Heartbeat Gives Moms a Chance

Columbus, Ohio — “I’m not having this child.” Kayla was a single mom already. Her relationship with the father of her first child had disintegrated. She had just moved to California and was working as a cosmetologist while she pursued her acting dreams. It was the Covid shutdown and she was with her family in Tampa, where she grew up. She planned to stay for two weeks, but it became two months. She was in a developing relationship, and on Memorial Day morning she discovered herself pregnant. “My heart just fell to my stomach,” she recalls in video testimony. She feared losing everything she had started to build. “I had never thought of or considered abortion. . . . It was too frightening for me.” But she simply felt like she “had no other choice. This was just going to be the best outcome, the best answer, that’s it. . . . I figured the chemical abortion would be the best option, less invasive.”

She went to an abortion clinic in Florida, and a doctor oversaw the taking of the first pill. She went back to California. That night she sat waiting to see what this would do to her body. The next morning, a Gospel song woke her up. As she was about to hit snooze, she listened to the song, and “knew” she had made “a mistake.” She prayed and begged for a miracle.

Kayla googled: “I took the first medication abortion pill and decided to change my mind. What can I do?” She was amazed that she might have a chance, reading about abortion-pill reversal and finding information on Heartbeat International’s Abortion Pill Reversal Network. She called the Heartbeat hotline and was assured they would find her a doctor to help her get the progesterone her baby needed to survive and thrive. She recalls everyone in the room rejoiced when they finally got to see her baby’s heart still pumping on a sonogram.

After delivery, she says in the testimony for Heartbeat, she “saw nothing but perfection.” And while she was pregnant, back in Florida, she even starred in her first acting role in a short film — motherhood didn’t mean the end of her hopes for herself.

Kayla and her baby girl Serenity are the first photos I see in Heartbeat International’s headquarters here. (My tour guide, Heartbeat’s director of development, Cindi Boston, reports that she recently saw Serenity running around happily and healthily on a playground with other children.) The offices are like many a suburban workplace, with cubicles and meeting rooms and a studio and the like. Except here you are also embraced by a gallery of beautiful, framed photos of children and of mothers who have testified to the joy of having their children with the help of one of Heartbeat’s 3,100 affiliated pregnancy-help organizations — some are medical clinics, some may provide only sonograms and pregnancy tests with radiologists and nurses on staff, and some provide material and other resources (diapers, job skills, child care, housing) for the wide array of needs a pregnant woman and mother needs. The variety differs depending on local need and support.

Another difference here from the typical office is there are some women having live text chats and answering phone calls on Heartbeat’s 24-hour hotline (800-712-HELP, OptionLine.org), which connects women to independent affiliates and also takes calls for centers that opt-in after hours. (Not all the Option Line staff work out of Columbus, though.) Heartbeat reports that over 5 million women looking for answers in unexpected pregnancies have contacted the Option Line since 2003.

Most working at Heartbeat have frontline pregnancy-center experience, some have even run clinics themselves. This is not the stuff of “fake clinics” but a true pregnancy-care community.

In fact, although this is not exclusive to Heartbeat, it is mandatory for affiliates to sign on to and prominently display at their facilities a statement of “Commitment of Care and Competence.” They agree that, among other things, all their “advertising and communication are truthful and honest and accurately describe the services we offer.” They also pledge that “clients are served without regard to age, race, income, nationality, religious affiliation, disability or other arbitrary circumstances.”

Jor-El Godsey, Heartbeat’s president, sees this work as that which Christians have been doing since witnessing Romans throwing babies into the Tiber and waiting to get them out and care for them. The Charlotte Lozier Institute estimates that more than 828,131 lives were saved over the years 2016–20 alone at pregnancy-help centers. They are confident that “millions of lives” have been saved during the life of Roe.

“There’s a big abortion Goliath out there and there’s a little David pregnancy-help community that’s making it happen without major subsidies,” Godsey says, adding that he wishes more people realized it. He notes that in some states, including Texas and Missouri, governments are getting better about supporting centers that actually want to help women parent. He marvels at the rush there has been to support abortion, but not parenting, at the federal level. Often pregnant women and single mothers and struggling families just need help getting over hurdles that seem insurmountable. It would seem you wouldn’t need to be opposed to abortion to do that.

Kayla’s daughter was named Serenity because the serenity prayer is the story of how Kayla came to be born: “God grant me the serenity to accept the things that I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.”

That’s not a bad prayer for humility, whatever one’s position on abortion is. Maybe we don’t have to pile on to the often cruel politics of abortion in America — which in its daily playing out in many ways hurts more than it helps, especially when it comes to the so many women who have already had abortions.

The callers to Heartbeat’s hotline want help choosing life. That’s an option we need to build more momentum around in post-Roe America.

This column is based on one available through Andrews McMeel Universal’s Newspaper Enterprise Association.