Late last year, the St. Pius X parishioner began Exodus 90's St. Michael’s Lent program, a 40-day, Lent-like period of prayer, fasting, almsgiving, and daily walks. One day while walking, listening to the Bible, and praying the rosary, he became inspired to do something more with his routine.
The idea became a plan, the plan became a route, and after discussing it with his wife and family, word spread and the pilgrimage became a reality.
“From that point, there was no going back,” Brown said.
The Pilgrimage for the Unborn will be a 67.8-mile, over 33-hour walk, beginning with a 5 a.m. Mass at St. Boniface in Waukee on Saturday, May 30, and ending with a grill out in St. Pius X in Urbandale at 3 p.m. on Sunday, May 31. The pilgrimage will include stops at each church along the route to dedicate a rosary to the unborn.
“I didn’t even realize when I planned it that it would end on the same day as the Feast of the Visitation,” Brown said.
Though not initially an effort to raise money, Brown felt called to dedicate this pilgrimage to Innervisions HealthCare (IVHCare), a non-profit pregnancy clinic with a stated mission to educate, empower, and encourage women with unplanned pregnancies by connecting them with the care, support, and information they need to make a fully informed decision.
“I thought doing something like this would be a great way to sacrifice for our Lord and raise awareness for an organization. What better way than to pray to Mary for our unborn, this is where I thought of IVHCare,” Brown stated on the walk’s website. “When I heard a stat that 28 percent of my children’s generation had been aborted, I was so saddened, we need to help people make the right choices.”
The donor-funded medical clinic has two locations in West Des Moines and the south side of Des Moines and relies on its staff to provide pregnancy testing, pre-abortion consultations, limited obstetrical ultrasound, abortion pill reversal, and other potentially lifesaving care to its patients. In addition to healthcare, the clinic also seeks to remove the common financial obstacles to continuing the pregnancy – food, clothing, housing, and medical – by connecting mother with over 150 partners in the community to address their seemingly insurmountable challenges.
Bryan Gonzalez, IVHCare’s director of development, said that from his interactions with patients, clinics that provide abortions do not provide all the facts, and that the primary mission of InnerVisions is to give women as much information about their situation as possible to let them make that decision.
“The culture is going to say, ‘Get the abortion because that's going to make you feel better,’” Gonzalez said. “For the mother, we know that it's not the case. We have personal experience from patients who have come to us, leave the clinic, take the abortion pill, and come back to us and say, ‘I regret it.’”
A mother with a similar journey is Granger-native Sarah M. Hurm, author of Finding Hope: Letters to My Abortion Pill Reversal Baby, who gave her testimony at the 2026 National March for Life in Washington, D.C., about her decision to seek out help in hopes to reverse the effects of an abortion pill and save the life of her now 7-year old son Isaiah.
As previously reported by The Catholic Mirror, Hurm contacted Vitae Family Clinic after starting a chemical abortion protocol in 2018. The clinic administered a treatment called abortion pill reversal (APR), an intervention that includes a high dose of progesterone to reverse the effects of the progesterone-blocking mifepristone, often referred to as “the abortion pill.” The treatment was successful and her son was born on January 11, 2019.
In 2020, Hurm connected with the staff at IVHCare, who helped Hurm obtain a scholarship to return to school for job training. She also volunteered at the clinic and spoke at IVHCare’s annual gala in June 2022.
“They were like a safe haven, where I could be honest about life,” Hurm said in an interview with the Mirror. “It felt like a second home, where they just saw me for who I was.”
Hurm’s story is far from the only story of how IVHCare has touched the community. In 2025, approximately 89 percent of patients who sought help from IVHCare were abortion-minded when seeking abortions, according to the organization’s 2025 Annual Report. Of those abortion-minded patients, 66 percent chose parenting or adoption after seeking treatment from IVHCare, a total of 354 children saved that year.
However, the staff at IVHCare is conscious that for the 21 percent of mothers who chose to proceed with an abortion, all they can provide is an act of witness to the unborn child.
“It is a sobering thought,” Gonzalez said. “Sometimes there are patients who have their minds set that they are going to terminate, and they don't look at the baby [on the ultrasound]. So, the only eyes outside of God’s who are seeing that this baby ever lived are our nursing staff.”
For Brown, The Pilgrimage for the Unborn is another of those acts of witness that seeks to recognize the children who have not yet been born or who have passed through this world unnoticed and unseen, with only the eyes of God to welcome them.
Brown asks all those who are able to join him. If readers wish to sign up for the walk or to contribute visit https://www.ivhcare.org/pilgrimage.
“Walk a little, walk a lot, walk it all,” he said.