Overlooking the Opportunities to Grow in Holiness at Our Feet
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A 2005 study by the Guttmacher Institute, Planned Parenthood’s research arm, showed that 74% of abortions take place because parents fear they can’t afford to take care of their child or that it will hinder their economic future.
Those who advocate ending the lives of unborn children know this, and leverage it to win the hard-earned dollars of vulnerable parents. According to an article by Hannah Meise entitled, “Pritzker, Dems push to widen…messaging beyond ‘social issues’ silo” Governor JB Pritzker encouraged the Democratic party to shift the messaging on ending the lives of unborn children to frame it as an economic issue.
Kelly Hall, executive director of The Fairness Project, which provides financial and strategic support to the companies that provide access to those who engage in practices and provide medications that end the lives of unborn children, is quoted in that article as saying that ending the lives of unborn children, “…does enable families to set their own course in terms of how many kids they want to have, who can stay in the workforce, how many breadwinners you'll have in the household…”
Our critics are telling us what we need to do to win the battle. But, instead of listening, most people who stand for the right of unborn children to live focus instead on stopping the sacrifices with legislation. That makes us their enemy.
What needs to happen, instead, is that we put capitalism to work for these unborn babies, by investing in helping parents create a better economic future for themselves and their children. That makes us their champion and their friend.
Many of these parents simply don’t know how else to secure their economic future. They see kids as an obstacle to their dreams in part because of mainstream media articles like the one written by Western & Southern Financial Group entitled, “How Much Does It Cost to Raise a Child?” where it cites the average 18-year cost for a child born in 2023 as being nearly $375,000.
If we can show them that there’s a better way, hope for their economic future that doesn’t require them to take on tens of thousands of dollars in debt and gamble on an uncertain job market, we can steer them in the direction of choosing life without needing to legislate their decisions for them.
Republican Billionaires like Vivek Ramaswamy, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, and Peter Thiel can become – instead of the villains of the parents who see them as taking away a power that is necessary for their economic future – the champions and heroes who provide them the tools that empower them to build a brighter economic future that they control. It will effectively put a stop to the abortion industry without needing to pass a single law to do it.
If not for my pre-existing strong stance in favor of life, at the age of 19 I might have been one of those mothers approaching a Planned Parenthood, looking for liberation from my fears of economic disaster. My husband didn’t feel ready to be a parent and didn’t feel confident he could provide for us. He knew better than to suggest an abortion, though plenty of other people did.
Pregnant and homeless with no degree and no prospects for a better future, it took a giant leap of faith to keep my son. I’m grateful, 28 years later, that I did take that leap of faith, but that didn’t eliminate my fears or make it easier.
At 23, I nearly took my own life – and my son’s with me – because I felt like I was drowning in an ocean of problems for which I could find no solutions. I didn’t even know for sure if there were solutions. It was the realization that I’d considered – even for a moment – taking my own son’s life that jarred me out of my despair. I decided that day that no matter how long it took me or what it required, I would find a way to make my son’s life better than mine.
At 43, on the first Saturday in March, I woke from a dream shouting with joy, “I have problems! I have problems!!” God showed me in that dream that every problem I faced in the past and learned how to solve could bring me profits today if I found the right audience for them, and every problem I faced today that I didn’t know how to solve could bring me profits for the future once I learned to solve it. I would never run out of problems, but that was good news because it also meant I would never run out of opportunities to profit.
I wrote the book Turning Problems into Profits in November of 2019 so that other economically challenged women and families could see that their problems are not their enemies. Good can come out of every single one of them.
I’ve learned how to calculate the value of a solution and create offers that can be leveraged to build a solid business. It doesn’t take much of an investment to start a business that way. They already have the necessary expertise required.
They just need the tech support, business licensing, financial support while they’re getting their business up and running, and a little bit of training to get them going in the right direction. I also learned how to market on a $0 marketing budget, something I’m more than willing to teach others how to do.
According to a study mentioned in a recent article, “Arkansas Starters Coalition Aims to Boost Entrepreneurship,” produced by the AMP staff, for every 1% increase in entrepreneurship, there’s a correlating 2% decrease in the poverty rate.
Another article entitled, “Why entrepreneurship education fails in impoverished regions” by Lele Sang discusses the results of microentrepreneurship studies. It showed that it was “more effective to ask microentrepreneurs to do things they are already good at doing” than it was to provide training in skills they didn’t have.
The study also found that leveraging business mentors with only moderate success was more effective than showing off the rags-to-riches stories of people who went from zero to millions or billions because, “Rather than feeling motivated by the rags to riches success of the role model entrepreneurs, participants felt intimidated,” and “tend to forget that the role models started in a similar situation to theirs and focused more on the grand outcomes.”
Saving babies by investing in helping the parents build businesses that can sustain their families doesn’t just benefit the parents. It improves the economy overall and makes for a brighter future for everyone.
Democrats often call out Republicans on the hypocrisy of wanting parents to gamble with their financial future without being equally willing to invest in helping parents secure a better life for themselves. What Democrats mean is that people aren’t willing to pay extra money in taxes for government run programs that provide “security nets.”
However, in my own experiences, these programs enable people and do not empower them. They leave people dependent on government support rather than equipping them to take control of their own future and build a better life for themselves.
If we want to turn things around and put an end to such arguments, we must be willing to invest in our fellow human beings. We must be willing to equip them with the tools they need to turn their lives around.
It doesn’t take much. A $20,000 investment can be enough to provide six months of housing at $1500 a month (the average rent for a two-bedroom apartment in the United States is $1,317), $1,000 in start-up funds to cover their LLC establishment, permits, and build a business account, and give them $10,000 in operating capital they can leverage for six months to build up their brand and establish themselves in their communities.
The parents can be encouraged to take the money they would have paid sacrificing their child's life and investing in improving their economic future instead.
For those who are concerned about where the funds would come from to operate such a program and oversee it, a Human Development Investment Group (HDig) can be created.
This investment group would be charged with mentoring our startups and holding them accountable. To keep the fund growing, we could require the families who participate in the initial program to sign an agreement giving the group a 5% stake in their company and a seat on their board of directors to ensure accountability and proper oversight until such time as the initial investment is repaid and then a 1% stake in their company in perpetuity.
Real estate’s a nice investment. But here’s the reality: It doesn’t have the unlimited growth potential that human beings do. There’s only so much land and so many units that can be built on any given piece of land.
Every adult has solved at least 10,000 problems in their lifetime. That’s 10,000 potential solutions they can put a spigot into, turn on the faucet, and begin to leverage to generate revenue. And, with every year of their life, the number of problems they’ve figured out how to solve grows.
While the focus of this proposal is saving the lives of our unborn children, the future of our nation, it goes beyond that. Those parents are where we begin to turn things around.
It’s where we start to prove the value of capitalism. Capitalism is this unlimited buffet that offers everyone a chance to get as much as they want and are willing to work to obtain. The problem is that the entry points into this system have been hidden from most people and there are now guards at the entrances which are posted by government agencies and corporations to prevent people from getting free access to it.
The people who are siding with the Democratic party aren’t doing so because they love the policies of the Democratic party. They’re doing so out of frustration.
They see people who know how to bypass the guards and get past roadblocks getting their fill of the buffet and they want that for themselves. They just don’t know how to get it.
So, when the government comes along and promises to bring them plates of food, they agree to the things the government requires in order to get that food. They trade their ability to select what they eat, when they eat it, how often they get to eat, or how much they can eat because the alternative is starving.
If we become the party that shows them where the doors are that bypass the guards and give them access to the buffet, the Democratic party’s got no legs left to stand on and it collapses. People don’t really want death. They want life – they just need to be given the hope that there’s a reason to keep living.
With this strategy of investing in our parents and their future, we prove the value of capitalism and we show people that it provides a superior outcome. We give them the tools to see their problems, not as problems, but as opportunities and teach them how to leverage the boundless opportunities that life provides them in their favor.
America re-establishes its reputation as the land of opportunity where all are able to thrive and flourish and lays to rest for good the myth that she’s the land of plenty for me and none for thee.
For Catholic families who wish to support the work of helping desperate families turn their problems into profits, I offer free training at https://lovingcatholicism.com. My course, Turning Problems into Prophets can help sidewalk counselors and pregnancy resource centers uncover the problems that can be leveraged to create their profitable future and bring hope to the hopeless.
Award-winning international speaker and author, Brandy M. Miller is a Catholic revert. Raised in a culturally Catholic home, she left the faith at 16 in search of the truth and returned 12 years later when she found it right where she left it. Today, she is convinced that the Catholic Church is the cure to society's ills and is eager to help share the Gospel truth to those who have ears to hear it. When she isn't writing for or about the Catholic Church, she offers her writing talents to Catholics who would like help sharing their witnesses of Christ's work in their lives.
