When Angela Copenhaver converted to the Catholic faith, she was all-in — almost. Despite a zeal so strong that she left corporate America for family and faith, the pro-life piece of Catholicism didn’t “fit” for her. 

“I’ll just ignore that part,” she decided. 

But God put the pieces together in such a way that Copenhaver would come to create a unique game-changing pro-life program that addresses people who feel it’s not their business to decide for others. 

“We need a sustained effort, but I’m highly confident it’s going to change things,” Copenhaver told the Register about We Teach Think, an education marketing company to inspire people to value and protect everyone, born and unborn. Under that umbrella is Human From Day One, which creates powerful messaging as part of a media campaign that includes billboards and TV  ads. 

The goal is to use logic to move hearts and minds in the same way that campaigns to wear seatbelts, not litter, put out campfires, not drive drunk and other issues have gone from largely ignored to ones the public is passionate about. Copenhaver aims to replace cultural brainwashing, she said, with absolute truths. 

 

God Led the Way

This wife and mother of two children and 12 grandchildren grew up with scant religion. “My mother was a nondenominational Christian, and my dad didn’t believe in God, so it was confusing,” she explained to the Register. 

Her first spark of a relationship with God came while Copenhaver and her husband Lowell were living in Virginia. “One morning, standing watching a beautiful orange sunrise coming up over the ocean, a voice came into my head, ‘You should be living with your family and visiting the ocean instead of visiting your family and living with the ocean.’” She believed it was God telling her she and her husband needed to move back to Nebraska to be closer to their children.

They moved back to the Plains. Copenhaver became a full-time grandma and Lowell found a job. Their oldest daughter had joined the Catholic Church and invited her parents to attend Mass. One Sunday, at Communion time, her 3-year-old granddaughter wanted to accompany Grammy to Communion. When Copenhaver explained that she didn’t go, her granddaughter leaned in, nose-to-nose with her hands on her grandmother’s cheeks, and said, “But you need Communion too, Grammy.”  

“My daughter came back from Communion, and I’m in a full cry,” Copenhaver recalled. Her daughter asked her what happened. 

“I feel like God just put his hands on my face and told me to go to Communion in the one voice I never say ‘No’ to,” she responded. 

After she and her husband joined the Church at Easter 2012, Copenhaver moved away from her previously staunch support of abortion, but she was not pro-life. “I made a conscious decision to ignore that issue,” she said.

The Catholic faith, however, had set her on fire. During her conversion, EWTN Radio, heard on Spirit Catholic Radio in Nebraska, had impacted her spiritual growth. She was soon hired as development director for the station. “It was exciting,” Copenhaver shared. “I could go on the radio to talk about my faith and during the ‘Carathon’ ask people to give their life to Christ. I loved it.

Three years into the job, a friend who volunteered for 40 Days for Life brought Copenhaver a book about the organization. Chapter 33, “Take It Personal,” stopped her cold. It told of a grandmother whose granddaughter was scheduled to have an abortion in Helena, Montana, during the same time that Copenhaver had lived there. 

She knew the facility well — in fact, she had been on the other side donating and volunteering for Planned Parenthood. 

“I was sobbing and distraught and had to leave work. It was one of the worst days of my life. I drove straight from work to my priest and asked for confession.”

“What am I going to do?” she asked her priest.

“Take some time and pray about it,” he advised. “You have no idea what God has planned for you. Ten years ago, you never could have imagined you’d be on radio asking people to give their life to Christ.”

She prayed and waited on the Lord. Then, in 2018 during a Eucharistic procession to an abortion facility in Lincoln, Nebraska, with around 1,000 people organized by Bishop James Conley, the procession surrounded an entire city block. 

“A lady coming out of her driveway screamed out the car window: ‘You people have no idea what you are doing. I spent my life as a nurse caring for babies born to drug-addicted mothers.’” 

Copenhaver reflected on her words. “There’s certainly a spot in heaven for those caring for those babies, but would it have been better if those babies had not been born? My answer was ‘No.’”

She started doing research, not knowing where it would lead. “Anytime you are going to build a sales strategy, you need to understand who you are selling to,” she explained, adding that her deep dive in 2017 was enlightening. “I learned that 19% of people want abortion on demand any time; 22% are staunchly pro-life, and 59% are in the middle — the ones who say, ‘I don’t believe in abortion but …’” (More recent polling from EWTN and RealClear Opinion can be perused here.)

Copenhaver learned further that most of the money to fight abortion was directed to abortion-minded women — an important group to target. She realized, however, that the middle majority should also be addressed to lead them from viewing abortion as acceptable to unthinkable. 

Copenhaver withdrew her UPS retirement money and quit the job she loved at Spirit Catholic Radio to begin a nonprofit company to change the way people think about abortion. “I just knew this is what God was preparing me to do for my whole life,” she shared. 

 

Growing the Pro-Life Market

It is the potential future pro-lifers whom she identified as the target market. “The goal of any business is to grow your market share,” she explained. “I want to grow the pro-life market share — to move abortion from socially acceptable to socially unacceptable.”  

Human From Day One’s 30-second commercials have billboards that go with them. The messages give simple, clear truths such as a billboard with a sperm and egg joined, stating, “This is you on Day 1 of your life.” 

Billboards have QR codes to lead people to the website to learn more. Copenhaver works with Individuals and groups to spread this campaign throughout the U.S., working with the TV stations and billboard companies. 

 

People can donate to the general fund and also fundraise for a local campaign where 100% of those donations go towards advertising in that city. 

Copenhaver puts things into play, looking for high-viewership spots. 

Joan Schueler from Pierre, South Dakota, met Copenhaver as a speaker at a Right to Life convention. “No one wants to talk to me about the issue because they know where I stand,” she said, “but letting Angela reach the people I am not reaching through billboards and TV commercials is effective. We have four large billboards in central South Dakota now and paid for TV commercials that played earlier through the entire state.”       

Schueler shared that a friend overheard two women at a truck stop talking about the billboard message, “This is you on Day One” of your life, with an image of a fertilized human egg. “One woman told how the message was spot-on and recalled how hard it was when she miscarried because she had lost a child.” 

South Dakota recently defeated Amendment G intended to add a right to abortion to the state Constitution. “A lot of grassroots efforts defeated Amendment G; contributed to that defeat,” Schueler said. “We Teach Think was part of that.”

Kathy Bloom brought a campaign to her hometown of Rapid City, South Dakota. “It just makes sense,” she said. “I believe this is going to work at changing our culture in how one views the controversial topic of when life begins. Everyone who has heard this presentation comes away thinking how intelligent this approach is, as well as feeling a sense of excitement.”

Campaigns typically run for 12 weeks. Some are expensive, such as a 14-by-48-foot billboard in front of the University of Nebraska Huskers Memorial Stadium in Lincoln, which cost, for eight weeks, $9,000. But games typically have more than 80,000 people  attending, so it’s a good cost-benefit situation. There are also farmers and ranchers who sponsor billboards on their property for free. 

“This is not a quick solution,” Copenhaver observed of the work to be done to change hearts and minds to value all life. 

This mission is about securing the future of humanity, according to Copenhaver. “People in the middle are not going to research this on their own. We want to reach them in their personal space — phones, TV, radio. That’s where they are most receptive to new information, where they don’t have to defend themselves to someone. That is why Catholic radio works, listening in their car or at home in a comfortable place where information sinks in.”

She emphasized that it’s all worth it: “When your heart and mind is changed, it’s true change, and you are then more likely to support it publicly.”