PHILADELPHIA, PA --- Unemployed and struggling to provide for herself and her 2-year-old daughter with unemployment checks, the last thing Matennah could afford was another child.

Ready or not, as 2011 dawned, Matennah found herself pregnant and headed to the doctor’s office alone for an ultrasound. What she found there left her, in her words, “crying like a child.”

Twins.

By this time, Matennah’s boyfriend, the father of her twins, was in jail, leaving her with virtually no support system to help care for her growing family. Though Matennah saw the twins as a double blessing, those closest to her urged her to consider other options.

Where would she turn? Who could help? What solution was best.

Matennah opened the Yellow Pages, holding the bulk of the book in her right hand while she browsed with her left thumb to the “A” section.

Toward the end of the section loomed the euphemistic words, “Women’s Medical Society,” whose presiding doctor, Kermit Gosnell, had been arrested just days earlier.

The beginning of the section, however, turned out to be Matennah’s salvation. It was a listing called Alpha Pregnancy Services, a Heartbeat International affiliate pregnancy help center located in the heart of the City of Brotherly Love.

We met Matennah and her three daughters, Biana, Alena, and Chloe, at our Babies Go to Congress event in January 2013, where she had the chance to show and tell lawmakers that pregnancy help centers are good for America.

Alpha Pregnancy Services is 2.5 miles from Dr. Kermit Gosnell’s “House of Horrors” clinic, where a woman in Matennah’s shoes, Karnamaya Mongar (pictured right), was butchered—in the words of one congressman—by Gosnell within a year of Matennah’s unexpected pregnancy.

Just think about that. Matennah was literally within pages and city blocks of darkening the doors to the now-most infamous abortuary in America.

But instead, Matennah found a pregnancy help center that not only equipped her with the help she needed to choose life for her two precious daughters, but is now helping Matennah raise her three daughters with practical resources, job skills training, and parenting assistance.

This is why Heartbeat International and our network of over 1,400 life-affirming organizations exist. We exist so that women and families like Matennah can live and thrive. We exist so that no woman ever feels so alone, coerced or hopeless that she ends her child’s life through abortion.

Make no mistake about it. This is a life and death issue.

Death on the one hand for—at the very least—every unborn child whose mother walks into an abortion clinic. Life on the other for every one of the 1,000,000 children, mothers, and families who visit pregnancy help centers each year.

Women like Matennah deserve better than abortion—regardless of whether our culture labels those facilities as filthy “Houses of Horror” or pristine “Centers for Reproductive Health.” Each woman in Matennah’s situation deserves the kind of emotional support and practical resources during an unexpected pregnancy that Alpha Pregnancy Services has given her.

Won’t you give today to support this life-saving, death-defying work? Heartbeat International thanks you. Alpha Pregnancy Services thanks you.

Most importantly, Matennah and her three daughters thank you. 

(Watch Matennah's full story below.)