Speaking to pregnancy help workers from across the globe at the 2025 Heartbeat International Annual Conference on Friday, May 2, in Birmingham, Ala., Margaret “Peggy” Hartshorn, PhD, exhorted the crowd, “We must be pioneering, like our previous generations. We must be experimental. We must be innovative.”
With a perspective on the pro-life movement that includes 39 years in leadership with Heartbeat International, Hartshorn compared the current landscape with the “chaotic” years following the Dobbs ruling. Then as now, she said, an “all-hands-on-deck mentality in the pregnancy help arm of the pro-life movement was also very evident.’”
On public policy and political fronts, she said, the early pro-life movement pioneered an incremental approach to “chip away at the broad application of Roe and finally led us to the Dobbs decision.”
[Click here to subscribe to Pregnancy Help News!]
Meanwhile, “the pregnancy help people were early adapters… of all the new technologies,” Hartshorn said, giving key examples by decades.
In the sixties, Sister Paula Vandegaer used one of the first 800 numbers to serve women through a brand-new counseling approach called crisis intervention. In the seventies, centers worked with licensed labs to read their pregnancy tests, then quickly pivoted in the eighties to offer the new early-detection pregnancy tests. By the nineties, pregnancy centers leveraged new ultrasound technology to give mothers a glimpse of the babies in their wombs.
In the 2000s, with the rise of the internet and its Voice over Internet Protocol, Heartbeat’s new Option Line adopted that technology. The 2010s saw fleets of mobile clinics carrying help to women far beyond brick-and-mortar limits. Then in 2020, COVID forced massive changes in delivery of services.
“We had to think ‘virtual everything,’” Hartshorn said.
“So, we quickly adapted through the years not only to new technologies but also the cultural changes,” she said, noting that core pregnancy help services have expanded in response to the breakdown of families and fallout of the sexual revolution.
In maternity housing, the private host homes of the seventies and eighties have developed into “often very specialized residential programs, many today focusing on trauma-informed care for mothers who are victims of sexual trafficking and other forms of abuse besides abortion,” Hartshorn said.
Other pioneering produced a variety of funding models for ministry. Also, innovative pregnancy help organizations have expanded their staff positions to include nurses, doctors, midwives, professional counselors, and specialists in support services.
Further, Heartbeat International now operates the Abortion Pill Rescue® Network, connecting women with medical professionals who can provide the life-saving protocol pioneered by Dr. George Delgado and Dr. Matt Harrison, reversing the progesterone-blocking effects of mifepristone, the first abortion pill.
“In partnering with you and the 1400 providers of Abortion Pill Reversal care around the country, Option Line has now saved over 7,000 babies,” Hartshorn said.
“Together we have created a diverse, localized, and very successful pregnancy help organization network with ministries not only in the U.S. but around the world,” she said. More than half of the world’s 7500 pregnancy help organizations are affiliated with Heartbeat International.
Through the 2100 affiliated locations in the U.S. alone, Hartshorn added, “we estimate that we're saving 3000 babies per week, one every four minutes—the work of small, dedicated paid staffs and 44,000-plus volunteers.”
A view of the horizon
“Looking toward tomorrow, the future I see seems somewhat daunting,” Hartshorn said. “We must go into it with eyes wide open but also with great energy and hope because we know what the Lord has already done through us working together.”
She then discussed four challenging trends.
First, she said she expects to see more intense cultural battles.
“The devil has been focusing on division in the closest two human relationships: between male and female and between mother and child,” hartshorn said.
She added, “That's why I think Mother Teresa famously said in her Nobel Peace prize speech, ‘The greatest destroyer of peace in the world is abortion.’”
Second, following the Dobbs decision, “in the [pro-life] movement we're experimenting with many new political and public policy approaches that differ in all the 50 states,” Hartshorn said. She noted that in politics “the pendulum, although it's swinging positively for us now, will probably swing back at some point.”
Third, as numbers of chemical abortions rise—even albeit the newly-revealed, greater than previously thought risk of serious adverse events for one out of nine women who take the pill—“the future could look even worse,” she said.
“Abortion proponents in the USA are now testing a version of the pill that only uses the second drug, misoprostol, with the brand name of Cytotec, that causes pain and bleeding and the eventual expelling of the little one,” Hartshorn said. She suggested this may be an attempt to render Abortion Pill Reversal obsolete by skipping the first pill altogether.
“I personally witnessed the tragedy of massive numbers of abortions by misoprostol or Cytotec in Manila when I visited 25 years ago,” Hartshorn said. “Bleeding women with severe pain crowded into emergency rooms daily… This memory has impacted me perhaps more than any other on my international visits.”
Fourth, Hartshorn said the world’s rate of change is accelerating so rapidly that experts estimate when today’s children turn 60, they will experience a year’s worth of change in 11 days. Amid such rapid change, particularly in the area of AI, she said, “we can't ignore it; we must engage.”
Steering into tomorrow together
With the Conference theme, “Together Towards Tomorrow,” displayed behind her, Hartshorn told her audience to face challenges like long-distance runners, not sprinters.
“We should not be running alone, but always as part of a team,” she said. “And we need to remember that this is a relay race, so we must prepare eventually to pass the baton on to the next generation of leaders.”
Tweet This: We must be pioneering, like our previous generations. We must be experimental. We must be innovative-Peggy Hartshorn @Heartbeat's Conference
She encouraged the pregnancy help crowd to continue providing access to the Abortion Pill Rescue® Network, while also finding innovative ways to shorten the time it takes for a real person to respond to a woman in crisis.
“She may be holding the pills in her hand when she starts searching on the internet or responds to an ad,” Hartshorn said.
To face the speed of change, Hartshorn said, “The only thing we can do is to realize we’re all learners and constant learners,” adding, “Heartbeat is here to help” through its online Academy, its Annual Conferences, and phone consultations on specific areas of concern.
“As a leader, you need never feel like an orphan,” she said. “There are loving, caring people right here around you and at Heartbeat Central, and we want to and need to go forward toward tomorrow together.”
An extra T: Trust in the Lord
Hartshorn told the Heartbeat Conference she would add one more T to the conference theme: Trust in the Lord.
Citing John 15:5, she said, “Our movement is really in essence God's people bringing his love to one segment of a hurting world. We're all created to labor together, you and I, in this particular part of this vineyard, but we can only produce fruit in the vineyard because we're connected to Him.”
“Don't trust in yourself or in the newest technology,” Hartshorn said, just as the psalmist refused to trust chariots and horses, the technology of his day. “Even though I've spoken about how we've used it, that's not where our trust lies.” Trusting in God, she said, will carry the movement past obstacles and attacks, potential failures, and fear of the unknown.
“We are an Easter people,” she said. “Don't we have the example of 12 ordinary people whom Jesus called to the greatest God-sized task ever? And he empowered these people with his Spirit, and they did change the world. With God all things are possible.”
Editor's note: Heartbeat International manages the Abortion Pill Rescue® Network (APRN) and Pregnancy Help News. Heartbeat is currently the subject of two lawsuits brought by state AG's concerning sharing information about ABoriton Pill Reversal.
