In the southwest corner of the Didsbury Cemetery is the grave of Mennonite missionary Edmund Chatham who came to Alberta when his lungs were failing him and died of tuberculosis in 1900.
Edmund made no lasting impression on Didsbury or his beloved church that was Didsbury’s cornerstone. He wasn’t here long enough – less than a year before he died.
His older sister Maude is a different story. She is one of Didsbury’s largest contributions to Alberta’s social and Christian health in the first half of the 20th century.
Maude Chatham was a Mennonite ministering sister and pastor who started her career as church probationer in Ontario when she was 21, served with Edmund’s mission on Georgian Bay and came to Didsbury to nurse him in his final months.
After Edmund died, she stayed to become a lasting influence on the way Alberta treated women with unwanted pregnancies.
Maude worked in the Didsbury area for seven years, preaching at Carstairs from 1903 to 1904. From 1905 to 1906 she was Elder Samuel Shelley Stauffer’s helper at Didsbury and pastor at Mayton northeast of Olds.
Then in 1907, the Mennonite Church sent her to minister to the destitute in Edmonton. She began by co-founding a shelter for homeless men that ran until recruitment for the First World War absorbed its clientele.
Providing food and shelter for the homeless introduced her to pregnant single women shamed and abandoned by their families and the fathers of their soon-to-be-born babies.
Abortionist were members of Edmonton’s criminal underworld and abortions were cruel, often fatal procedures.
Compelled by her profound personal relationship with Christ, Maude took pregnant women in.
She rejected the judgment these women faced from the family, community and often the church.
Instead, she offered them love, a safe place to stay until they gave birth and then assistance with the adoption of their babies.
In 1909, she co-founded Beulah Home in Edmonton as an interdenominational mission for pregnant women and an adoption agency.
After two years in rented quarters, Maude built a home with the financial assistance of the Mennonite Brethren, the City of Edmonton and other donors.
Long after Maude stepped down as leader because of ill health, Beulah Home continued its work. Its record of 6,900 adoptions is a testament to the Christian answer to an unplanned pregnancy.
Today unplanned, unwanted pregnancies are often resolved by abortion – 90,000 each year in Canada and 12,500 in Alberta. Canada has the most open abortion law in the world because there is no law.
Restrictions, if any, are left up to the medical practitioners of the procedure.
Abortion is legal and if administered by a physician, safe. Abortion deaths are very rare, in Canada occurring less often than annually if the procedure is conducted medically.
Abortion is considered to be a legal right.
So the criticism that abortion attracts is political and moral.
However, political leaders avoid the topic as if it were a disease even when, as in Alberta, rank and file MLAs want to confront and debate it.
To deal with it morally, the Alberta story of Maude Chatham is as good a place to start as any.
Her miracle was changing unplanned, unwanted pregnancy into children who were wanted and loved.
– Frank Dabbs is a veteran political and business journalist, author and editor.
