In 2006, Miami-Dade County led the United States, per capita, in both abortions and abortion providers. More than thirty abortion businesses operated within the county. Not one pregnancy help medical clinic existed to offer women anything else. Thirty-plus to zero: that was the arithmetic, and for years it had gone essentially unchallenged.

Heartbeat of Miami exists because three people looked at that ratio and decided it was indefensible.

The three were John, of the ministry PassionLife, who had come to Miami arguing that the largest city in the country without a single pregnancy help medical clinic was a mission field; Martha Avila, who would become the organization’s president and who would have to find the money; and Jeannie Pernia, who would run the first clinic and who knew the territory in a way no one else in the room did. They met that year. It took roughly twelve months of hoping, planning, and praying before a door actually opened. On July 9, 2007, Heartbeat of Miami’s first pregnancy help medical clinic began seeing women in Hialeah, the neediest neighborhood in the county.

Nineteen years later, more than 75,000 babies have been rescued from abortion through its clinics.

Counting the Cost Before Counting the Rescues

Nothing about the beginning suggested that outcome. Avila describes the founding inventory as hope, a dream, and a great deal of prayer — no building, no equipment, no donor base. What she remembers most vividly from that period is not logistics but an internal argument, one she believes every person called to this work has to settle: the battle between the brain, the heart, and the pocket. The brain calculates the odds. The heart insists anyway. The pocket objects loudest of all.

John gave the founders a phrase during those first conversations that has outlasted the argument. He called them crossbearers for the childbearers. Avila still uses it at the bottom of her emails, nearly two decades later, in his honor.

For Pernia, the cost was measured in a career. She held a degree in social psychology and had spent years working with families in crisis — mental health, substance abuse — and was at that time employed helping seniors enroll in Part B of Medicare. Respectable, stable, useful work. Then John spoke at her church.

“You rocked my world,” she told him later, “because you took me to a place that I had totally chosen to forget about.”

What he had done, in effect, was show her that everything she had trained for could be applied to something far more purposeful, in a city where she already understood the subject intimately. She left the paying job for a low-paying one and became the director of the first clinic. Avila left a good job as well.

The Address

The location of that first clinic was not a strategic choice. It was something closer to a summons.

Years earlier, Pernia had started an abortion business in Hialeah together with her mother. After it closed, she stopped driving past the corner altogether. When she finally did go back, she noticed a sign in the window of the building immediately next door: 4 D’s. That small house became Heartbeat of Miami’s first clinic — its front door a few feet from the front door of the facility she had once opened.

The connection ran deeper still. Inside that old facility, Pernia had aborted her own first child. She had wanted her baby. There was no Heartbeat of Miami then, and no one anywhere in the city to tell her she could keep him.

So the first counseling room the ministry ever operated had a small window, and through that window the old building was visible. Pernia would sit with frightened, undecided women and tell them the truth without pressing it on them: I’m not here to tell you what to do. But I do feel I need to tell you what happened in that building.

The First Week

The clinic had barely opened when it was broken into.

The team had been working late into the night for weeks — installing security systems, putting up walls, laying floors. Avila had finally taken a short drive to the beach to see family for the first time in months. The following morning, John called Pernia and asked whether she had left the door open.

She had not. She and her husband raced over. The back window had been forced. The ultrasound machine was gone — a machine that did not even belong to Heartbeat of Miami, because it had been borrowed.

The police came. So did reporters. So did crime scene investigators; the founders learned that morning that CSI Miami is not merely a television program. And then, in the middle of the investigation, with officers photographing the broken glass and John standing in a stripped room explaining what had been taken, someone knocked at the door.

It was the clinic’s first client.

Pernia sat down, took a breath, took the young woman’s hands and said: We’ve had a little incident. But come here, honey. Let’s talk about why you’re here.

Avila remembers John calling her to say that in the middle of a crime scene, a girl had walked in and a baby needed saving. John remembers looking over from the room where he was talking to investigators and seeing, through a doorway, two women in the counseling room talking as though they were the only two people on earth.

That, he says, is the moment he knew the ministry would survive whatever came. The tenacity to rescue the innocent is not something evil can overcome. It can bark, it can frighten, it can strike — but it can do nothing at all without the Lord’s permission.

The baby’s name was Maya. She is about nineteen now. Her mother later gave permission for her testimony to be used and, after the team tracked her down, came to Heartbeat of Miami’s very first banquet, walking in with her little girl and the baby’s father.

As for the break-in: after that week, everyone in Miami knew exactly where the clinic was. What the enemy meant for harm, Avila says, God turned to good for the saving of many lives.

Chicken Soup on a Kitchen Counter

The very first rescue actually predated the building.

The lease was still under negotiation when Avila was invited onto a radio station for a radiothon, giving out a phone number on the air while Pernia answered the calls. A woman in her thirties happened to start her car just as the interview began. She had come straight from a doctor’s appointment. She had been told her baby had Down syndrome, and the doctor had recommended an abortion. She was unmarried, alone in this country, and frightened.

She called the number. Pernia, who had no clinic to send her to, did not mention that fact. She simply said: As soon as Martha is off the air, she’ll call you back. Give me your number. The woman trusted her and left it.

Avila called the moment the interview ended. “I don’t have the clinic yet,” she told her. “We’re about to open it. But could you come to my house? I’m making chicken soup.”

There was a pause. Your house?

“You can trust me. This is my name, this is where I live. I know you don’t feel good right now, but come to my house and we’ll have chicken soup.”

The woman came. And there, at a kitchen counter, before there was a clinic or an organization in any meaningful sense, Marela was rescued from abortion.

The story breaks every rule of modern professional practice, and everyone involved knows it. John’s assessment is that this is precisely what makes it instructive: it returns the work to what it actually is — neighbors helping neighbors, taking chances and taking risks. Avila puts it in the terms of the parable the ministry keeps returning to. Like the Good Samaritan, she says, it takes whatever it takes.

Marela turns nineteen this October. She became something of an icon for Heartbeat of Miami. The ministry took her and her mother to Babies Go to Congress, where the girl floored a roomful of adults by saying: Pregnancy clinics are good for our nation, so little girls like me can be born and become the president of the United States.

Heartbeat of Miami was later honored by President Trump during his first term.

Taking the Building

For six years, the staff worked out of the little house and looked through that window at the facility next door.

Then Pernia’s prayer changed. Lord, I don’t want to be here. I want to be there. I want to be in the actual building where we used to do abortions.

In 2013, that prayer was answered.

Walking through the doors took everything she had. The group entered through the back, into the room where the procedures had been performed. Her knees went soft beneath her; she thought she was going to the floor. The flashbacks came, and objects she had not seen in decades were suddenly, terribly familiar.

She did not go in alone. Avila was holding her hand on one side, a co-worker named Chris was beside her on the other, and behind them came a group of women who had come to take the ground back. As Pernia began to sink, Chris said aloud: Where sin abounds, grace abounds all the more.

At that word she straightened up. God gave the courage in that moment, Avila says, and the group walked the entire building without flinching. They nearly fainted afterward, when they got a clear look at the renovations it was going to need.

Heartbeat of Miami operates there still.

John regards that address as a working metaphor for the gospel the ministry preaches. Whatever is in a person’s past, the blood of Jesus washes away all sin and guilt and shame — and here is a woman who once opened an abortion business now standing in those same rooms rescuing children from it. Pernia is, in his words, a walking example of what it means to go from death to life. The difference is that this particular testimony has a street address.

Fruitfulness and Affliction

Nineteen years of life-saving help delivered in a life-changing way, and more than 75,000 children rescued. Allowing for the twins and triplets among them, that represents an enormous number of mothers sat with, wrestled for, and walked beside.

It has not purchased peace.

The clinics have been threatened for years. Protesters appear reliably at every election. But the worst came after the reversal of Roe v. Wade.

Over the Fourth of July weekend of 2022, with the clinic closed on the Monday, a donor in Hialeah called to say it had been vandalized. Avila met the police there, and what they found was severe: obscenities painted across the building and the security cameras destroyed.

Those cameras were new. Heartbeat of Miami had never had them until the FBI advised installing them, given the volume of threats the ministry was receiving — including bomb threats. The same wave of threats had already sent Avila and her team through active shooter training with the FBI. That is the ordinary operating environment of a pregnancy help clinic in Miami-Dade County.

Ariana, the development director, gathered volunteers and painted over the obscenities. Avila, who was going through COVID at the time, met the police anyway.

The next morning — Tuesday — the clinic opened.

Channels 4, 10, 23, and 51 were outside. Every news outlet in the market was there. Twenty mothers walked through that door regardless. Sixteen of them were at risk. Sixteen babies were saved that day.

It did not end there. In September, protesters crashed the ministry’s gala; one woman came at Avila so suddenly that, in the paranoia of that season, the thought that she might be armed did not seem unreasonable. The North Miami clinic was targeted too. It was, as Avila describes it, one thing after another. Eventually First Liberty took the case pro bono, the Department of Justice became involved, and Heartbeat of Miami won.

Out of all this, John draws a lesson he says is written throughout Scripture but is not easy for most Christians to accept: a great deal of power and fruitfulness can be poured into a work while that same work is under affliction. The two arrive together. The instinct runs the other way — if God is blessing us and we are bearing fruit, then bad things ought to stop. Twenty years of shared experience in Miami says otherwise. Fruitfulness and affliction have gone hand in hand from the first week until now. Perhaps, he suggests, that is simply God’s way of keeping his people on their knees.

Beyond Miami

The work has not stayed put. What began in a largely Cuban community in Hialeah has begun spilling over into Cuba itself, and into other places besides. Pernia now directs PassionLife’s work across Latin America and travels widely to tell what happened in that building.

The aim, as John frames it, was never merely to serve one county. It is to help Christians and communities of churches everywhere answer the biblical call to rescue the innocent and hold back those staggering toward the slaughter, as Proverbs 24:11 puts it.

Miami-Dade was thirty-plus to zero once. It is not anymore. Whatever the ratio is elsewhere, the Heartbeat of Miami story suggests it can be changed by people with a burden, no equipment, and a pot of chicken soup.

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Jeannie Pernia’s full account is told in her book, Conquered, available through Amazon and Christian Book Distributors. A condensed version is available at passionlife.org.

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