Outreach to Youth Paying Huge Dividends; Kids These Days: What Motivates Young People to Get Involved in the Pro-Life Movement?

The motivations for involvement in our great Movement are as diverse as the young people themselves. But as many and varied as those reasons may be, collectively they mean that young Americans are becoming active participants in the right-to-life movement in large and enthusiastic numbers.

Some have assumed a place at the pro-life table largely because they inherited their activism as the children or grandchildren of pro-life activists. Some are students whose consciousness was raised when they were assigned to write or speak on abortion, or put down for voicing their pro-life convictions.

Others are young people who've been confronted with the reality of abortion when they helped a friend going through an unexpected pregnancy. Still others are simply teenagers or college students who have great empathy for the plight of the unborn and their mothers.

The generations of Americans born after Roe v. Wade have been uniquely affected by legal abortion. For instance, while we can never know the unborn victims of abortion, the post-Roe generations do know that between 1/2 and 1/3 of our classmates, friends, teammates, and even siblings never saw the light of day. They weren't with us in the sandboxes and playgrounds, at slumber parties and at high school proms, nor in our college dorms or graduation exercises. And they should have been.

Those of us born after Roe also know the women who have had abortions and the men who failed them in their time of need. They are our mothers, aunts, and teachers. They are also our friends, classmates, teammates, and siblings. Fifty-two percent of U.S. women obtaining abortions are younger than 25: women age 20-24 obtain 33% of all abortions, and teenagers obtain 19%. One of every five abortions is performed on college women. And 43% of American women will have at least one abortion by age 45.

Yet in spite of - - or, more likely, because of - - all this, anecdotal evidence and polling data from the last several years have revealed a clear trend: young people are becoming more and more pro-life. In the Washington Post's coverage of the annual March for Life last January 22, Manny Fernandez reported, "The event was attended by scores of teenagers and college-age students. And were it not for the signs and chants, the young people in varsity letterman jackets, dyed hair, school backpacks and pierced eyebrows would have seemed at home at a Pearl Jam concert."

For many people outside the Movement, the initial evidence that times have really changed came when they read a March 30, 2003, New York Times article entitled "Surprise, Mom: I'm Anti-Abortion." It revealed the progress the pro-life movement has made with young people. The gist of the article is that, much to the chagrin of their "pro-choice" parents' generation, more and more young people are identifying themselves as pro-life.