A Loving Option Adoption—living the Gospel of life
By Beth Schmitt
On Sept. 20, I was privileged to be a member of a team of volunteers that organized and hosted the second annual Barn Dance to raise funds for Catholic Charities of East Tennessee’s (CCETN) adoption ministry, A Loving Option Adoption.
The adoption ministry works alongside Catholic Charities’ Pregnancy Help Center, and CCETN A Loving Option Adoption program manager Chasity Galyon and her team operate a powerful, amazing initiative supporting women across East Tennessee. They truly walk alongside expectant mothers as they either make an adoption plan for their babies or decide to parent their children. This support for the birth mother can include ensuring she has health care, food, safe shelter—and importantly—counsel, love, and support. A Loving Option Adoption truly cares about the mother, the child, and the adoptive families. They are doing God’s work, providing help, hope, and light at a time when many women see only darkness.
The adoption program was forced to close several years ago but had the opportunity to reopen following the U.S. Supreme Court’s Fulton vs. City of Philadelphia decision in 2021. The unanimous ruling enabled faith-based adoption programs to resume outreach, support for women in unplanned pregnancies, and adoption placement for women who choose not to parent their children.
However, resuming the program in 2022 was not without challenges. At that point, one of the primary goals of CCETN’s A Loving Option Adoption was to generate awareness after years of having the service shuttered. As the only remaining faith-based adoption program in our region, it was important to increase this awareness, not only among the faithful throughout East Tennessee, but most importantly, among East Tennessee women facing unplanned pregnancies.
“If we can’t reach her,” Ms. Gal-yon said of the woman they hope to serve, “we can’t help her.”
Led by St. John Neumann Parish’s pro-life ministry, and with the help of Knoxville Catholic High School, many generous sponsors, and the grace of the Holy Spirit, we raised close to $30,000 at our first Barn Dance in 2024. And happily, the team at CCETN’s A Loving Option Adoption matched seven babies and families in fiscal year 2024-25—a 600-percent increase from the previous year!
We’re confident that we exceeded last year’s fundraising total at our second annual Barn Dance event last month. Some of the funds raised enable A Loving Option Adoption to leverage a pro-life marketing firm to ensure women have visibility to this resource when they search out options online or through social media platforms. But growing the number of women and families served can come only with even more financial support for the ministry team at A Loving Option Adoption.
To serve more women, babies, and families, A Loving Option Adoption may need to grow its team, and that can only happen with significantly more financial resources. The question for all of us is, how else can we help them? As members of the Catholic Church, I believe we must be on the offensive, certainly to proclaim the Gospel of life, but we must also “walk the talk.” It’s not enough to vote pro-life, although that’s certainly critically important. We must also actively support the women who, rather than leave our state for an abortion, choose to have their babies and parent them or place them with adoptive families like those we celebrated at the Barn Dance in September.
The money we raised last month was the result of an effort organized by just a handful of volunteers from one parish in the Diocese of Knoxville. Imagine the power if all the faithful throughout the diocese participated in financial support for this amazing faith-based adoption team. They are quite literally saving lives and providing hope to both birth mothers and families praying for a child of their own.
There are no doubt hundreds, if not thousands, of women in our state without hope. Yet the team at CCETN’s A Loving Option Adoption is providing that hope by giving them a loving option. They’re shining a light to women throughout our region who need a glimmer of light to shine into their lives.
We, too, can bring them hope, bring them love, and share God’s grace with them through our financial support of A Loving Option Adoption. To do that, I’d like to encourage you all to become a recurring donor to A Loving Option Adoption. It’s a secure link and it only takes a second to walk the talk and actively live the Gospel of life.
Beth Schmitt is a parishioner of St. John Neumann in Farragut.