Pregnancy Center Rebukes 'Horrific' Claims of Sen. Elizabeth Warren," The Daily Signal, July 14, 2022.
- Brianna Herlihy, "DOJ Ramps Up Charges Against Pro-Life Activists: 4 Last Year, 26 This Year," Fox News, October 19, 2022.
- Timothy H.J. Nerozzi, "DOJ Charges Tennessee Pro-Life Activists With Violating FACE Act, Still No Arrests in Jane's Revenge Attacks," Fox News, December 16, 2022.
- Catholic News Agency, "Trump Pardons 23 Pro-Life Activists," Catholic World Report, January 23, 2025.
- Kate Quiñones, "How Pregnancy Centers Help Women: Centers Provide $450 Million in Value, Report Finds," EWTN News, November 17, 2025.
