A New Generation Gap (Pro-abortion parents are discovering they have pro-life kids)

townhall ^ | April 9, 2003 | Chuck Colson

[TLBSHOW]

A New Generation Gap

Chuck Colson

As part of her coursework in persuasive speech, Afton Dahl had to make a presentation about a controversial issue. Dahl, a sixteen-year-old sophomore at Red Wing High School in Minnesota, chose abortion. "I think it would be better," she told her classmates, "to overturn Roe v. Wade."

Dahl was not just repeating what she heard in her pro-life, Christian home. In fact, her remarks came as a shock to her thoroughly pro-choice mother. But they are a hopeful sign that pro-life arguments have not fallen on deaf ears.

Dahl was not the only person in her class to make a pro-life presentation. As Dahl's teacher, Jillynne Raymond, told the New York Times, the "majority" of her students are pro-life.

This comes as a real surprise in Red Wing, which voted for Al Gore in 2000. One resident described herself as "shocked" at the pro-life sentiment among the town's kids and asked, "Where do these kids come from?"

The answer: They are just kids from Red Wing whose attitudes are consistent with national trends. Among young Americans, support for the pro-choice position has been dropping for the past decade. In 1993, 48 percent of eighteen- to twenty-nine-year-olds polled by the New York Times agreed that "abortion should be generally available to those who want it." Today, that number is down to 39 percent. A social scientist observed that young people today no longer see abortion as a "rights" issue, but as a "moral, ethical issue." That's good news.

And not surprisingly, abortion-rights advocates are trying to explain away these findings. Some argue that young women, never having "faced a situation where they couldn't get an abortion," take the right to abortion for granted. But they're not taking it for granted. They're explicitly rejecting that so-called "right."

An even more desperate pro-abortion explanation is that the shift is due to sex-ed programs stressing abstinence that "demonize abortion." In this conspiratorial account, children are being indoctrinated behind their busy parents' backs. As one pro-choice parent told the Times, "An anti-choice critter [jumped] out of my son's backpack and [ran] around my house." Really?

I suppose thinking that he has been brainwashed is easier than admitting that he thinks that you are wrong.

But that is what is happening. When Dahl told her classmates that "the baby's heartbeat starts at around twelve to eighteen days," she demonstrated that our arguments have taken hold. Likewise, when her classmate said that the abortion issue is "more about the baby's rights than the woman's rights," we can see that our efforts to shift the terms of the debate have borne fruit.

What's happening in Red Wing and across the country is a reminder to the pro-life side that being in this battle for the long haul pays off. Just because one generation of women regards Roe as sacrosanct does not mean that we cannot reach their children with rational, moral arguments.

What's happening in Red Wing should inspire Christians to take advantage of groups like Stand to Reason, an excellent apologetics ministry specifically equipping kids to understand and defend pro-life arguments—arguments that are creating a new generation gap, one in which being young means choosing life.

[1stFreedom]

I know quite a few people who are pro-abortion.

My sister-in-law wrote a pro-life essay as a senior in High School. She was brought up Catholic and so forth.

Her friend got pregnant while in college and had an abortion. My sis-in-law already knew the facts of life. Because of her experience with her friend, it changed her values. This happens time and time again.

The opposite happens also, but only with help from pro-lifers working on campus. In my years of placing newspaper inserts into campus newspapers, dorm literature drops, showing of videos, and public displays, I saw people's hearts changed -- and others hardened.

It is true the facts do break through the abortion distortion. But many young women who have abortions know the facts. They simply rationalize it away and have their baby's killed.

IMO, pro-life and abstinence education have really helped in turning peoples minds around.

However, I really give credit to the recent reduction in abortions and pro-life sentiment to the drop in demand for abortion.

This drop in demand comes from the fact that many people are avoiding risky sexual behavior. Abstinence, "alternative sex" (oral sex,etc) , and prophylactic usage were/are on the rise.

Like it or not, increased prophylactic usage has led to a reduction in pregnancies and HIV transmission.

IMO, People have reduced "unintended" pregnancies out of self preservation. That's extremly sad. All the years of protesting, sitting in, carrying posters of dead babies, and sidewalk counseling didn't have a dent in saving babies compared to the realization that one could die from catching AIDS.

It's so sad because people didn't abstain or avoid pregnancy out of concern for the life of an unborn baby. They stopped getting pregnant because they wanted to avoid catching HIV and dying of AIDS.

The college campus has seen a reduction in the demand for abortion for the same reasons. But it is still the college campus, where KIDS are unsupervised, that hearts are turned from pro-life values. Kids are alone for the first time, and their only real guidance in emergencies are their peers.

Experience with an "unplanned" pregnancy in college has a tremendous erosive effect on peoples values. One can't reason with someone about abortion who has been affected by it. It's one of the reasons why the pro-abortion groups stress experience and relationships. Facts don't overcome friendships. Friends gloss over abortions and instead of ending a friendship they reduce their values so as to continue the friendship.

My sister in law is pro-abortion because her friend had an abortion in college. Since her friendship is so valueable, the only way she maintained that friendship is to accept what her friend did.

Kids have to be taught that friends don't drive friends to abortion clinics. I've seen tons of people, with WWJD strings or rosaries hanging from the rear view mirror, drop friends off for abortions. Friends don't tolerate friends killing babies. Friends don't drop their friends baby off to be butchered. Friends don't change their values because of the behavior of others. Yet we aren't teaching these values to our kids.

IMO, the battle has been and still remains the college campus.