Host Brendan O'Connell interviews guest Margaret H. Hartshorn, Ph.D. & Heartbeat International Organization, about her background & how she became involved with the pro-life movement, her organization's mission and services, pregnancy centers under attack, abortion pill risks, falling percentages of ultra-sounds, & more.
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Life Matters
The following commentary does not necessarily reflect the views of the staff and management of WBCA or the Boston Neighborhood Network. If you would like to express another opinion, you can address your comments to Boston Neighborhood Network, 302-5 Washington Street, Boston, Massachusetts, 02119. To arrange a time for your own commentary, you can call WBCA at 617-708-3215 or email radio at bnnmedia.org. Hello, welcome to Life Matters. I'm your host, Brendan O'Connell. Well, we have a very special guest today from Ohio, Columbus, Ohio, and I want to read a little bit of her background, and then we'll get into the discussion today that we hope to elucidate people on. My guest today is Margaret Hart-Shawn, she's a PhD in English, and it's currently Chairman of the Board of Heartbeat International, the largest life-affirming pregnancy help network in the world, with over 3,000 affiliated pregnancy help centers, medical clinics, maternity homes, and non-profit adopted agencies in over 90 countries, and 2,000 of these are in the United States of America. She also co-founded Hartbeat's Option Line, the only 24-hour, seven days a week bilingual Internet-based pro-life call center in the world, Option Line now connects over 1,000 people per day to life-saving help in their community-based pregnancy help center. Option Line recently celebrated the milestone of helping 5 million people since its founding and its 20th anniversary. Welcome, Peggy Hart-Shawn. Yeah, it was not a plan that I had, I got involved right on the day of a Ruby Wade, January 22, 1973. I was driving up to Ohio State University where I was meeting my dissertation advisor, and I heard the announcement over the radio, national public radio, that this decision had come down, and I had been out in California for my undergraduate education, and abortion was already legal there. They were putting up billboards that said pregnant need help with a hotline number, and actually in the college where I went, our ethics professor said mark my words in 5 years, abortion will be legal all over this country, and we were shocked there was a kind of in the class. We weren't prepared for that, we were shocked when that happened, and 5 years later, there I was in my car, it was 5 years later, that it was legal everywhere, and so having been raised in an era where abortion was illegal in every stage, and we were raised with the idea that every child was a welcome child, that was part of the culture in those days, big families, and so it was such a shock to me, it was like how could this be happening in my country all over the world, it was happening, so anyway I was motivated, my husband had just finished law school, and we called, we looked in the phone book, that ancient relic that probably a lot of your audience has never seen one of those phone books, and I knew there was something called right to life, so I looked it up and I gave him a call and I said we want to get involved, so then we just took it a step at a time, what could we do from speaking engagements to volunteering, to do newsletters and so forth and so on, and eventually within about a year we started housing pregnant girls, because most of the big maternity homes that had existed in the 50s had closed, there were not places for women to go, who wanted some privacy in their pregnancy, wanted to consider their alternatives, and so that was the beginning of the kind of the host home era, and we started housing pregnant girls, that's how we got into pregnancy health, which then we realized that's where God was calling us, so most of the rest of our pro-life journey was in the pregnancy health world you might say. Well now you've risen to the pinnacle of organizations that help people, how did that all come about? Well in Columbus, Ohio you mentioned I was from Columbus, as we were working in right to life it became clear that there were people who needed help, once abortion became legal, and this is something that works into our discussion today to Brendan of abortion till reversal, even in those days the early pro-life pioneers realized that once abortion becomes legal, and now it's becoming much easier than ever possible, with abortion pills all over the place even on the internet, and so once that happens people, women feel great pressure to have an abortion, they're pressured by their boyfriend sometimes, peers, parents, people say oh you can't do that, you know this is going to interrupt your life, you'll never be successful, and so they feel coercion and pressure to have an abortion, the early pioneers knew that, and so they started starting pregnancy health centers even before 1973, the early ones were in existence from about 1971 on, and that's where heartbeat was formed, but we didn't know about that, when Mike and I became active in 1973 we didn't know there was a network of pregnancy health, but we knew it was needed, we knew it because people were calling the right to life office in Columbus, Ohio, and saying I don't know where to go, or my son's girlfriend doesn't know where to go, and we need help, and so we started opening our homes and then realized that we could have a pregnancy health center in Columbus, Ohio as well, so my husband and I then started the first crisis oriented pregnancy health center, had a 24 hour hotline because when someone needs help they need it immediately, and if you're not there answering the phone that's why of course option line was so important for heartbeat international, if you're not there immediately, often the next call will be to an abortion clinic, or today it might be they're looking online, and if you're not easy to find, they're going to find the ads for abortion pill, and they can even get it online now without a prescription. Can I ask you this here in Massachusetts, you've got a hostile government, and the people when we think here, the people are, well now I've forgotten, well why don't you go ahead and I'll remember it? Well you were probably leading up to the fact that yes they're attacking pregnancy centers in Massachusetts now, pregnancy centers that are like the one that Mike and I started in Columbus, Ohio, and like the ones that are connected to heartbeat international, we've got about 2,000 of them in the United States now, they have always been under attack to a certain extent, they've always been people trying to claim that we were giving false information when we said that abortion can have complications, when we said it can have an emotional impact on women, well that's not true, you're giving faulty information, we've always been under attack in certain ways, but the attacks are getting more and more sophisticated now, and I know there's a PR campaign there in Massachusetts, particularly Boston, to discredit the pregnancy health centers that are there, and these groups are heroic, they have medical staff, they have nurses, they have medical directors, they're providing accurate information, they're providing necessary and free help for women, so that they don't have to feel that abortion is their only alternative, and the irony is of course, Brendan, that for years the other side talked about choice, you know we have to have choice, and yet they've always been opposed to the choices that we're providing in pregnancy centers, and now they've even gotten passed, at least they're honest about it now, they're really not interested in choice, they have made abortion in their minds, and now in many states, an actual right, a constitutional right, and now again it's not just a right, it's something that women are being pressured into, coerced into, and studies show that 70% of women who have abortions say that they face some coercion, pressure to have that portion, so yeah that's the situation we're in. Yeah, I think the other pressure that the pregnant teenage woman or girl or woman feels is with each passing day, an abortion becomes more complicated and expensive and dangerous, and that's the secondary pressure to the outside pressure she gets from her boyfriend, or boyfriend. Yeah, but she's given the impression that she has to make this decision immediately, and the reason she's given that impression now, Brendan, is because the abortion providers are making their money now on the abortion pill, and that does need to be taken, or should be taken, if someone's going to have an abortion in the early days of a pregnancy center, before 12 weeks let's say, because if she takes it further on than that, it may result in an incomplete abortion, all right, there's so many dangers to the woman, I'll take the pill in the second trimester, and even the first trimester, what do you mean by an incomplete abortion? Well, she may start bleeding, she may start bleeding, and be in the process of having an abortion, but not completed, not because of the child, the unborn baby may be too large, at that point it's not responding the way earlier fetuses, earlier embryos would be affected by the abortion pill, let's explain the abortion pill is a two-dose regimen. The first dose of the abortion pill is mythopristone, which cuts off the progesterone that feeds the baby, the fetus, the embryo at that point, so when that progesterone is cut off by the first drug, the nutrition to the baby is cut off, and the baby starts dying, right, now the second drug that the woman is supposed to take 24 to 48 hours later is misaprostal, which starts contractions, okay, so if that embryo is very small, under about 11 weeks of gestation, that can be expelled by those extractions right wherever she is, usually in her own home, it's a horrible situation, she goes into labor really in her own home, and sometimes sees that little embryo, and so that's the way the abortion pill works, but if the embryo is too big, if it's become a fetus at point and it's too large to be expelled that way, then she might have an incomplete abortion in which she's bleeding, but not aborting the baby, and she would end up in the emergency room, it can be life-threatening, and there have been women now who have died from incomplete abortions, they've got into a hospital, they've gotten to an emergency room, but sometimes an infection has set in, and so it is quite a dangerous type of abortion, and very unregulated now, since women can get that pill online, so because the pill is ubiquitous, it's everywhere now, and women are coerced and pressured into making a decision early on, very early on, because the abortion pill providers want to make money and they want to sell that abortion pill, then what happens is many women who are feeling that kind of pressure are so conflicted that maternal instinct is so strong, when they take the first pill, they can tell us this, you know, I realized that I was killing my own baby, I took that pill, one woman that I talked to recently, who got the abortion pill reversal, said I wanted to cut that pill out of my throat, I got back in my car, and I wanted to cut it out of my throat, I knew it was killing, I was killing my own baby, they become the abortionist you see, and it's very traumatic for them, so what the abortion pill reversal it makes possible, that woman that I'm telling you about, she found the abortion pill reversal network, which is answered by Heartbeat International, and we have registered nurses and nurse practitioners on the line that can talk to her about abortion pill reversal, that can refer her to a prescriber, prescription prescriber, who can get her a dose of progesterone, which will, which will try to counter, counteract that anti-progesterone that she's just taken, the menopristone, so back in her baby, that can save her baby, it will re-enter progesterone into her system, and if she doesn't take the second pill, which causes labor, then we can follow her, we can do an ultrasound to make sure the baby is still alive, we can continue the ultrasound, dosages for her during the pregnancy, and she's got a 64 to 68% chance of having her baby, even after she's taken the first abortion pill, so it's a wonderful, it's a wonderful second chance for these moms and these babies, once mothers start getting that maternal instinct in gear, now I've got to save my baby, now I've got to save my baby, and they start looking on the internet, can I reverse my abortion, and they find us. Five or six years ago I had Dr. George Delgado on here, and he informed me, said you know Brendan, progesterone's been used for many decades since the 1950s, and yet the abortion industry is trying to sully the whole idea of taking progesterone, saying that it will lead to an increase in birth defects, can you speak to that? Some of the things that are going on, the attacks, that same attack is being made on heartbeat, international right now, and other providers of abortion pill reversal, some of our providers, three states in particular, Colorado, California, and New York. In Colorado, a case has been brought against one of the abortion pill providers to cease and desist, doing that procedure, because it's, they say, it's fake science, all right, joke science, it doesn't work, and we're just claiming that it works, but it doesn't. The same is happening by the attorney generals in the state of New York and the state of California, they have filed lawsuits against heartbeat and at least one or more of the pregnancy help centers that are involved in the abortion pill reversal process. And they're claiming again, this is junk science, we're, we're engaged in, in false advertising, because this is commercial speech, it's false advertising because this is junk science. Now that is not true whatsoever, it's not junk science, just like you mentioned, Dr. Delgado, Dr. Delgado's point that progesterone has been used to reverse the decrease of progesterone in a woman's system. If a woman is starting into a miscarriage, perhaps, this has been done since the 1950s. If she's starting into a miscarriage or at risk of miscarriage, because of low progesterone, progesterone shots, progesterone supplements will help her to keep that pregnancy and have a healthy baby. And there are plenty of studies that have shown that there's absolutely no connection in increase of birth defects for women who have taken progesterone. There's no connection whatsoever, that's well-established medical science. How is the other side going to prove, if there's no proof, they're just making an allegation? Well they have one study, one study that I think involved 12 women. And actually the study itself showed that the abortion pill process itself could be dangerous to women. Some of the women in the study, I believe six, took the abortion pill and didn't do abortion pill reversal. The other six did do abortion pill reversal and the ones that had excessive bleeding were actually in the group that took the abortion pill. The other side totally abricates the results of that study. So we're pretty confident that once those cases get to the point that people are looking at the case on its merits, on its merits, they haven't gotten to that point yet. Where the merits of the case will be considered, that it will be very clear that there is no danger whatsoever to progesterone and that in fact the abortion pill reversal process does work. We've got plenty of moms and babies. By the way now, our statistics show that we've crossed the limit of 6,000 healthy babies being born as a result of abortion pill reversal. And they are so treasured by their families. The stories are beautiful, Brandon. You know, imagine when a woman starts thinking, "Oh my gosh, I'm now I'm losing my baby." And I've caused this myself. They're so distraught and when they can go through the abortion pill reversal process and they have a beautiful baby, it is just so beautiful to see how the family rallies around it and just treasures that baby. Can I ask you about, it was a chart that I saw on your website and your websites are excellent by the way, but this chart said that the percentage of ultrasounds with the advent of the abortion pill itself, if a person, that ultrasounds, the percentage of ultrasounds have gone down or is dropping significantly. Can you tell us why that may be? Well, that's because during COVID, the FDA started loosening the requirements for the abortion pill and they claimed that people couldn't get to doctors at that point. When the abortion pill was legalized here in the US, there were certain what they called rims that were requirements put on the abortion pill because it's a very dangerous drug. There were only 17 drugs in the US at that point that had rims, requirements. This particular, the requirements for the abortion pill included seeing a doctor and having an ultrasound before they took the abortion pill. Now, why the ultrasound? And that's because if that embryo is not in the womb, if the embryo is formed in the fallopian tube, for instance, that is a very dangerous situation for a woman to have the embryo forming in a fallopian tube, one of those tubes that lead from her ovaries into the womb and that little embryo should have moved from the tube into the womb. Now, if the embryo is still in the tube, which you would be able to tell from an ultrasound, then the abortion pill is not going to abort that baby. The abortion pill only works in the womb, all right, so that embryo would still be in the tube and the woman could face a life-threatening situation thinking she had an abortion, but now she's got an embryo still growing in the tube, which could burst the tube, cause her to start bleeding and she could lead to death if she doesn't even know that she's at risk of having an ectopic pregnancy. So the ultrasound is really life-saving for women who have ectopic pregnancies, then those can be treated and the woman's will not have excessive bleeding from a ruptured tube. So when the FDA took away these rounds, women now, a doctor could write a prescription for a pill over the internet, all right, or she could get a pill online with no prescription whatsoever and our own statistics at heartbeat show that for the women who call us having already taken the first pill, only one out of four has had, let me see, no, one out of four has not had an ultrasound, all right. So one quarter of the women were projecting that to women in general who have taken the pill, one, the abortion pill, one out of four will not have had an ultrasound. That means they're at very high risk of having a problem if they have an ectopic pregnancy and ectopic pregnancies are pretty common now. So that is a life-saving requirement that has now been eliminated by the FDA. So the abortion pill is quite a dangerous method of abortion now and interestingly, the Charlotte Losier Institute did a study that showed that since the abortion pill has become common in the United States, there's a 500% increase in women coming in with excess bleeding into emergency rooms all over the country. Are they conscious? Well, a lot of times they're not conscious. That's a good point. That's a good point. And I can't speak to that as, I mean, I'm not a medical person myself, the exact condition of these women, but they're coming in bleeding from taking this abortion pill, excess bleeding. Mm-hmm. Yeah. It's a very dangerous situation for women and they don't know it. You know, the pill is being promoted by the abortion industry today. It's just as expensive, if not more so, than a surgical abortion. But for an abortion clinic, they don't even have to have a surgeon. So they're making a lot more profit. Absolutely. And they've got certain, when the medical profession, they've got people who are actually paid by the drug companies that are promoting it. Yeah. Wow. So with progesterone, does that raise or lower the pre-term delivery rate than the general population? Well, it would lower the pre-term delivery rate because women who are prone to miscarriages, one of the reasons that that occurs is that they're lacking enough progesterone. Mm-hmm. So the progesterone really does increase the likelihood of continuing the pregnancy to return and having a very healthy baby. And all the babies that I've seen, goodness, coming in from the abortion-per-reversal stories are just absolutely beautiful. I just want to tell you this. And to talk about how conflicted women are, you know, that maternal intake is so strong, the recent case that I heard of here in Columbus, Ohio, the mother was driving to an abortion clinic to get the pill. She had a two-hour drive to get there and she was praying on the way. And listening to praise and worship music, praying for a sign. If God did not want her to have this abortion pill, then he would give her a sign. And she says she got to the clinic, never had a sign, but on her way out, having taken that first pill, she pulled out of the parking lot and there was a sign advertising the abortion pill reversal with our hotline number. And she said, "That was my sign." She's the one that said, "I wanted to cut that pill out of my throat." But God did provide the sign. So women need to know that this exists. And we're so thrilled that Heartbeat International can be the network that provides that. 1,400 providers now, Brendan, in our network, for abortion free reversal. That's wonderful. Now, just what we've only got about 30 seconds, but do you think that this new organization, I don't know if it's an organization, by Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswami, will they make an attempt to defund Planned Parenthood from getting all the taxpayer dollars that they get currently? Well, certainly, that's a hope. That's a hope. I have no idea whether they will, but certainly that's a hope, because it is a total waste of our tax dollars, by the way, Planned Parenthood has more than a billion dollars in assets. They don't need a billion dollars a day from our tax payer funds. Well, Pig Heartshot, thank you so much for coming on the show today. Thank you, Brendan. I really appreciate it. And we hope folks who found the show to be unique and formative, content rich, truthful and thought-provoking. Thanks for watching and listening. My name is Brendan O'Connell, your Friend for Life. The preceding commentary does not necessarily reflect the views of the staff and management of WBCA or the Boston Neighborhood Network. If you would like to express another opinion, you can address your comments to Boston Neighborhood Network, 302-5 Washington Street, Boston, Massachusetts, 02119. To arrange a time for your own commentary, you can call WBCA at 617-708-3215 or email radio at BNNMedia.org. (upbeat music)