We just got an update from one of the newest GFL-affiliated pro-life clubs, Students for Life at Desert Christian High School in Lancaster, California.
SFL’s president, Ben Andrews, wrote to tell us:
Things are going pretty well in our club. We’ve got a Pro-Life trip to Knott’s/boycott of Grad Nite to send a message to Disney to stop funding Planned Parenthood coming up on May 10th (more info on the SFL blog).
We raised almost 200 dollars at our last Bake Sale.
A couple of students have shared speeches with the group (with help from the curriculum). We have a prayer and fasting at lunch event coming up this Friday, and have a couple more fundraising ideas in the works: a t-shirt contest (again from the GFL curriculum) and free art show with a box for donations.
And we’re working on trying to put together a Pro-life Awareness week which would involve a program similar to the one that raises awareness for car crash fatalities. Throughout the day people are killed (or in this case) aborted. For the rest of the day they’re “dead” and remain silent and morbid looking. At the end of the day people are reunited with the dead. Since someone is aborted every 20 seconds, a person would be used to represent several people.
I especially like this last idea, as it’s a new variation on a well-known theme.
Students for Life, you’re off to a great start! Our prayers are with you!
Hundreds of crosses that were part of a Cemetery of the Innocents pro-life display at the University of Wisconsin at Stevens Point were torn out of the ground by a rampaging pro-abortion student May 1. Members of the campus pro-life group, Pointers for Life, caught the entire incident on video.
The vandal, sophomore Roderick King, is a senator in the UWSP Student Government Association. A commentor on the YouTube video page, one Kristen Carlson who says that she is SGA senator, indicates that King is being suspended, but Jill Stanek reports that no such action has been taken.
We recently heard from our friends at Human Life Alliance about a lively campus-wide conversation that started at Purdue University after the Purdue Students for Life inserted 17,500 copies of HLA’s sleek pro-life publication Trapped… into the student newspaper The Exponent.
It’s interesting to see how very different the types of comments were from the “pro-choice” students compared to those of the pro-life students in the The Exponent’s letters to the editors section in issues after Trapped… appeared.
The pro-life tour across Washington State with Show the Truth was absoutely great! We went from Olympia to Spokane over a period of five days, stopping at abortion mills, colleges, and universities along the way and holding signs and passing out literature.
There were seven of us teenagers along on the tour, and each of us had a wonderful time and really loved every bit of it! It was very inspiring to see all these kids taking time off school and work in order to dedicate some time and energy to saving babies. I think also that we learn very much on these tours!
One college that all of us really like to visit on our tours is The Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington. [Continue reading this entry »]
One of the most recent e-mail updates from Stand True included a list of pro-life activities to do over the summer. The list will be helpful for clubs that continue to meet over the summer and individual teens who are looking for ways to keep up with their pro-life conviction if they’re club is not meeting over the summer or do not yet belong to a club. The list is in no particular order and there are lots of different activities for what ever commitment level you can make. I’ve added a few things for local Illinois pro-lifers.
1. Volunteer at your local Pregnancy Help Center. Just open your phone book to “abortion alternatives” to find a center in your area.
2. Get your friends together and visit your local senior citizens home. Be sure to call ahead to make arrangements and find out if any local churches coordinate visits. [Continue reading this entry »]
We have all heard this one on the side of abortion proponents. Regardless of the huge- and growing- amounts of people taking a stand for life, like at Saturday’s rally in Aurora, pro-lifers are constantly labeled as a “small but vocal minority.”
However, with every abortion protest, or rally for life, or vote for a pro-life politician, that “small but vocal” label begins to change.
For example, read Planned Parenthood Aurora’s response to Saturday’s rally. Along with their usual trashing of clinic protests, PP tried to brush off the amount of protesters. Instead of being horrified at the fact over 400 people (many of them teenagers) showed up on a cold Saturday morning at the end of the school year to protest at their clinic, PP dismissed the number claiming that the amount of clinic protesters are “dwindling.”
Funny, if I was expecting a fanatical political minority to be protesting something relatively local on a cold Saturday, I wouldn’t bet on more than 50 people. But for a group of pro-lifers, 400 is apparently a given.
I find all of this especially amusing because the number of volunteers PP was able to summon on Saturday to combat this “minority” was 5.
Please continue to stand up for life!! People do notice!
There’s a full report on Saturday’s rally in Aurora, IL here.
Despite the nasty winds and unseasonably cold temperatures, over 400 pro-lifers came out to protest at the site of the largest currently operating abortion clinic in the U.S.
Some students at Anthony Wayne High School in Whitehouse, OH have made a bold move in standing up for their pro-life beliefs. A local news station reports:
They wanted to send a strong message about the sanctity of life, but some local high school students say they were punished for their beliefs….
The T-shirts read, “Abortion is homicide.” The students wore the shirts on April 21…
“We were told we could take the shirts off, turn them inside out or face a two-day suspension,” says senior Kristen Norman. The students say they felt so strongly, they were willing to face the consequences until the school district began adding on more punishments…
On May 3, Saint Michael the Archangel Organization is hoping to have one million rosaries said for the unborn. Please consider participating in this event. Just go to their site to learn more and to register. Thanks!
Let's show America what peaceful, effective pro-life activism looks like. Bring your camcorder on Saturday and shoot some footage of the event, then post your video on YouTube as a response to Jeff's.
Find more information on Saturday's rally, including some of the activities taking place and where to park, see here.
Courtesy of LifeSite, here are some highlights from Pope Benedict XVI’s address to young people this past Saturday at St. Joseph’s Seminary in New York:
The Way to Hope Is Difficult
As young Americans you are offered many opportunities for personal development, and you are brought up with a sense of generosity, service and fairness. Yet you do not need me to tell you that there are also difficulties: activities and mindsets which stifle hope, pathways which seem to lead to happiness and fulfillment but in fact end only in confusion and fear.
My own years as a teenager were marred by a sinister regime that thought it had all the answers; its influence grew - infiltrating schools and civic bodies, as well as politics and even religion - before it was fully recognized for the monster it was. It banished God and thus became impervious to anything true and good.
The power to destroy does remain. To pretend otherwise would be to fool ourselves. Yet, it never triumphs; it is defeated. This is the essence of the hope that defines us as Christians. And so, just a few weeks ago, during the beautiful Easter Vigil liturgy, it was not from despair or fear that we cried out to God for our world, but with hope-filled confidence: dispel the darkness of our heart! dispel the darkness of our minds!
The Darkness of the Heart and the Mind
What might that darkness be? A first group of examples pertains to the heart. I am thinking of those affected by drug and substance abuse, homelessness and poverty, racism, violence, and degradation - especially of girls and women.
Show the Truth WA is a pro-life activist group centered in Olympia, Washington. Their focus is educating about abortion with graphic signs.
Twice a year, Show the Truth has week-long tours during which they travel either up and down or across Washington State and hold educational demonstrations at abortion mills, colleges, and universities. You can visit Show the Truth’s website here.
We have been able to join Show the Truth for all these tours, and we very much look forward to each one! Each of them has been a wonderful experience in pro-life activism, and I have learned an incredible amount from these tours! I especially enjoy going to college and university campuses.
Show the Truth makes a special effort, when on these tours, to join other pro-life organizations at their local abortion mills. This kind of working together is very favorable and productive to the pro-life movement.
Next week, starting on April 21 and ending on April 25, Show the Truth is going to have its spring tour across Washington State. I and my Mom and brother are going along with them, and we’re really excited about doing this again!
Please specially keep us all in your prayers during this pro-life tour! Definitely front-line stuff!
And I will very much encourage any of you to join this kind of tour if there are any in or near your area.
I like to post about what other clubs are doing for several reasons. First I think it’s important to recongize the awesome teens out there who are standing up for life and making a difference in thier school commmunity.
Secondly, I think other clubs offer great ideas that I hope you and your club will consider implementing.
I recently heard from Jim Heim, adviser of Voice for the Unborn, the pro-life club at Boylan Catholic High School in Rockford, IL. They are currently preparing for National Pro-Life T-shirt Day. In May they will be selling carnations with pro-life tags for Mother’s Day.
Jim and his family attended the March for Life this past Jauary along with 25 students from Boylan. Way to go Voice for the Unborn!
**UPDATE, 4/18, 4:55pm: A Yale spokesperson says Shvarts’ project was a hoax. Shvarts disagrees.
There has already been a lotofreaction among pro-lifers to the news that a Yale student, Aliza Shvarts, plans to display for her senior art project “a documentation of a nine-month process” during which she repeatedly got pregnant and took drugs to induce abortions on herself.
[Shvarts] said she was not concerned about any medical effects the forced miscarriages may have had on her body. The abortifacient drugs she took were legal and herbal, she said, and she did not feel the need to consult a doctor about her repeated miscarriages.
Kristan Hawkins, executive director of Students for Life of America, has issued a challenge to the major pro-abortion groups:
“I call on Planned Parenthood, NARAL, NOW and all other so-called pro-choice groups to condemn this. Abortion should never be trivialized as a matter of ‘art.’”
It will be hard for them to do that, as these groups have been saying for decades that women should be able to have abortions for any reason at all. [Continue reading this entry »]
Many of you may be familiar with the Catholic restoration efforts of several missionary priests in Russia. They are stationed in Vladivostok, and for 17 years they have labored tirelessly to restore the Catholic cathedral there. This cathedral had been confiscated by the communists during their regime and turned into a state archive. On February 3 of this year, the missionaries rededicated this cathedral.
The name of this Russian mission is Mary Mother of God Mission Society.
These priests’ work is absolutely amazing! There are VERY few priests in Russia, and SO MUCH work to be done! Only 1% of Russians go to church, because church was so taken out of their lives by the communists. The family in Russia is also almost totally in ruin, and the divorce rate is 80% during the first four years. The average child number per family is 1. And the average Russian woman has 8 abortions! [Continue reading this entry »]
We recently heard from our friends at 
There’s a full report on Saturday’s 
Some students at 