If you haven't done so yet, be sure to visit ALL's newly enhanced web site! Live videos and pictures from the Training and Activism Weekend, multimedia videos, a current events blog and timely articles written by ALL staff are just some of the new features we have included. An updated Associate Program page is in the works as well. If you have ideas or suggestions for what you, as an ALL Associate, would like to see, be sure to let me know!
Of course, all of the essential pro-life educational material you need to fight the culture of death is still there as well as links to ALL projects such as Rock for Life, STOPP and Celebrate Life. If you haven't yet read the January-February issue of our magazine, you need to! There are several strategic articles that will help you to save lives. ALL's staff attorney, Andrew Flusche, makes the case for suing birth control manufacturers, senior editor Anita Crane interviews the "fiercely pro-life" Judge Andrew Napolitano and scientist Peter Hollands begins a new column on understanding stem cell science. Send the link to all of these articles and more to your family and friends.
In addition to the new features on our site, we wanted to let you know that all of the presentations from the Training and Activism Weekend are now posted and available.
It was a great pleasure to see so many of you—and to meet some for the first time—in Washington, D.C. during the Training and Activism Weekend. As has been noted in numerous articles, the number of youth who attended both the TAW and the March itself was quite amazing. The fact that there are so many pro-life youth in our society today not only gives us hope for future generations, but it should also bring us some measure of comfort that we are indeed passing on the torch, so to speak, to very vibrant and determined young people who will undoubtedly continue the fight with passion and perseverance. Pray that they won't need to continue the fight for long.
A number of ALL Associate groups are, once again, participating in the second national 40 Days for Life Campaign, which will begin on Ash Wednesday, February 6 and continue throughout the season of Lent. Please keep all of those involved in 40 Days for Life in your thoughts and prayers.
Tip of the Month – Ideas for pro-life activities
By ALL Staff
Set up a pro-life cemetery
Erect a field of crosses to represent the number of children who have been killed by surgical and chemical abortion or gravestones to represent the women who have been killed by "legal" abortion. If possible, display the cemetery in high-traffic areas that many people walk or drive past. Also, if the cemetery is located in an area where many pedestrians cross, you may want to have members of your group distribute flyers explaining the cemetery.
(Pro-Life Ohio and Central Nebraskans United for Life have both been involved in similar projects and could provide ideas, suggestions or assistance.)
Provide health education services to schools and school clinics
Over the years, Planned Parenthood has, unfortunately, been highly successful in building a reputation as a provider of health and sex education programs and services for various schools, school systems and other organizations involved in educating our children. It's time a concerted effort was made to provide an antidote to the poison Planned Parenthood has poured into the educational system.
Your organization might develop a pro-life health and sex education program that could be used by elementary, middle/junior high and high schools. You might focus on colleges and universities and the health clinics serving them.
Develop a complete "off-the-shelf" teaching packet to be used by individual schools or entire school systems.
(Movement for a Better America has a very well-developed and highly successful program for teens and California Right to Life Education Fund sponsors an information table in a local shopping mall, which has been very helpful in reaching out to youth.)
Aid the sick and elderly
Organize regular visits to nursing homes and hospitals. These visits can be fun and interesting, if approached with an upbeat attitude. They will also remind your members that human beings require full respect at all stages of life.
Look into providing "Meals on Wheels," hospice or other assistance services to the sick and elderly. Depending on services already available within your community, this might mean working with other organizations already providing these services, to expand your collective reach. In other communities, it might require you to start the services "from scratch."
Correspondence
Your organization, or you as an individual, can contact your legislators and urge them to vote for life. Submit letters to the editor of the local newspaper and to radio and television stations, to educate the public and refute any pro-abortion, pro-euthanasia, pro-suicide and pro-death articles, stories, editorials, reports, programs, etc. they publish or broadcast.
Contact companies that support anti-life efforts and express your disapproval. Organize letter-writing campaigns in your church, office or among your pro-life friends. If we can stop even one company from contributing to the pro-death cause, it will mean lives saved.
Most importantly, do something!
We hope this section has given you some ideas for ways to help in the pro-life fight. Even if you didn't find any ideas that fit in exactly with your organization's goals, objectives or "personality." hopefully, we've got you thinking. The important thing is to find a need and fill it. And as we've said before, if you come up with some ideas that might spur others in this fight, please let us know.
News
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Alert over jab for girls as two die following cervical cancer vaccination
A jab that could be given to hundreds of thousands of schoolgirls this autumn was at the centre of a safety scare last night following the deaths of two young women.
European regulators are investigating the "sudden and unexpected" deaths of the women who received Gardasil, one of two jabs to protect against cervical cancer licensed for use in the UK.
A huge state-owned Chinese pharmaceutical company that exports to dozens of countries, including the United States, is at the center of a nationwide drug scandal after nearly 200 Chinese cancer patients were paralyzed or otherwise harmed last summer by contaminated leukemia drugs.
The drug maker, Shanghai Hualian, is the sole supplier to the United States of the abortion pill, mifepristone, known as RU-486. It is made at a factory different from the one that produced the tainted cancer drugs, about an hour's drive away.
The United States Food and Drug Administration declined to answer questions about Shanghai Hualian, because of security concerns stemming from the sometimes violent opposition to abortion. But in a statement, the agency said the RU-486 plant had passed an F.D.A. inspection in May.
Two of the nation's most influential pro-abortion leaders have admitted publicly that the pro-life movement has convincing arguments that pro-abortion forces have no response to. In an opinion piece published by the Los Angeles Times on January 22nd, Frances Kissling and Kate Michelman write that the phrase "culture of life," coined by Pope John Paul II, has had a significant impact.
British scientists have been given the go-ahead to begin potentially ground-breaking experiments using injections of stem cells to repair patients' damaged hearts. The team hopes to repair the organs of people who have suffered the most severe heart attacks.
In what's being called a major advance in organ transplants, doctors say they have developed a technique that could free many patients from having to take anti-rejection drugs for the rest of their lives. The treatment involved weakening the patient's immune system, then giving the recipient bone marrow from the person who donated the organ.
A new vision research center in India becomes the latest in a handful of facilities dedicated to exploring the potential of adult eye stem cells to repair vision damage. The Champalimaud Center for Translation Eye Research will continue research begun by LV Prasad scientists, who use eye stem cells from living adults to grow new cells that are then implanted into damaged eyes.
Spinal cord injury sufferers have been given fresh hope of improved movement with the first Australian trial of a new adult stem cell treatment.
Closing thought
This is what the Sovereign Lord says: "I will take the top of a tall cedar and break off a tender sprout; I will plant it on a high mountain, on Israel's highest mountain. It will grow branches and bear seed and become a magnificent cedar. Birds of every kind will live there and find shelter in its shade. All the trees in the land will know that I am the Lord."
– Ezekiel 17:22-24