By Gabriel Dionisi, New England Regional Coordinator for Students for Life of America

Imagine this. A young woman walks onto a college campus this fall, excited to start a new chapter of life. She was raised in a Christian, pro-life household.

But at her college, she doesn’t see anyone standing up for pro-life beliefs. Professors and classmates pressure her to adopt pro-abortion opinions. After a few months, she is holding a pregnancy test in one hand and reaching for the phone to call Planned Parenthood.

It’s sad, but stories like this play out every year at schools across our nation. 

We all know how colleges can indoctrinate students with a leftist agenda. But when it comes to abortion, the consequences aren’t just badly informed citizens or bad politicians winning. It means children being killed and women deeply hurt by a predatory abortion industry. 

That’s why we need to educate people and change the culture on campuses. And that’s what we’re working to do with Students for Life of America.

Students for Life is the nation’s largest pro-life youth organization, with roughly 1,700 groups across the USA who are advocating for the dignity of every human being. Our students, ranging from Middle School all the way to Grad School, are trained to be confident leaders who can save lives.

One great example is Katherine, a Catholic high school student in Connecticut. Katherine used to have a pro-choice perspective, but converted to pro-life when she saw models of babies developing in the womb. She then founded a Students for Life group at her school. 

This past year, Katherine made a series of videos to educate her peers on pro-life topics. She reports that the video series reached 78 high school homerooms and “helped change minds on abortion that were previously closed due to a lack of proper education”.

Some other great groups include:

• The Thomas Aquinas College Students for Life group, which travels weekly to pray outside of a Planned Parenthood in Brattleboro, Vermont
• Holy Family Academy’s Pro-Life Club, which did several fundraisers and service events to support a home for pregnant mothers at risk of homelessness
• University of Southern Maine Huskies for Life, which faced harassment and threats but persevered in starting their club and brought a pro-life speaker to campus

When students see their peers respectfully advocating for the Right to Life of preborn babies, it shatters the illusion that everyone is pro-choice and forces people to confront the real issue. It also encourages students raised with pro-life values not to cave in. Just showing up wins a big victory.

We need more people to show up.

Maybe you don’t feel ready or don’t even know where to start. That’s where Students for Life comes in! We will guide you, send free resources, and visit your school to assist you in starting a pro-life club. 

If you’re thinking at all about doing this, please reach out to me at gdionisi@studentsforlife.org. Any pro-life presence at your school is better than nothing, and you might be surprised by how much good you can do with simple strategies.

For those reading this who are out of school, please encourage the students in your life to get involved. I also welcome your help to connect us with churches, youth groups, and Christian schools that would like a pro-life speaker.

The crisis of abortion is a difficult one to end, but the good news is that simple actions really save lives. Roughly 1 in 4 women in the US have an abortion at some point in their life – so changing even a handful of minds today may help save lives in the future.

The Bible says that “God did not give us a spirit of timidity, but a spirit of power and love and self-control” (2 Tim 1:7). Let’s be courageous and loving by respecting the dignity of every human life and fighting to win this next generation.