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News and commentary from the Pro-Life Action League
You are currently browsing the archives for the Youth Outreach category.
With the new school year right around the corner, Generations for Life — the League’s youth outreach — has recently heard from a number of students across the country who are looking for help in getting pro-life clubs started at their high schools.
We love getting these requests, since helping get new pro-life clubs up and running is one of the main reasons GFL exists.
It’s for this reason that we created our Pro-Life Curriculum, which is designed as a manual for forming and maintaining an effective pro-life club. [Continue reading ...]
“Face the Truth” Tour outside the Art Institute [Photo by Sam Scheidler]
The mid-point of the Pro-Life Action League’s 2010 “Face the Truth” Tour was marked by the single best day in downtown Chicago in the Tour’s 11 year history.
After such a big day, time allows for only a brief recap. For more in-depth information on the day, visit our Twitter feed.
The Tour visited Lake Shore Drive at Buckingham Fountain, the Art Institute of Chicago and the pedestrian throng at Adams St. and Wacker Blvd. outside Union Station. Highlights of this fantastic day under the beautiful Chicago sun include:
After two days in Downtown Chicago, the Tour moves on to the north suburbs of Chicago tomorrow.
The Crusaders for Life are an active group of teens.
They have invited the League’s director, Joe Scheidler, and Generations for Life’s co-director, John Jansen, to speak at their meetings on several occasions. They have also been to Planned Parenthood in Chicago to pray, even saving a baby while they were there!
Their newest effort is LIFEapalooza, a gathering designed to bring pro-life teens from the Chicagoland area together to have fun and network. [Continue reading ...]
![Despite getting almost no sleep, this group joined pro-lifers Saturday at the Planned Parenthood clinic to pray for an end to abortion. [Photos by Corrina Gura]](http://prolifeaction.org/pix/2010/wyoming-group.jpg "assaulted 1")
Despite getting almost no sleep, this group joined pro-lifers Saturday at the Planned Parenthood clinic to pray for an end to abortion. [Photos by Corrina Gura]
Saturday, June 19 was a lovely day to gather outside Planned Parenthood to pray (unlike the previous couple of weeks).
Early that morning I met a youth group from Wyoming, who came to Chicago for a mission trip, at Mass at St. Mary of the Angels. Because of the storms Friday night, their plane landed in Des Moines to refuel, and they finally landed in Chicago around 2 a.m. They arrived at their hotel only to find their rooms had been given away.
Although they got about two hours of sleep each, the members of this group were looking forward to praying in front of an abortion clinic for the first time.
Over breakfast I explained the two aspects of clinic witness: sidewalk counseling and prayer. Not everyone is called to counsel (to speak to people entering the clinic) but we are all able to pray.
Lurid sex columnist Dan Savage
The Illinois Caucus for Adolescent Health is at it again.
In 2006, ICAH held its annual fundraiser at Playboy’s executive offices.
That event—view the invitation here [PDF]—included a VIP reception with Playboy CEO Christie Hefner, the daughter of Hugh Hefner, who founded the magazine in 1953. Several years ago, Christie decided that the company could make more money by producing increasingly harder-core pornography—something that even her father was reluctant to do for a long time.
The next year, their annual fundraiser featured a stripper.
At this year’s event on June 15, ICAH will be honoring sex advice columnist Dan Savage with the group’s “Sexuality Activist Award.”
The fact that Savage is being honored tells us everything we need to know about ICAH’s values and the advice they believe should be given to kids. [Continue reading ...]
Every year around this time, we receive numerous e-mails from high school and college students across the country who are seeking information on abortion for research papers they’re working on.
We expect this number to continue to grow in the next few weeks of May—a peak time for term papers.
When we receive e-mails like these, we first recommend that students check out our Q & A section.
We also offer to mail a complimentary student packet, consisting of a wide variety of pro-life literature.
If you would like one of these packets for yourself or for a student you know, fill out the contact form on the website of the League’s youth outreach, Generations for Life, and we’ll be happy to send you one.
I was privileged to give a series of talks on Saturday at the Diocese of Brownsville’s Youth Chastity and Pro-Life Conference held at St. Joan of Arc Parish in Weslaco, Texas.
The Diocese’s Pro-Life Apostolate organized the event, which attracted a crowd of over 300 teens, along with dozens of college students, young adults, and parents. As I’m primarily accustomed to speaking in classrooms or at pro-life club meetings, this was the largest group I’d ever spoken to!
An article by Sarah Kliff in the current edition of Newsweek has some sobering news for the country’s largest “pro-choice” organizations.
They’re worried about what the future holds, because they don’t see young people stepping up and rallying to their cause — and yet, that’s exactly what they do see happening on our side.
Citing new NARAL research from earlier this year, the article notes:
A survey of 700 young Americans showed there was a stark “intensity gap” on abortion. More than half (51 percent) of young voters (under 30) who opposed abortion rights considered it a “very important” voting issue, compared with just 26 percent of abortion-rights supporters; a similar but smaller gap existed among older voters, too.
After pointing out that “Millennials are more likely than their boomer parents to see abortion as a moral issue,” Kliff writes:
Millennials also came of age as ultrasounds provided increasingly clear pictures of fetal development. “The technology has clearly helped to define how people think about a fetus as a full, breathing human being,” admits former NARAL president Kate Michelman.
Quite so. Once you see a baby on ultrasound, it’s rather hard to be convinced that it’s anything other than, well, a baby.
When I wrote last month about the very successful TeenSpeak 2010 conference, I mentioned that this year’s conference included a talk titled, “The Anatomy of a Pro-Life T-Shirt,” given by League staffer Matt Yonke.
In his presentation, Matt dissected the most common styles of pro-life T-shirts, showing several examples of each. His talk served as a great jumping-off point for TeenSpeak’s first-ever Pro-Life T-Shirt Workshop.
Attendees were divided into 20 groups, and each group was given a T-shirt, a set of fabric markers, and 45 minutes to create their own pro-life T-shirt. To ramp up the competition factor, the teams were told that the winning design would be professionally printed and sold on ChristianShirts.net, and that each member of the winning team would receive one.
The competition proved tough, but in the end the judges selected the design (pictured above) by Angela Habisohn, Hannah McHugh, Mattie VanderBleek, Charlotte Seidel, and Michelle Ryan as the winner.
If you asked 100 people at random if they believed abstinence education is effective, most of them would probably say no.
Most would probably say that teaching abstinence is “unrealistic”, that it doesn’t work, and that schools should instead be teaching so-called “comprehensive” sex education.
A big part of the reason why so many people believe abstinence education is ineffective is because its opponents—not the least of which are the major players in the abortion industry and other pro-abortion choice organizations—have been relentlessly tub-thumping for years trying to convince people that it is so, such that it’s now one of those things that “everybody knows”.
And most mainstream media outlets have carried water for them every step of the way.
So ingrained in popular consciousness is this idea that when the Washington Post reported on a “landmark” study released Monday that demonstrated remarkable comparative effectiveness of abstinence education vs. so-called “comprehensive” sex education, they couldn’t bring themselves to fully admit what the research showed.