By Jonathan Rogers

Jonathan Rogers

Last week, I had the honor and pleasure of being invited out to the "North" Camp of Wisconsin Teens for Life, directed by the eminent Joleigh Little. You've probably read Joleigh's stories in National Right to Life News where her expertise and passion for bringing teenagers into the Right to Life Movement comes shining through. (And if you haven't, then you're not signed up for the NRL News, and should be).

A pro-life camp isn't just a fun way to spend a week, it's doubling down on the Right to Life Movement's long term commitment. We don't just work against to defend innocent life "at the point of contact" through legislative battles and elections. Ending abortion on demand and ensuring adequate protections for innocent life that ultimately require building a pro-life culture.

Might as well start with the kids then. Here are a few notes and observations from the week.

A college professor of mine once remarked to me that "teenagers want to be rebellious, so why not make them rebellious for the right reasons?" While it's becoming more and more common for our youngsters to be more pro-life by inclination, the reigning cultural message from schools and organizations is still that "choice" is ok. Take that teenage impulse to contravene the dominant social message, and show them how to defend innocent life with it.

Who says all kids today don't care about learning? The kids recruited to Camp all showed an enthusiasm and eagerness to learn, taking notes and asking questions. I spent a couple evenings sitting around with them discussing the political process, even while the evening activity movie played in the background. After a full day's routine of session after session, some of the kids still wanted to know how a legislative alert can help influence legislators on a critical vote.

The camp program is extremely comprehensive. During the week virtually all topics relevant to the pro-life movement were covered. Not just abortion and the straightforward medical facts and statistics. Not just the legal issues involved and the history of the pro-life movement. Not just the current agenda of the pro-abortion administration in Washington and the previous victories of the pro-life movement. Not just introductions to euthanasia, assisted suicide, and embryonic stem cell research.

All these were covered, and then expanded upon, with sessions on the history of legalized euthanasia in the Netherlands, comparisons to other social movements in history, the connection between Margaret Sanger, racism, eugenics, and the current culture of abortion on demand. Covering all the life issues in this holistic fashion helps show their interrelatedness, how easy it might be to go from being in favor of eugenics, to favoring "choice" as birth control, to wanting to disregard the elderly and disabled. Presenting the entire picture rather than individual snapshots of issues helped the kids better understand the underlying evil, and how to better fight it.

Camp also equips kids to actively combat the evils threatening innocent life. With sessions on the importance of pro-life laws, on elections, on the priority of educating those around us, the campers were given a full fledged grounding in how to become the leaders of the next generation of pro-lifers that we will need them to be.

And I just got to loaf around (Joleigh's fantastic camp team ran the whole show effortlessly it seemed), and feel encouraged about that next generation. A full week of sessions, lectures, activities, and games for over two dozen enthusiastic young teenagers--and me!

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