Shackleton Chile Turns Fetal Heartbeats Into a Pro-Life Protest
#thevoicefromtheheart, also known as La Voz del Corazón, is a 2017 pro-life protest campaign created by Madrid-based agency Shackleton in which pregnant women in Santiago, Chile, used megaphones connected to their developing children's heartbeats to represent the unborn as voices opposing proposed abortion legislation before Chile's parliament, according to Sfadb.
The campaign launched in March 2017, rooted in an underlying protest action that had taken shape in Chile the previous year, according to Tellyads. Its central premise was both literal and theatrical: by amplifying fetal heartbeats through megaphones, the initiative positioned unborn children as participants in a democratic debate rather than its subject. The activation began in Santiago and subsequently expanded internationally, with Shackleton documenting the initiative as a film — a single media asset archived under the agency self-promotion category on Clapboard. The classification reflects the campaign's dual nature as a civic protest and an exercise in creative craft by the agency itself.
In Chile, the political context was immediate and charged. The Chilean parliament was actively debating legislation that would liberalise the country's abortion law, one of the most restrictive in Latin America at the time, according to reporting by Human Rights Watch. Shackleton framed the campaign as an act of protest, designing a mechanism by which pregnant women could attend demonstrations and allow the amplified sound of a heartbeat to function as an audible argument. The result was a demonstration built entirely around a sensory experience rather than signage or rhetoric. Clapboard scores #thevoicefromtheheart at 63 out of 100, recognising the conceptual originality of the execution while noting limitations in documented reach and independently verified impact.
Shackleton identified a specific legislative moment as its creative entry point. The Chilean parliament's deliberations over abortion law reform gave the campaign a precise and time-sensitive backdrop, anchoring the protest to a real political process rather than an abstract cultural position. According to Americas Quarterly, Chile's abortion debate was among the most closely watched legislative battles in the region during this period, reflecting deep divisions within Chilean society along religious, political, and generational lines.
The strategic decision to centre the campaign on a physical, audible experience — the amplified heartbeat — reflects a calculated departure from conventional pro-life communications, which frequently rely on imagery and rhetoric that audiences can dismiss or reinterpret. By making the heartbeat the message itself, Shackleton removed the need for argumentation. The sound carried the entire weight of the campaign's position. This approach placed the initiative in direct contrast to organisations like Chile's pro-choice advocacy groups, which during the same period were producing communications campaigns built around testimony, legal framing, and appeals to bodily autonomy as reported by Ms. Magazine. Where those efforts addressed the intellect, La Voz del Corazón addressed the senses.
In the United States and across global markets, agency self-promotion campaigns of this kind typically rely on cultural moments with broad appeal, according to Imdb. Shackleton chose instead to anchor its work to a contentious and specifically Chilean political dispute. The Chilean advertising market totalled approximately US$800 million in 2017, equivalent to 0.45% of Chilean GDP, according to the Chilean Association of Advertising Agencies, known as ACHAP. Within that landscape, advertising investment excluding online media declined by 4.6% that year, according to ACHAP, suggesting a market in which earned media and social amplification carried particular strategic value — precisely the mechanism on which #thevoicefromtheheart depended for its reported international spread.
Shackleton constructed the campaign's creative execution around a single, repeatable, and visually striking action. Pregnant women gathered — beginning in Santiago — with megaphones fitted to amplify the sound of their developing children's heartbeats, turning a medical signal into a public political statement. The image of a visibly pregnant woman holding a megaphone to her abdomen in a public space carried inherent visual weight, requiring no additional graphic design or copywriting to communicate the campaign's intent.
The film format, a single asset, served as both documentation of the protest and the campaign's primary distribution mechanism. Rather than producing a conventional advertising film, Shackleton captured the protest as it occurred, allowing the authenticity of the participants and the setting to function as the production value, according to Open Spotify. This documentary approach — filming a real event rather than staging a scripted one — gave the content the visual language of citizen journalism, which is demonstrably more shareable in social media environments than polished broadcast advertising. The choice to shoot in Santiago, with its recognisable urban architecture and the visible presence of Chilean parliament buildings as contextual backdrop, grounded the film in a specific geography and a specific argument.
Production credits for #thevoicefromtheheart are not publicly documented. No director, creative director, or photographer is named in available archive records, according to En Wikipedia. What the film does establish clearly is a commitment to restraint: the heartbeat itself is the soundtrack, the participants are non-actors, and the setting is a real demonstration rather than a constructed one. This discipline — using the least amount of creative intervention to achieve the most emotionally direct result — is consistent with the broader creative philosophy Shackleton has demonstrated across its body of work.
No verified third-party performance data for #thevoicefromtheheart is publicly available. No coverage from Campaign, Ad Age, Adweek, The Drum, or Contagious has been identified in available records. The campaign's own framing, as documented by Clapboard, describes it as becoming the most seen and shared pro-life demonstration in history, though this claim is not independently corroborated by named third-party sources.
Structurally, the campaign's effectiveness rests on several well-established principles of social amplification. The megaphone-and-heartbeat mechanic is inherently photogenic and reproducible, meaning participants in other cities and countries could replicate the gesture without requiring agency involvement. This scalability distinguishes La Voz del Corazón from most agency self-promotion work, which typically exists as a closed creative object. The international expansion reported by Shackleton, beginning in Santiago and spreading across multiple markets, would be consistent with a grassroots replication model rather than a paid media rollout.
In the Chilean advertising context of 2017, where online media represented only a portion of total advertising investment according to ACHAP, a campaign dependent on organic sharing and protest footage would have operated largely outside the measured media economy. This makes traditional ROI assessment structurally unavailable. The Clapboard Score of 63 out of 100 reflects the campaign's genuine conceptual strength alongside the absence of independently verified reach data and the contested nature of its political positioning.
#thevoicefromtheheart, or La Voz del Corazón, is a 2017 pro-life campaign created by Shackleton in Chile. Pregnant women in Santiago used megaphones connected to fetal heartbeats to protest proposed abortion legislation before Chile's parliament, with the initiative later expanding internationally as a documentary film.
Shackleton, a Madrid-based creative agency, produced #thevoicefromtheheart. The campaign launched in Santiago, Chile, in March 2017, responding to active parliamentary debate over Chile's abortion law. It is classified in advertising archives as an agency self-promotion film with a single documented media asset.
Chile's parliament was debating legislation to liberalise one of Latin America's most restrictive abortion laws. According to Americas Quarterly, this debate was among the most closely watched legislative battles in the region, making it the precise political moment Shackleton chose as the campaign's strategic and creative foundation.
#thevoicefromtheheart holds a Clapboard Score of 63 out of 100. The score acknowledges the campaign's conceptual originality — using amplified fetal heartbeats as protest communication — while reflecting the absence of independently verified reach data and the contested nature of its political subject matter.
No award records for #thevoicefromtheheart are publicly documented in available sources. No coverage from major trade publications including Campaign, Ad Age, Adweek, or The Drum has been identified, though the campaign is archived on Clapboard as a notable example of protest-driven agency self-promotion from Chile in 2017.
La Voz del Corazón began in Santiago, Chile, and expanded internationally through a replication model. The megaphone-and-heartbeat mechanic was reproducible without agency involvement, allowing participants in other cities to replicate the gesture independently, which Shackleton's own documentation describes as making it a widely shared pro-life demonstration.
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