AKRON, Ohio — An unexpected pregnancy can be overwhelming and challenging for a family or young couple — something that Paige Villers knew all too well.
Villers had an unexpected pregnancy at 18 years old.
Her aunt, Christina Henry, said her niece made the difficult decision to give her baby boy up for adoption.
“She knew she wasn’t going to be able to provide the life for him that she wanted to provide," Henry said. “It was something she truly agonized with because she wanted nothing more than to parent her son and to give him the life and the future she wanted him to have.”
Henry said after Villers gave birth she felt alone and didn't have a group of people who could truly relate to her experience as a birth mom.
“We weren’t aware that there were birth mom support groups at the time," Henry said. "She really didn’t have a lot of support outside of her family.”
Still struggling with the emotional whiplash of adoption, Villers joined the Air Force.
“It was very important for Paige to give back to her country, to give back to her community," Henry said. "To do something with her life that would honor her son.”
Unfortunately, Villers passed away while serving in the Air Force.
“So she ended up passing away from a rare strain of the adenovirus," Henry said. "The adenovirus is common, it causes the common cold but it was a strain 14.”
Before her untimely death, Villers shared with her family the dreams she had about helping other women who are going through unexpected pregnancies.
"She wanted to reach out to young women who were in the same position as her," Henry said. "(She) eventually (wanted to) start some sort of counseling and she talked about making documentaries so that other women could see that there were other women out there just like them, in the same position as them.”
Although she wasn’t able to do that, her family wanted to carry on her dream of helping these young women.
So, they created The PAIGE Foundation in her memory.
“Our goal is to educate the public on adoption, on the role of the birth mother in the adoption triangle," Henry said. "The importance of having a birth mother involved with an adoptee and with the adopted family.”
The Paige Foundation provides a network for birth moms in Northeast Ohio.
“What we do is we raise funds, and we support the birth moms in our local area, by paying to send them to retreats, by helping if they have financial needs, we help with transportation," Henry said. “We really want to break that stigma, We want people to see birth moms in a different light, we want birth moms to be able to proudly say, ‘I'm a birth mom and this is a choice that I made.'”
For more information about The PAIGE Foundation, click here to visit paigefoundation.net or find them on Facebook.