We’ve just been informed that Alveda King, the niece of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., will be speaking at TeenSpeak 2009 along with Bryan Kemper from Stand True.
We hope to see you at the Westin in Lombard, IL on Saturday, January 31 for this amazing event!
Mark your calendars for TeenSpeak 2009 which will take place on Saturday, January 31 at the Westin in Lombard, IL.
Bryan Kemper from Stand True will be speaking. More information to follow, so stay tuned . . .
P. S.
There are still CDs available from this past year’s TeenSpeak conference featuring former abortionist Anthony Levatino and pro-life speaker Scott Klusendorf. Due to a generous grant we were able to order more CDs after giving out over 30 sets so far.
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!
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.
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 their 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 whatever 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. (more…)
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!
Get your pro-life T-shirt so you can participate in National Pro-Life T-Shirt Day on Tuesday, April 29:
Also, Stand True Ministries is sponsoring the National Mother’s Day Baby Shower to benefit pregnancy resource centers across the country.
The National Mother’s Day Baby Shower is designed to raise much needed resources for crisis pregnancy centers
In last Sunday’s New York Times magazine, there’s an interesting feature story on a new movement among students on Ivy League university campuses to embrace chastity. It highlights in particular an abstinence club at Harvard called True Love Revolution.
Now, not at all surprisingly, the story has some flaws.
At one point, for example, the author, Randall Patterson, mentions the 2004 Waxman Report, which, he states, “found that 11 of 13 abstinence curriculums that his government-reform committee examined were rife with scientific errors and false and misleading information about the risks of sexual activity”.
He says nothing further about the Waxman Report—and he certainly doesn’t refer to its thorough critiques, which show that the Waxman Report itself is full of errors and false and misleading information.
On the whole, though, the article is quite good, and portrays the courageous students who are boldly proclaiming the value of chastity in a favorable light.
The article focuses a great deal on one member of True Love Revolution, Janie Fredell, who has a gift for articulating a range of arguments for why living chastely is a common sense lifestyle choice:
“It’s an odd thing to see one’s lifestyle essentially attacked in The Crimson,” Fredell said. She began to feel a need to stand up for her beliefs, and what she believed in more than anything at Harvard was the value of not having premarital sex. In an essay she wrote for The Crimson, she asserted that “virginity is extremely alluring,” though its “mysterious allure . . . is not rooted in an image of innocence and purity, but rather in the notion of strength.” As she told me later, “It takes a strong woman to be abstinent, and that’s the sort of woman I want to be.”
During the club’s first year, they made a lot of enemies: (more…)
I received an e-mail from John Bishop, president of Students for Life at Dowling Catholic High School in Des Moines, IA:
Recently our pro-life club in Des Moines tried something new. We rented out a skating ring and all of the proceeds went to an organization called Virtue Media. The skating event went well but I wanted to make sure you knew about Virtue Media. The organization has been having success in the Des Moines area. They put pro-life television commercials on the air and hundreds of babies have been saved in the Des Moines area because of them. Virtue Media makes it so easy for youth clubs to make money for cause, and their commercials are so successful.
Very impressive, John! Thanks for sharing this information. I encourage all of you to please consider having your club raise funds for Virtue Media.
The UCLA pro-life student group Live Action has just released the second video in a series exposing Planned Parenthood’s racism:
Read more about their investigation here.
HT: Jill Stanek
An abortion debate at York University in Toronto—a public univeristy, and the third-largest university in Canada—was cancelled by the university’s Student Union just hours before it was scheduled to take place.
Margaret Fung, the president of the pro-life group Students for Bioethical Awareness—one of the groups that sponsored tried to sponsor the debate—said:
I was told in a meeting by members of the York Federation of Students [YFS] that debating abortion is comparable to debating whether a man should be allowed to beat his wife. They said that there is freedom of speech to a limit, and that abortion is not an issue to debate. They demanded that the event not take place and shut us down. [emphasis added]
The interesting thing is that debating abortion is actually like debating whether a man should be allowed to beat his wife—only for the exact opposite reason why the YFS thinks it is.
Also at this meeting, Fung says that Jeremy Salter, the executive director of YFS, “compared pro-lifers to the KKK”.
Considering the report UCLA pro-life students released last week about Planned Parenthood employees’ willingness to take donations for the specific purpose of killing black babies, Salter’s comparison was, um, not very well timed.
Hello everyone!
My name is Margaret and I am another one of the student guest bloggers who will be posting my pro-life news, reflections and experiences on this site. Like Christina, I am thrilled to be involved in the pro-life movement in this way and I am very grateful for the invitation to write on this blog!
I am especially excited because not only does this site give me the chance to be able to continually put in my two cents about pro-life issues, but it allows me publicize upcoming events and fundraisers being put on by my church’s new teen pro-life group, Apostles for Life, as well as other clubs in the area!
Now, let me tell you a little about myself- I am sixteen years old (seventeen later this month!) and a junior in high school. I am primarily home schooled, but I also take some classes at my local community college.
I live in a little suburb about forty minutes west of Chicago, Illinois. I am the third of five children, with one older sister and brother and two younger brothers. I have basically been involved in the pro-life movement as long as I can remember, but I did not become a passionate member until my teen years when I started discovering for myself what it means to be pro-life.
My hobbies include: playing the flute and the tuba (but never at the same time), helping teach catechism at my church, volunteering with my 4-H group, working at my part-time job, and participating in my local pro-life club.
Right now, my main focus has been working with the already mentioned pro-life club, Apostles for Life, at my church, Sacred Heart. We are currently planning a baby bottle fundraiser where the proceeds will go directly to the crisis pregnancy center Woman’s Choice Services.
For all of you who are not familiar with how a baby bottle fundraiser works, a pro-life organization passes out baby bottles for everyone to take home. Then, each individual who took a bottle fills it up with money or loose change until the bottle is full. Then everyone returns their bottles and the organization donates the money to a crisis pregnancy center or other pro-life cause.
We will be passing out bottles at all of the Masses at Sacred Heart in Lombard, IL, the weekend of March 8-9. Please pray for the success of our first fundraiser!
I hope to be able to post more soon. Until then- God bless!
Yesterday, UCLA pro-life students, led by junior Lila Rose (who made national news last year when she posed as an underage girl and secretly recorded a conversation in which a Planned Parenthood Los Angeles employee recommended that she lie about her age to avoid being reported as a victim of statutory rape, and was then threatened by PPLA with a lawsuit), have just released the latest edition [PDF] of their newspaper, The Advocate.
It’s an eye-opener:
Over the summer, The Advocate… [had] an actor call [Planned Parenthood] clinics across the country and pose as a donor. The actor… communicated… a very racist agenda, the one Margaret Sanger, PP’s founder, envisioned.
He… asked to donate money specifically for the abortions of African-American babies… to “lower the number of blacks in America.” Despite his bigoted requests, no PP employee (or director of development, in one case) declined the tainted money…. In fact, some even went as far as agreeing with the antiblack agenda….
See — and hear — for yourself: (more…)
This year’s TeenSpeak conference was excellent!
We had two incredible speakers, Dr. Anthony Levatino, a former abortionist who shared his personal story, and Scott Klusendorf who gave some great tips on how to defend the pro-life position—as well as an amazing group of teens.
You can see pictures from the conference here.
And, here are the videos we watched: (more…)
If I could only pick one word to describe the 2008 March for Life, it would be:
Huge.
I don’t have time to write much about it now, but I at least wanted to put some pictures:
