Blandine Kemayou of Light for Angels in Cameroon and Simon Duraiaj of Life for All in India spoke to Heartbeat International’s 54th Annual Conference attendees about establishing the first pregnancy help organizations in their nations, leading to lives saved and transformed.
Heartbeat is the largest network of pregnancy help organizations in the U.S. and the world. Kemayou and Duraiaj were among the international pregnancy help workers from 19 nations across the world to attend the 2025 Conference in Birmingham, Ala.
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Dark night precedes creation of “Light for Angels”
Kemayou began with the story of her own teenage abortion experience. For $42, her boyfriend bought her an illegal late-night abortion. Before the procedure, the doctor told her, “Do not scream, do not cry, or we will both be arrested. Lay down and be quiet.”
Afterward, when Kemayou asked, “Where is my baby?” the doctor pointed to a bucket full of blood.
“Ten years later, while working here in the U.S. and dealing with an identity crisis, I received an intense calling of the Holy Spirit to end abortion in Cameroon,” Kemayou said. “However, this journey had to start with me healing my own wound and finally confronting the truth I'd kept hidden for so long.”
With help from multiple resources in the U.S., she said, she experienced healing. Then she turned to Google, hoping to “find and join an organization in Cameroon who defends the sanctity of human life and can help women to avoid the path I took.” She found nothing.
“I realized I had to become to the answer myself by starting a center that I never intended to,” Kemayou said. “Through Heartbeat International and the Association for Life of Africa, I was provided with resources to run the center.”
From there, she assumed things would be easy for a ministry so dear to God’s heart. That was not to be.
“The first challenge I encountered was with the church, who believed a service like that of a pregnancy center encouraged pre-marital sex,” she said. On the other hand, “organizations with a ‘reproductive health and family planning’ agenda do not make our job easy. We're constantly under attack for not providing birth control.”
Cameroon’s laws restrict abortion to cases of rape and incest. But poverty and hardship result in a “high rate of unplanned pregnancy, abortion-related death due to ingestion of traditional herbal remedies, and, the most extreme and heartbreaking case, the upward trend of the abandonment of newborns in trash bins and public spaces,” Kemayou said.
Light for Angels is changing the culture.
“In addition to pregnancy help service, we strive to challenge the community mindset and equip women to break from poverty through entrepreneurship,” she said.
As examples, she described two single mothers who gave birth to their sons, received training, and went on to launch their own enterprises.
“Forty-two dollars once silenced a heartbeat and left me with a bucket of blood as a reminder,” Kemayou said. “Today those same $42 echo loudly in the sound of women opening their businesses, feeding their children, and reclaiming their future. Pain became purpose, and purpose became power.”
Once “there was nobody” addressing abortion in India
Simon Duraiaj’s wife Johanna used to cry over the news of injustices to women and children, like babies tossed into a ditch or eaten by dogs. Duraiaj, though a Christian, felt “numb” after a lifetime of watching these things happen. He could not console her.
Over the course of many months, Duraiaj said, God renewed his compassion for the people experiencing violence and injustice. When he and his wife prayed about these issues, they were compelled by God to “speak up for those who cannot speak for themselves and be a voice for the voiceless.”
In 2009, “I was looking around our nation, our leaders— Is there any ministry going on that deals with babies in the womb or pro-life ministry?” he said. “There was none. There was nobody. So, without any idea, without looking at any model, we just started Life for All” in Coimbatore, located in Tamil Nadu, the southernmost state of India.
A few years later, a woman came to the center when her husband threatened to kill her, believing he was not the father of her baby. So, the Duraiajs opened their house, thinking, “saving one life was really worth it,” he said. “But actually, through our program up until now we have been able to save more than 40,000 babies from abortion.”
The next ministry expansion began when Johanna Duraiaj met up with Jor-El Godsey, president of Heartbeat International, several years later at a conference. Godsey told her that most of the non-U.S. calls coming into Option Line were from India. “You have to do something,” he said.
“Then Heartbeat International came along and they trained us with life-affirming courses,” Duraiaj said. “They helped us contextualize the LOVE Approach manual. They trained us and we trained people and then in 2021 we started a pregnancy helpline.”
“Now we offer help in six different languages,” he said. “Last year alone we were able to help 5,000 ladies. This year already the number is really going up. So, God is doing wonderful things.”
Among those now being trained in life-affirming counseling is the wife of a high court judge. Her husband was so enlightened on abortion by speaking with Duraiaj that the judge even invited him to come speak to the judicial academy.
“Nobody was talking about abortion in this country and so we did,” Johanna Duraiaj told the Conference crowd via video. “We spoke about abortion, about pornography addiction, about the consequences of abortion, about transgender ideology. To date through the 900 seminars that we have held, we have reached more than 150,000 people in 22 states of this country.”
She went on, “Life for All’s life center has provided a safe haven for more than 150 women during or because of their pregnancy. At the life center, we provide compassionate care, ensuring that these women can navigate through these crisis pregnancies with the love and the dignity that they deserve.”
The pro-life movement is growing in India, as evidenced by the first National Pro-life Summit in 2014 where like-minded workers gathered to be equipped and encouraged for unity in ministry.
Meanwhile, Life for All has served about 5000 women, and recently celebrated the birth of the first baby rescued through their abortion pill reversal protocol.
In India, “90 percent of women experience abortion,” Duraiaj said. “We have a great opportunity to speak the gospel of life to those hurting ladies.”
International abortion numbers top U.S. figures
Godsey took the stage after Kemayou and Duraiaj.
“If you look at the international abortion numbers, they paint a picture that is very stark,” he said. “Here in the U.S., we are rightly exercised when our number reaches 1 million as it was for so many years under Roe. It is again right now.”
“But 1 million abortions in the U.S. is barely 2 percent of all the abortions in the entire rest of the globe,” Godsey said. “We spend a great deal of effort on the issue here in our own country. And all of that is to be celebrated. But when we really look at it very carefully, we see a lot of effort is aimed at only at 2 percent of the problem.”
Tweet This: If you look at the international abortion numbers, they paint a picture that is very stark.
Speaking from the stage surrounded by flags from the more than 100 nations that are home to pro-life organizations affiliated with Heartbeat International, Godsey said, “More needs to happen for the 98 percent that's around the globe. Not of course just in Cameroon and India, but in all of the countries that are represented here.”
Editor's note: Heartbeat International manages Pregnancy Help News.
