Thomas A. Glessner is the founder and President of the National Institute of Family and Life Advocates (NIFLA), a public interest law firm founded in 1993 and committed to legal counsel and training for pregnancy centers.
Mr. Glessner graduated from the University of Washington, School of Law in Seattle in 1977 and practiced law in the Seattle area for ten years. As a practicing attorney, he used his legal skills to represent and counsel prolife organizations, including pregnancy centers. He founded and led four pregnancy centers in Seattle, Washington from 1981 to 1987.
Mr. Glessner was the president and CEO of the Christian Action Council (now Care Net) from 1987 to 1992, establishing legal guidelines and programs for the training of hundreds of Board members and directors of pregnancy centers throughout the nation. Currently, Mr. Glessner is on the Board of Directors for Washington State Family Policy Institute and the Board of Directors for the National Religious Pro-Life Coalition.
As the founder and CEO of NIFLA, Mr. Glessner has developed and implemented legal guidelines for pregnancy centers to enable them to convert their operations into licensed medical clinics and provide medical services, such as ultrasound.
Mr. Glessner is listed in Who’s Who in American Law and is the author of Achieving an Abortion Free America (Multnomah Publishing 1990), Destiny’s Team: A Story About Love, Choices and Eternity (Anomalos Publishing 2007), a novel, The Emerging Brave New World (Anomalos Publishing 2008), a nonfiction work, and Created Equal: Reflections on the Unalienable Right to Life (Page Publishing, 2016). He is also the author of an article published by the Law Review for the Regent University School of Law entitled, “Curbing Raw Judicial Power: A Proposal For A Checks and Balances Amendment.”
Mr. Glessner is a member of the bar associations for the United States Supreme Court, the State of Virginia and the State of Washington. As such, he has filed several “friend of the court” briefs in cases of major significance to the prolife movement in the United States Supreme Court