Member Spotlight: Dawn Marie Pérez of StandUpGirl.com

Why SMI? Dawn Marie Pérez loves the community aspect

Dawn Marie Pérez has always been pro-life.

Rather than standing at the corners of abortion clinics and attending rallies, however, this introverted Oregonian applies her pro-life stance through connecting pregnant girls around the world with help and hope through StandUpGirl.com.

She describes the website as a “virtual pregnancy care center” that offers the type of support a woman is looking for when they come into a brick-and-mortar center. The goal is to provide the site’s visitors with information and support and get them connected with someone locally.

Dawn Marie lives in western Oregon with Mark, her husband of 15 years, and their two children, who are 10 and 12 years old. She graduated from California Polytechnic State University with a degree in psychology, minoring in early childhood education, and taught for about 25 years before learning about StandUpGirl.com from someone at her church.

“This person shared that it was an online resource for women in crisis pregnancies, and girls who are looking for resources or sometimes just someone to talk to, to email the website,” she said.

The organization needed volunteers, and, in 2008, Dawn Marie signed up. At the time, she was teaching employees how to use computers. Her tech and teaching backgrounds made her a great fit to work with girls through this new website.

She was hired as StandUpGirl.com’s first official director in 2011.

An online resource for women

The concept for StandUpGirl.com was originally called the Caring Foundation. It was a subsidiary of the Oregon Right to Life Foundation in the late 1990s.The idea developed after a study in 1999 revealed there were more people ages 12 to 24 spending time on a computer than watching television.

“They wanted to get a pro-life message out to people through a computer,” Dawn Marie said. “We were just at that point on the cusp of the internet really exploding.”

When StandUpGirl.com was built as a website in 2001, it received about 3,000 visitors a year. In 2002, StandUpGirl.com Foundation became a nonprofit and self-sufficient. Today, it gets 400,000 visitors a month.

Women can visit the website and find resources about pregnancy symptoms, how the baby develops in the womb, and hope-filled stories from girls who chose life. They can also search for a pregnancy center in their area.

“Girls can look up what their pregnancy symptoms are that they think they’re having and then they can contact us after that,” she said. “So right there on the pregnancy symptoms page they can send us an email and ask for help. That's the page that gets the most traffic, the pregnancy symptoms page.”

Also popular are the Body Tour and Embryoscopy features, which show visitors how a baby grows over the course of nine months.

“We wanted to have a resource so that young women could actually see what their child looks like," Dawn Marie said. "This is not a blob of cells. This is not nothing. This little person in there is a person. This little person started upon conception.”

Women supporting women

In the website’s earlier years, Dawn Marie said, site visitors would contact the webmaster asking if there was someone they could talk to. The site was redesigned to feature a way for girls to send emails with their questions. The questions became the launching ground for the “Dear Becky” column on the site, where a woman named Becky responded to their questions and published the interaction for other visitors to read.

Once StandUpGirl.com started receiving thousands of Dear Becky letters, foundation leaders realized it needed more volunteers and more help responding to questions. The more relational they made the website through live chats, online forums, mentoring, and 24/7 online counseling services, the more that people viewed it.

“The beauty behind all of this was that we would develop a community of women who are able to support other women,” Dawn Marie said. “We have volunteers who are scheduled each day of the week to answer the emails and the texts that come in, and then those conversations are trying to get them the information that they need. A lot of times these girls aren’t pregnant—they just think they might be—and so we tell them we know they are worried and it’s just us being that listening ear and being able to say, ‘You know, it’s OK. Let’s step back, take a deep breath and take a step and go forward.’”

The key is connecting the girls with someone local so that, although girls like the anonymity of contacting someone through the website for help, they have someone they can approach face to face who is going to follow through and help them on their journey. The pregnancy centers and StandUpGirl.com support them with help beyond their pregnancy, if needed, through encouragement, coaching, and building relationships.

'Not the end of your dreams’

Over the years, Dawn Marie has heard every type of crisis pregnancy story. She visits schools and churches and shares what

StandUpGirl.com offers, plus educates her audiences on why every life matters.

“I feel the more we can educate the younger generation about life, then we have the opportunity to change that narrative for our future,” she said. “We make an effort to work with the local colleges and the high schools.”

For the girls who visit or contact StandUpGirl.com, Dawn Marie and her staff and volunteers ultimately hope to point them to the One who gives life.

“We want these girls to have a relationship with the Lord and to understand that when they’re alone and the boyfriend left them, or they don’t have a good father figure, that there is a heavenly Father who loves you no matter what, and this is not the end of your life,” Dawn Marie said. “This is not the end of your dreams. It’s just a different path that you’re on than you thought, so let’s look down the path to the future and these things you want to accomplish. You’re still able to obtain them. This is just a different course.”