Heartbeat International saw many significant successes in 2025. The largest network of pregnancy help organizations in the U.S. and internationally, Heartbeat had four areas in which it especially shined in 2025.
Affiliate growth, global expansion
Pregnancy help affiliation with Heartbeat topped 4,000 for the first time ever last year. That number included global affiliates, which now exceed 100 countries, an increase from 95 in Fiscal Year 2024.
“Singapore and Benin are two of our newest,” said Ellen Foell, international program specialist for Heartbeat.
Benin is an African nation. Forell hopes for additional international affiliate growth during the coming years.
“We’re looking for more connections and growth among the Scandinavian nations and looking for more opportunities to undergird the work that is already being done there, and we would love to see more work in more nations across Asia,” Foell said.
Various countries are represented at Heartbeat’s annual conference, with affiliates displaying the flags of their nations during the Parade of Nations. Last year’s conference in Birmingham was a record-breaking event with more than 2,200 attendees participating, either in person or virtually.
“It was the biggest ever,” Heartbeat President Jor-El Godsey said regarding the 2025 conference.
Heartbeat added another international Joint Affiliation Network last year, the Balkan Network. That addition increases the number of global Joint Affiliation Networks to 10. The original Balkan network consisted of seven nations that grew from former Yugoslavia, Foell said. Now the network also includes Bulgaria, Greece, Albania, and Moldova.
“The Balkan Network for Life now includes all of those countries,” Foell said. “All of the network affiliates become Heartbeat affiliates, and so they have access to all the resources that we provide.”
The first ever Asia Pregnancy Help Leaders Summit took place last October in Singapore. A 2024 planning meeting brought representatives from Thailand, the Philippines, Taiwan, and a few other countries in addition to the U.S., Forell said. A location and date were chosen, and last fall more than a dozen nations were represented at the Summit. Foell and Godsey also attended.
“There were people there we’ve never met before,” Forell said. “That was really exciting! Many felt a sense of unity and a sense of not being alone because of the Summit.”
During the gathering, a Heartbeat staff member who lives in Japan and is part of the Abortion Pill Rescue Network (APRN) conducted a presentation, informing these international leaders about how APRN works, she said.
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Connecting women to pregnancy help
The APRN continues to grow as well, with more than 1,500 medical practitioners, hospitals, clinics, and pharmacies part of the network. A record number of 2,400 abortion pill reversal (APR) starts took place last year, an increase of more than 30 percent from fiscal year 2024.
“The growth has been incredible,” said Christa Brown, Heartbeat’s senior director of Medical Impact and Executive Director of the APRN. “It's such an honor to witness how many lives are being saved and changed every single day.”
Because of APR, more than 8,000 unborn lives have been saved.
“Our nursing team is available 24/7 to share about reversal with anyone who is having regret after starting an abortion,” Brown said. “They will assist women no matter where they reside in the world, quickly making connections to APR practitioners, clinics, hospitals and pharmacies.”
In 2025, 82 percent of APRN mission-critical callers were connected with a provider in less than an hour.
“To date, we've helped women in all 50 states and in 98 other countries,” Brown said. “All of us at the APRN celebrate the progress of the network and anticipate even faster growth in the future.”
The 24/7 multilingual contact center Option Line also experienced a major milestone, seeing a significant increase in the number of digital connections. That number exceeded one million, and the overall connections in 2025 surpassed 1.5 million.
“I happened to come across an article from 2013 celebrating the impact of 10 years of Option Line,” Nafisa Kennedy, director of Option Line, told Pregnancy Help News. “In those first 10 years, we were so excited to have served 1.5 million people! I recall celebrating those early milestones with my colleagues – I don’t think any of us would have dared to imagine reaching a similar milestone in a matter of months, and yet the Lord has brought us here.”
According to last year’s Life Trends Report, hotline phone calls rose from 48 percent connections to 64 percent in 2024. Last year, Kennedy and her team implemented some strategic adjustments to how they promote Option Line's center locator online, Kennedy said. Those changes resulted in more women being served.
“These adjustments created opportunities that helped us reach more than two million connects for pregnancy help, a number of connections that, in the past, would have taken several years to reach,” she said.
Serving pregnancy centers
Heartbeat International serves pregnancy help organizations, which exist to serve women experiencing unplanned pregnancies. Heartbeat continues to improve its service to pregnancy help organizations, and in 2025 launched the Telecare Toolkit, helping centers connect with pregnant women at risk for abortion in a more excellent virtual way.
“The abortion industry has moved from a brick-and-mortar mindset to retailing abortions online in the mail-order fashion,” Godsey said. “Many of our pregnancy help centers still retain a brick-and-mortar mindset. We need to do more than just make ourselves available – we need to think ‘How do we deliver meaningful services outside those [regularly opened] hours?’”
The toolkit provides ideas pregnancy help organizations can implement to provide telecare.
“We as a community know how to serve women well, knee-to-knee and nose-to-nose,” he said. “The toolkit really helps envision that life-changing ministry in a virtual or remote way.”
The Option Line team developed the program.
“They are the ones who have extensive experience of building relationships with people in a quick fashion and a virtual way,” Godsey said.
“We’ve seen the landscape moving in that direction,” stated Andrea Trudden, Heartbeat’s Vice President of Communication and Marketing. “So, it’s something we wanted to encourage and help equip organizations with.”
Telecare is somewhat different than telehealth, she said. About 25 percent of Heartbeat affiliates are not medical clinics – they are, instead, maternity homes, resource centers, even adoption service organizations.
“Telehealth may not apply [in these cases],” she said. “But a woman may still need someone to talk with.”
Telecare offers the ability to get information into the hands of women seeking information about unplanned pregnancy without coming into the center, Trudden said. The toolkit helps centers move to a 24/7 platform, either by having their own helpline answering calls and texts or utilizing Heartbeat’s Option Line.
More centers added telecare capability in 2025, she added.
“Last year it grew from 46 to 125,” Trudden told Pregnancy Help News.
New tools were also offered by Extend Web Services (EWS), which builds websites for pregnancy help organizations. In 2025, EWS launched Meta Ads and Google Performance Boost products, helping centers become more front-and-center on the internet when women search for topics such as abortion, pregnancy options, and other keywords.
“We don’t want pregnancy help organizations to be distracted by all the marketing that needs to happen,” Trudden said. “So, we offer Extend Web Services to help with websites, online advertising, and social media posts. Last year, they launched the Meta Ads and Google Performance Boost because that helps extend the reach of the pregnancy help organization and market to the women in their area.”
“Our Extend team is excited to have added that to help grow pregnancy center advertising,” Godsey said. “Some of the old ways are still fine, but these are the new ways. It’s Google and Meta’s way of saying, ‘Hey – how can I do better for you, so you’ll keep advertising?’”
With the increased use of chemical abortion and the ease of ordering abortion drugs on the internet, pregnancy centers need to position themselves as the answer and expert resource women search for online.
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Raising awareness of pregnancy help in new areas
Abortion numbers have increased since the U.S. Supreme Court struck down Roe v. Wade in the 2022 Dobbs ruling and the issue of awareness of pregnancy help organizations and their work remains critical. Part of that education includes government officials. Last year, Heartbeat launched a Government Outreach program and hired Jessica Prol Smith, a seasoned Capitol Hill professional, for the new role directing Government Relations.
Prol meets with federal officials and their staff and also engages with state legislators and officials.
“She understands the lay of the land,” Trudden said.
“We haven’t had a dedicated public policy person in a long time,” Godsey explained. “We saw a lot of opportunity, and we found things were moving at a rate and a pace that were challenging for us to do without someone dedicated to that role.”
“People were coming to us asking us for insight, if we could review bills, so we didn’t want to lose that opportunity, Trudden said.
Other ways Heartbeat brings awareness and education to pro-life work and the services of pregnancy help organizations is through reporting the news in its Pregnancy Help News outlet. Pregnancy Help News celebrated a decade of covering the pregnancy help movement in 2025. Every week, pregnancy help leaders receive the Pregnancy Help News weekly digest, and the news, commentary, feature articles, and analysis are available 24/7 on the website.
“It’s been so fun to see the growth of Pregnancy Help News,” Trudden said. “Since 2018, we’ve more than doubled our readership and have such a loyal and engaged audience. We have several partnerships with different news outlets and our legislative friends – they read Pregnancy Help News to find out what’s happening with pregnancy help.”
“It’s really cool to see how the pregnancy help community looks forward to reading [PHN], Godsey said. “It’s like it’s part of their weekly routine, and that’s exactly what we hoped and prayed it would be.’
“It’s really become a valuable resource for an archive of pregnancy help,” Trudden said.
Additionally, the Pregnancy Help Podcast, which started in 2019, published 69 episodes in 2025 and had 19,000 listens and views.
The podcast started out of the housing movement, Trudden said.
“We saw an opportunity to grow,” she said. “We have such a wealth of knowledge within the movement, so it wasn’t too hard to start building the schedule and the series. We don’t have just one voice outside of Christine, our producer. We get the different voices involved.”
Pregnancy help speaker and author Kirk Walden, who helped start Pregnancy Help News for Heartbeat more than 10 years ago, appears on the podcast with a program called “Coffee With Kirk,” and Lisa Bourne, editor of Pregnancy Help News, often joins the podcast to talk about news affecting pregnancy help and pro-life causes. Bourne also produces a monthly news brief presenting the top stories each month. Other programs and topics on the podcast during recent months include sidewalk advocacy with the CEO of Sidewalk Advocates for Life, trauma-informed care, APR and the APRN Network, and more.
“It’s always informative,” Godsey said.
Many of Heartbeat’s endeavors, from Option Line and APRN to affiliations around the world and Pregnancy Help News, began many years ago. The organization’s leadership is encouraged by the increased fruitfulness of these services and programs.
“The faithfulness of the people who started these efforts – we have the ability to see the harvest over the years,” Godsey said. “Someone had to plow those fields initially, and we’re so grateful for their efforts.”
Editor's note: Heartbeat International manages Pregnancy Help News.
