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Just this week, the University at Buffalo Students for Life group (UB Students for Life) announced that they were finally recognized as a temporary club on campus after waiting over 9 months for approval from their Student Government.

Sara Buttitta, President of the UB Students for Life group, wrote the following piece on their struggle to become a group. Their perseverance and courage are truly inspiring.

For more information about the case, visit the SFLA’s website.

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The Youth of America are the leaders of pro-life movement.  Today’s students are standing up for life more than any generation before them, and the hard work is paying off. With more and more pro-life groups starting on college campuses around the country the pro-choice movement is feeling extremely threatened, and doing their best to sabotage the growth of the pro-life clubs. This is something that the University at Buffalo Students for Life has experienced firsthand.

University at Buffalo (UB) is a large public college in New York State. The undergraduate school alone has over 20,000 students and 2 main campuses.  In February of 2010, I decided to start a pro-life club on campus.  In May of the same year, the application for recognition was handed into the school with all requirements fulfilled. Ordinarily the application to become a recognized club at UB takes only a few weeks to be processed.  However, for us the process took over 9 months.

According to the Student Association Vice President, the Student Government (SGA) was simply waiting for the club to die out.  The SGA thought that by not recognizing the pro-life group, the leaders would abandon hope and give up. The pro-life campus leaders were engaged in an uphill battle against their SGA who did their best to sabotage the group by:

– Not processing their application and claiming it was “lost”
– Not returning phone calls or e-mails
– Asking for re-wording of the constitution even though “nothing is really wrong with it”
– Not taking action on any of the clubs paperwork
– Not showing up for appointments with club officers

Clearly they weren’t aware of what they were up against with pro-life students having the support of Students for Life of America (SFLA) and the Alliance Defense Fund (ADF).  Our group was able to continue meeting and be relatively active with the help of SFLA.  Eventually in March of 2011 the UB Students for Life group came into contact with a lawyer from the Alliance Defense Fund who was able to send the UB SGA a letter without any charge to our group.  As a result, UB Students for Life was finally recognized as a temporary club and is now working towards permanent status.

The pro-choice movement in Buffalo is extremely threatened by our pro-life club’s existence. With UB being such a large campus many of the area’s abortion facilities are located near UB’s campuses.  Pro-choice demonstrators from the community who are not UB students have gone so far as to attend meetings, engage in debates with our group’s pro-life speakers, and have protest our events. The school has offered no support for our group in dealing with this matter.  However, we are not discouraged, and will continue to stand for Life on campus.