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Ryan Bomberger of The Radiance Foundation speaks at the 2017 March for Life Conference in Washington, D.C.Lisa Bourne / LifeSiteNews

WASHINGTON, D.C., January 30, 2017 (LifeSiteNews) – This year’s theme for the March for Life, The Power of One, hit home for pro-life advocate Ryan Bomberger.

Bomberger was conceived in rape, born to a single mother and then taken into an adoptive home.

“Every single human life has purpose,” Bomberger told participants the day before the 44th annual March for Life. “God has an amazing way to enable triumph to rise from tragedy.”

Bomberger, whose The Radiance Foundation aims to “shatter the myth of the abortion industry,” shared in his keynote address last week at the March for Life Conference that the number of aborted children — 57 million and counting — is hard to comprehend.

Every missing life counts

“When something is removed from something, it changes everything,” he stated. “When you pull one life out from this world, it changes everything.”

Bomberger displayed a photo of his large and diverse extended family, where there have been numerous adoptions over multiple generations.

“This is our family and this is an example of the power of one,” he shared. “Adoption isn’t just something that transforms a child, it transforms a family and the community; and sometimes it even transforms the world.”

Diversity is wonderful, he continued, but it’s neither culture nor color that bind us. It’s love.

No one is unwanted

He went on to say the idea of unwanted children is a myth and that the image of his family “is the reality of many courageous birth moms choosing life despite their very difficult circumstances, giving us all a chance to be adopted and loved.”

The power of one, demonstrated through one singular decision by his birth, might also have been made possible because just one person influenced her sometime in the past toward life.

Bomberger told the pro-life crowd that he is given a reminder of the miracle of one decision each time he sees his own children.

Planned Parenthood steals purpose

He went on to say that Planned Parenthood and the abortion industry “crush” human purpose thousands of times daily through abortion.

Bomberger displayed a quote from Cecile Richards, the abortion chain’s president, saying Planned Parenthood needed “to be the largest kick-butt political organization” and noted her stated goal was not centered on women’s health, or any of the other things Planned Parenthood claims it provides.

“Planned Parenthood doesn’t trust anybody with the truth,” he said. “They don’t trust the public enough with the truth, they don’t trust women enough with the truth.”

The difference between the abortion giant and pregnancy resource centers, he stated, is that “Planned Parenthood will lure women in with their lies. Pregnancy resources centers will love women with their lives.”

Bomberger views pregnancy resource centers as today’s underground railroad, “a place of rescue, a place of hope, a place of healing.”

Missing lives, missing truth

He explained Planned Parenthood’s duplicitous approach and failing effectiveness for the audience, saying that contrary to the 3 percent statistic that it purports as its total abortion revenue, the number is actually 80 percent.

Furthermore, in the last five years, the statistics of Planned Parenthood other “services” have dropped significantly, and the abortion chain has also lost of nearly 700,000 clients since Richards took over.

“This is what happens all the time. They always say, well, look at all these wonderful things,” Bomberger noted, stressing, “It wouldn’t even matter, no seeming amount of beneficence makes up for the fact that 3 percent of the time you kill human beings.”

“This is who they are,” he continued. “They get away with it because the media never challenges it, and it’s a billion-dollar industry.”

Media bias

The media aren’t doing their job reporting on abortion, he explained.

“They abdicate their responsibility because they’ve chosen advocacy over accuracy and opinion of objectivity,” Bomberger said.

The media also didn’t tell the truth about slavery 170 years ago, Bomberger said, so former slave and abolitionist Frederick Douglass had to start his own newspaper. Douglass went on to become friends with and influence Abraham Lincoln.  

“I love this. That is the power of one,” Bomberger mused, pointing out as well that Douglass was also conceived in rape.

Brokenness

When he thinks of brokenness, he thinks of Margaret Sanger, he said, drawing the contrast between his mother and Sanger, both women having grown up in poverty with an alcoholic father.

“Those two women chose drastically different paths in life,” Bomberger said. “My mom chose to affirm life, and Margaret Sanger continued in her brokenness and opposed life.”

While Sanger is lauded as a pioneer in women’s rights, she was in fact anti-human, Bomberger pointed out, and quoted Sanger on birth control as a means of weeding out “defective” humans.

“This isn’t women’s rights,” Bomberger said. “There’s no equality by ending the life of another innocent human being. There’s no equality actually in birth control.”

He played a clip of Mike Wallace’s 1957 interview with Sanger, where Wallace asked her if she believed in sin, and she responded she believed the biggest sin in the world is bringing children into the world, specifically listing those demographics she thought to be unfit to live.

These are “marked when they are born” Sanger had said, “That to me is a greater sin.”

This was brokenness, Bomberger explained, because that would make any one of us “marked.“

We each have a purpose

“You know what we were marked with?” he asked the crowd. “Purpose, from the moment of conception.”
This was something Sanger could never wrap her mind around, he continued, “and the organization she birthed still to this day can’t wrap their minds around this.”

Humans are created to overcome, Bomberger said, and this is achieved through God’s help.

“Heaven forbid we should face adversity,” he enthused. “Adversity makes us better human beings. And greatness has arisen from poverty, over and over and over again.”

To further debunk the notion that poverty justifies abortion, Bomberger listed examples of people who would have been “eliminated” based upon being born into poverty or to a single mother, such as Dr. Ben Carson, Faith Hill, Eartha Kitt, and Steve Jobs.  

These instances show the beauty of possibility, the power of one, and “a courageous mother in incredibly difficult circumstances bringing forth life,” he said.

Where are our fathers?

So often with an unplanned pregnancy, so many women think it’s the end of their life, mostly because so often they are abandoned by men.

Decrying the fatherlessness epidemic of 41 percent in the general population and 71.3 percent in the black community, Bomberger said men need to step up, because fatherhood begins in the womb.

We must encourage responsible behavior but offer love and support when unplanned pregnancy occurs, he said, and it’s not just up to pregnancy care centers, rather also the church and individuals

“We need to be that network of support,” Bomberger said. “God has a way of orchestrating things.”

The power of one enables each person to make a difference in any number of ways, he concluded, and one never knows when the work they do to support life, whatever it might be, just might enable another person like him to exist.