Your Pro-Life Bottom Line (eBook)

Prologue:
Ask and It Will Be Given to You

Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find;
knock and the door will be opened to you. Matthew 7:7

In the first draft of this book, I did not include this prologue. The reason? This prologue is about me, but I want this book to be about you and what you can do to shut down Planned Parenthood and the abortion industry. Not about me.

However, several reviewers of early drafts of the book who know well my personal pro-life journey gave me feedback something to this effect. “Brett, people who decide to read this book are going to want to know why they should trust what you have to say, and what motivates you to do the pro-life work you do. They will want to know your story!”

Those reviewers strongly encouraged me to share my journey with you at the beginning of the book. After some initial hesitation about the idea, I began to see some merit to it.

So here goes. I’ll try to keep it short so we can quickly get back to your story—the story you have the potential to write about the role you played in helping shut down Planned Parenthood and the abortion industry.

What Do I Know?

Let me briefly make a case for why you should trust what I have to say in this book, which as you will soon see, even though it is a book about pro-life, it is at its core a book about business strategy. First, I do not come from the world of social work, or faith-based ministry, or anything like that. I am a businessman. Specifically, I am a marketing professional.

I began my marketing career in 1990, securing my first marketing and sales job working in the international division of Komatsu at its headquarters in Tokyo, Japan. So I have been practicing all aspects of marketing, with a particularly heavy focus on product marketing, for more than thirty years.

After three years in Tokyo, I made my way back to the United States, but before joining a company here I decided to first upgrade my business skills through formal education. I applied and was accepted into the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, where I received my MBA in 1995. I then entered the high-tech world, working for Motorola’s cell phone division in their international marketing department. I spent the next seventeen years working in cell phone consumer product marketing, primarily on the manufacturing and technology development side, with management roles at Motorola (1995–98), running marketing and helping raise capital for a dotcom wireless start-up called Clariti Telecommunications (1998–2001), and strategy development roles for wireless tech development and patent licensing company InterDigital Communications (2004–12).

Note that in the middle of that seventeen-year run, I had a brief two-year “non-high-tech” stint from 2002 to 2003 when I tried my hand at an entrepreneurial retail start-up in partnership with a Japan-based product design firm. When that business failed, I returned to the wireless product marketing world.

In 2012, I was let go from InterDigital and instead of seeking work in the high-tech corporate world, I decided to take another shot at an entrepreneurial venture. As a side gig to my full-time work in high tech, starting in 2007, I had already been developing my consumer internet marketing skills while helping my wife expand her internet-based “how to make jewelry” video tutorial business called Jewelry Making Professor. It seemed logical to pursue an entrepreneurial venture in which I already had some experience, so with my wife’s jewelry-making instruction business as the base, I started a digital internet publishing business. One of the great fruits of that was publishing a digital magazine called Jewelry Designer Magazine, which led to co-creating a handmade jewelry marketing course that we successfully sold on Jewelry TV for many years.

Now I’m going to throw a major surprise at you that you won’t understand until you read more about my motivations for doing pro-life work, but within three years after starting this new entrepreneurial venture, I had abandoned it and completely committed myself to full-time pro-life work. I know. When people hear the details of my professional background, they often can’t fathom why I decided to work full-time in pro-life. Then I tell them what happened to me, which you will read about in what follows, and they understand.

Before we get to that, though, I want to address one more element in the “why you should trust me” category, and that is that throughout this book, I will make many claims about the pro-life world and the pro-life organizations that operate within that world that you should probably only trust if made by someone who has significant “on the ground” experience in that world. And I do.

As you’ll read, I began full-time pro-life work in April 2013, first starting two of my own pro-life projects, Pro-Life Magazine and Maria’s Choice, under a nonprofit I created, and then starting in February 2015 working full-time with a nonprofit organization called Heroic Media—where as of this writing I serve as president, CEO and a member of the board of directors. In my work at Heroic Media, now approaching seven years, I interact very often with those team members at pro-life pregnancy centers who daily fight the frontline battles against Planned Parenthood and the abortion industry. I have had a front row seat to see what that battle looks like, and what works and what doesn’t work, when it comes to successfully encouraging women facing the fear of an unexpected pregnancy to choose life instead of abortion. In addition, as executive editor of Pro-Life Magazine, I have had the privilege of interviewing many of the leaders of the top pro-life organizations in the country on a host of pro-life issues.

All this is to say I have had my hands on the pulse of the pro-life world in the United States for nearly a decade. So my hope is that as you read some of the controversial things I have to say in this book, please know that my claims are born of firsthand experience, not based on abstract theory. With that, let’s move on to my motivations, my “why” of committing myself to full-time pro-life work.

A Mistake That Can’t Be Undone

In the predawn hours of Sunday, April 28, 2013, I sat alone in an adoration chapel at Our Lady of Czestochowa Catholic Church in Doylestown, just outside of Philadelphia. With tears streaming down my face, I looked at Jesus present in the Blessed Sacrament, and I prayed. Lord, please use me to help young women and men not make the same mistake I made. What “mistake” was I talking to Jesus about? Decades earlier, in the 1980s, I, together with my girlfriend at the time, made a terrible decision. My girlfriend was pregnant with our child, and she and I decided to abort our child.

So how did I go from the terrible mistake I made three decades earlier to looking right at Jesus and asking Him, Lord, please use me to help young women and men not make the same mistake I made? In one sense, you could say my journey to that moment began three decades earlier when I consented to the abortion of my own child. I think deep down there was always something inside of me that knew what I did was grievously wrong. My conscience just wasn’t formed enough in virtue to know better. But that would eventually change, and in dramatic fashion. As they say, better late than never.

The Lord Comes Knocking

In 2002, at the age of thirty-seven, I had a powerful mystical experience. I was so moved by what happened to me I felt there was only one thing to do, and I did it: I gave my life to Christ. Two years later, at the Easter Vigil on Saturday evening, April 10, 2004, I entered into full communion with the Catholic Church at Mary Mother of the Redeemer parish in North Wales in the suburbs of Philadelphia.

Thank You Jesus! Now What?

Not unlike many converts, I was on fire for the faith! I threw myself into learning everything about the teachings of the Church. Of course that included studying the Church’s teachings on the sanctity of life. And from the beginning, I never questioned that all the Church’s teachings on the sanctity of life were true. In addition, and this is very important for what happened in the years to follow, I believed without reservation God had completely forgiven me for my role in the abortion of my own child many years earlier.

When I emerged from the baptismal waters on that grace-filled evening in April 2004, I believed with absolute certainty and confidence God had forgiven me for EVERYTHING. I was a new creation. So if I believed I was completely forgiven by God, that I was a new creation in Christ, again the question, why was I on my knees nine years later, crying out to Jesus, Lord, please use me to help young women and men not make the same mistake I made?

I Didn’t Know What I Didn’t Know

It took me a very long time to understand that the Lord’s forgiveness included a great desire to heal me of the wounds I experienced from having agreed to the abortion of my own child. The problem was that I...