I work in the Option Line department of Heartbeat International, which means I am part of an amazing team of women who, every single day, handle hundreds of contacts by phone, chat, email and text. Many days we get well over 1,000 women and men contacting us seeking help.
The clients we talk to are reaching out to us from all over the world. From people trying to reach a local pregnancy help center in the United States to someone in India chatting with us about their pregnancy concerns, we help people of all ages, from all walks of life, who are in a wide variety of unique circumstances.
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However, we at Option Line sometimes experience prank calls. Many times these are just young men or women with a group of friends who think it will be funny to call or chat with a pregnancy helpline and ask ridiculous questions. It is all for their own amusement.
While this is very frustrating to experience, we always let callers know that if they do have a real pregnancy-related concern in the future, they can reach out to us for help.
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But recently, I, along with others at Option Line have encountered someone who is calling us with a completely different goal in mind — to purposely distract us with their call so we cannot speak to other clients.
The woman who has been calling has admitted this frankly to those who answer her call. Additionally, other men and women have been calling Option Line or APR and starting chats recently with the specific goal to harass or distract the consultants.
People like this are wasting valuable time.
They may be preventing women who actually need help and support from getting the resources they need.
They may contend they are saving women from so-called “fake clinics.” But these abortion supporters who call to distract and harass us never seem to have stopped to think about the genuinely good things pregnancy help centers, Option Line and APR do for women in need all over the world.
They do not realize (or do not want to realize) that by distracting us and harassing us, they are actually interfering with the choice of the women who come to us to seek help.
Instead of using their time to help pregnant and parenting women, or to support organizations that do, they choose to detract from supportive, encouraging, life-saving work.
All we want to do is help, and many times that help leads to literally saving human lives from the destruction of abortion.
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So please, don’t waste our time.
Respect the choice of the women reaching out to us for help. Respect us enough as fellow human beings to not seek to intentionally make our job of helping women harder.
Editor's note: Pregnancy Help News is a project of Heartbeat International, which also manages the 24/7-365 pro-life contact center and website OptionLine (1-800-712-HELP), answering inquiries via phone calls, live chat, text or email. Heartbeat also manages the Abortion Pill Rescue Network, (APRN), a provider network of more than 600 healthcare practitioners and 300 pregnancy help organizations across North America that assist women through the Abortion Pill Reversal (APR) protocol.
