Published: Wednesday, January 29, 2014 at 15:03 PM.

“What do you know about your birth mom’s decision not to abort you?” the interviewer, Marvin Olasky asked.

 “Well, I know she made a really good choice,” Ryan replied. “I’m here, thank God. I strongly believe that someone had to have spoken life into her to keep her holding on through nine months of, what had to be a traumatic pregnancy.”

What was traumatic about Ryan’s mom’s pregnancy? It was the result of rape.

“I find it tragic,” Ryan said, “that mainstream media, when we talk about rape, suggests that the natural follow-up to rape is abortion. An abortion is often the second rape, because as in the original horrific act of violence, someone is attacked physically, there’s a loss of life, and then you are abandoned. We try to give people the other side of the story. Many of the (rape survivors) that we talk to have found that the only thing that is redemptive in the horrific act is the child. And that’s why many of them explain that they could not abort.”

The statistics may surprise you. Out of the 1.2 million abortions that occur in this country every year, less than one percent of them are due to rape or incest. “I am the one percent that is always used to justify one hundred percent of abortions,” Ryan said. “And I find it really interesting that the majority of women who are raped do not choose abortion. It’s more than 50 percent, … because many of them do realize that there’s only one thing that’s redemptive.”

Ryan and Bethany Bomberger lead “The Radiance Foundation” in Virginia, which seeks to empower people to understand their intrinsic value as creations of God. Bethany said, “Through media campaigns, through live speaking presentations, and through community outreach, our heart (is) to inspire people to live a life of meaning.”

 Ryan, who is African-American, has a hero in Frederick Douglass, and considers himself to be the “Chief Creative Agitator” for the foundation. He said, “The first campaign we did just exploded: ‘Black children are an endangered species’ caused a massive reaction from mainstream media and seemingly the entire blogosphere … (But the truth is), black babies are aborted up to six times more than those in the majority population. That happens in New York City, for instance, where more black babies are aborted than are born alive. So, we wanted to highlight (through this campaign, toomanyaborted.com) the historical perspective, to help people understand the American eugenics movement, which was deeply racist, deeply elitist, and so we exposed that and we exposed the birth of Planned Parenthood through this campaign.”

The latest campaign of The Radiance Foundation is targeting New York, just after Gov. Andrew Cuomo stated that right-to-life advocates “have no place in the state.” The bus transit ads proclaim, “The Dream is Dead for 56 Million.” Ryan wrote, “In 1963 when Martin Luther King Jr. shared his Dream with the nation, he never envisioned an America where ‘reproductive justice’ would end more than 56 million innocent human lives. His dream never pictured a nation where black boys and black girls would never be able to join hands with white boys and white girls, as sisters and brothers, because ‘freedom of choice’ determined some humans are simply not equal.”

It’s not a political issue. It’s not even a “human rights” issue. The right to life has not been granted by the state, but by God. That’s why He tells us we must, “Rescue those who are being taken away to death; hold back those who are stumbling to the slaughter.”

 published in The Times-News, Burlington, NC