Campus Pregnancy Support Team: To hold back your hair

By: Kimberly Tsao

Posted: 5/13/09

Every girl needs the right type of support.

Angelina Espino, mother to 3-year-old Marissa, said she wasn't comfortable while she was pregnant at De Anza College.

"You kind of get looked down upon, you know, by the younger ones and then, even the teachers. I would have to leave for a doctor appointment and the teacher was kind of like, 'Oh well, I don't know what to tell you, you know. You miss the material, you miss it,'" Espino said. "And just sitting in the desk, you know, I was eight months pregnant and could not fit in the desk. So there was just a lot of things that just made me uncomfortable, having to walk from one end of the campus all the way to the opposite end of the campus."

SJSU's Campus Pregnancy Support Team, a Christian-based organization, offers free pregnancy testing, information on relationships and adoption, peer counseling for men and women who have unplanned pregnancies and referrals to on and off-campus services, said Chelsea Jackson, the organization's president.

The outside referrals include STD testing at health clinics, while the Student Health Center, Women's Resource Center, Counseling Services and Financial Aid and Scholarship Office all encompass the team's on-campus referrals, Jackson said.

"If a woman is pregnant and she decides to keep the child, a whole other avenue of financial aid opens up for her because she now has a dependent," she said.

Jackson said the organization is affiliated with the Community Pregnancy Center, which has two locations in San Jose.

"We don't refer for abortion, but we will talk about abortion with anybody if they want to because we want the decision that is made by the individual to be their decision alone," she said. "Even though we don't refer for abortion, we don't talk about it in a condescending way or in a judgmental fashion."

Jackson touched on what she would talk about with a student who was thinking about aborting her baby.

"We would go over the different types of abortion and if she was pregnant, what type of abortion would most likely be performed for her situation so that she could be prepared for that and so she knows, again, all the information that is available to her," she said.

The organization does, however, provide something else.

"The Community Pregnancy Centers offer an abortion retreat for women who have had a negative experience with abortion, where they can go and be together with other women and talk about the issues that they are having and that they are facing in a time where they can be together in community and support each other and work through their negative encounters with abortion so that they can be healed and make a full recovery," she said.

Jackson, a junior biology major, said the overnight abortion retreats usually occur on Fridays and Saturdays at various San Jose hotel locations.

Students can drop in or make an appointment to talk, she said. The drop-in sessions this semester were on Mondays, but the times are subject to change next semester, Jackson said. May 4 was their last meeting for the spring semester.

"We had schedules changing and with finals coming up, people have projects and presentations and we weren't available during those times," she said.

On other occasions, she said members might be sick or "they can't make it that particular day," so the sessions are canceled.

Usually, Jackson said, there are one to two peer counselors present in every time slot. The club currently has eight members, five of whom are trained peer counselors, she said.

They are taught "how to compassionately relate to people and how to support them in this time, just to make sure that everyone's kind of on the same page and everybody has accurate information," she said. The training lasts about six weeks.

Associated Students gave the team about $200 last semester when they requested approximately $500 for publicity purposes, she said. The organization is asking for $600 this semester, Jackson said.

"We are just trying to get off the ground and provide services to students at San Jose State and we're hoping to be growing soon," she said.