Malena Muñoz answered a recent call from the social services agency with her usual alacrity. Not two hours after receiving the information about an expectant mother of two who had been evicted from her rented room, Munoz met with the young woman herself. The heavily pregnant, visibly distressed mother opened the back of a beat-up van and showed Malena the old mattress she had placed there. Her plan was to sleep in the van with her toddlers in the suffocating heat of a Miami summer night, maybe in the parking lot of the nearby Walmart. 

Malena’s heart broke, but that didn’t stop her from swinging quickly into action. By nightfall, the pregnant woman and her toddlers were safely ensconced in Lotus House, a comfortable shelter for women and children. Two weeks later, the baby was born safely in a local hospital, and a whole web of social services had been activated to keep the little family off the streets and on a path to a better future. 

This is the story Malena told me when inviting me to be on the advisory board of a new local outreach to vulnerable pregnant women and girls. It’s called Hearts For Life, and Malena had me at hello for two important reasons. One: I’m convinced that to be pro-life politically and ideologically means almost nothing if we are not also rushing to the assistance of the mothers and babies themselves. Two: Hearts for Life is an offshoot of a homeless outreach organization called Hermanos De La Calle (Brothers of the Streets), which has a long and sterling record rescuing men, women and families from the hell of homelessness. 

Malena and her husband Narciso founded Hermanos eight years ago. They organized a group of friends from their parish to make sandwiches and take them downtown on Friday nights to feed the homeless and pray with them. The joy of making human connections with men and women who were transformed simply by being treated with warmth and generosity proved infectious. 

The program’s growth was exponential. Today Hermanos provides wrap-around assistance to Miami’s most vulnerable, including emergency shelter, relocation assistance, rapid referrals to social services, and, most impressively, permanent housing for more than 250 individuals, 50 of them children. 

Malena and Narciso, however, are going farther and deeper. They are acutely aware that what Pope Francis calls our “throw-away culture” manifests itself in the people — our brothers and sisters — sheltering under overpasses and cardboard boxes in all of our great cities. However, they feel that the greatest injury to human dignity occurring each day is the abortion of thousands of little boys and girls whose only offense was being conceived under difficult circumstances. Malena and Narciso want to see a culture in which the brutality of abortion becomes unthinkable. And so, they formed Hearts for Life.

Their new organization’s centerpiece will be a maternity home in downtown Miami. Projected to open in July, this home will be able to receive several expectant mothers for the duration of their pregnancies, pre- and post-, right through the time when mommy and baby are safely on their way to a stable situation. But the Hearts for Life home will only be a central part of a wider web of care. Any maternal difficulty that threatens an unborn child’s life will be addressed. So, too, will the many reasons behind the initial referral — poverty, having “nowhere to go”, a dangerous or coercive relationship with the child’s father, simple panic.  

Narciso and Malena’s overriding goal is to see that expectant mothers will find life-affirming options at Hearts for Life. They know from long experience that the default suggestion at most shelters that take pregnant women in crisis tends to be abortion. The idea is that erasing the child somehow erases the main problem. 

Narciso and Malena know this to be a lie. They know, as we know, that violence and death are never a solution, especially when the victim is an innocent life. Hearts for Life is their beautiful answer to that lie, a point of light in today’s throw-away culture.