Ryan Bomberger’s ministry exposes effect of abortion on the black community

Ryan Bomberger was 13 when he learned that he was conceived during a rape. Even with the love of his adoptive parents, he said the revelation “was extremely painful to understand.”

A few weeks after finding out, the eighth-grader told his story in class during a speech he gave opposing abortion and saw that it made an impression on his classmates and teachers. Bomberger said the speech was cathartic and helped him understand both the devastation of abortion and his own story, which he continues to tell 30 years later in his ministry affirming life.

“My sense of purpose was solidified when I realized the story of my life — as painful as it may be for me and as painful as it had to be for my birth mom — could be really redemptive for a lot of people,” Bomberger said. “That moment of finding out about my story and being able to use it certainly was powerful in the sense that it gave me this wild sense of destiny and possibility that others at that age wouldn’t really embrace or fully understand.”

Bomberger will be the featured speaker at the TLC Options for Women Pregnancy Resource Centers’ 40th anniversary banquet on Saturday, Sept. 27, at the Earle Brown Heritage Center in Brooklyn Center.

Bomberger has searched for his birth mother and hopes someday to contact her.

“I really believe God will orchestrate all that,” he said. “He’s orchestrated so many phenomenal moments throughout my life. That would just be another one.”

As one of 10 adopted children in a family of 15, Bomberger said his parents gave him a foundation of love — one reason he is a strong proponent of adoption. Two of his four children are adopted.

After college, he began a career as a creative director, eventually winning an Emmy and other awards for his work on broadcast design. In 2006, he went into ministry full-time, founding The Radiance Foundation (theradiancefoundation.org) with his wife, Bethany. Through advertising campaigns, multi-media presentations and community outreach in areas related to abortion, adoption, poverty, family stability, fatherhood, character development and self-image, the ministry seeks to affirm and educate people in the belief that God has given them purpose from the moment of conception, he said.

Bomberger and The Radiance Foundation have taken a different look at historical trends and exposed the disproportionately high number of abortions in the black community — a rate that’s five times higher than that of whites, according to the Centers for Disease Control.

On the foundation’s site, toomanyaborted.com, Bomberger tells that story in a series of unconventional videos.

“They are visual, they are sonic,” he said. “They really get across truths sometimes people haven’t heard before.”

Bomberger, who is of mixed race, said he was the first to develop a public ad campaign dealing with the impact of abortion on the black community. The ministry launched billboards in Atlanta in 2010. Partnering with local organizations, The Radiance Foundation has placed 500 billboards in cities around the country.

“It was a huge wake-up call because so many of the leaders of this [black] community support an industry birthed in eugenic racism and elitism and that has destroyed 56 million since Roe [v. Wade, the 1973 landmark decision legalizing abortion], but 1,000 black babies each day [taken from 2008 Guttmacher Institute statistics],” he said.

The Radiance Foundation will resume the billboard campaign this fall.

Along with the work he does for his own outreaches, Bomberger creates edgy, free content for pro-life and other organizations. By early next year, the foundation will make available to the pro-life movement and the public content to respond to advocacy and activism supporting abortion. The video and other content will be available to download from a website.

“It just allows the pro-life movement to respond immediately and cohesively to things that are going on,” he said.

As healing is part of Bomberger’s own story, it is also in his presentations on abortion.

“There’s no way to talk about abortion and not talk about the fact that there is wholeness, there’s healing, and there’s forgiveness,” he said. “We’re forever relentless about closing the industry, yet forever compassionate to the individual who may be contemplating it, who may have already made the irreversible decision. But we believe firmly that God is the God of restorations.”