Thursday November 11, 2010
Burgeoning European Pro-Life Youth Movement Gets Major Boost at Irish Conference
By Hilary White
DUBLIN, November 11, 2010 (LifeSiteNews.com) – On Friday, November 5, a group of pro-life young people from around Europe and the U.S. kept a prayerful vigil outside Dublin’s Marie Stopes abortion referral agency. Women who come to Marie Stopes are frequently referred for abortions in the UK.
The vigil was organised by Youth Defence, Ireland’s leading pro-life activist group, as part of their Viva la Vida youth conference, November 5-7.
A group of smiling young Belgian students, all of whom had recently attended their country’s first ever march for life in Brussels this summer, said they had come to Dublin to “learn arguments” to defend the pro-life position, “and to learn the truth about life.”
“We are Youth For Life in Belgium. There are not a lot of us, but sometimes we do marches for life in other countries to support them. I think we can learn a lot from each other and from Youth Defence. In Belgium the pro-life movement has just started.”
The Dublin conference was the group’s “first ever” pro-life conference and they were not sure what to expect. They had come, simply, “to get to know more pro-life people, to share experiences, get new ideas.”
The Belgians had been visited by Bryan Kemper, the American pro-life evangelical founder of Stand True Ministries and Rock for Life, who spoke at the Brussels march and encouraged them to attend the Dublin conference.
“We absolutely had no idea what to expect,” they said. “We kind of took the right plane and suddenly we found ourselves standing at Dublin’s airport.
In a note to organisers, the Belgian group wrote, “The Youth Defence people are so full of energy and pro-life passion that it was impossible to stay insensitive to it. We returned to Belgium with a feeling of regret that this fantastic weekend had passed so quickly, but with more hope than ever, thousands of new ideas and a lot of new friends for life.”
Leo Cleary, a Dublin Friday regular, said that he was grateful to see so many young people joining them.
Chris Pembroke is also a regular and said that just being present outside Marie Stopes “makes a difference.” “It’s a message. You’re telling the truth, you’re standing up for the truth about the human person.”
Michael Botzke, a pro-life child psychologist and organiser of Jugend für das Leben, (Youth for Life) came to the conference with his brother and sister from Munster, Germany. He described his work with children and teenagers who suffer emotional turmoil as the after effects of the new sexual mores.
Botzke said of the conference, “The high quality of the talks and the personal example and fire of many young pro-lifers were a big encouragement for us.”
The conference featured US, Irish and British pro-life luminaries, including Jill Stanek, the nurse who revealed the practice at the hospital where she worked of leaving babies who had survived abortion to die untreated. Stanek was instrumental in the passage of the U.S. Unborn Infants Protection Act.
She described Youth Defence as “savvy,” and praised the “work, and enthusiasm” of Youth Defence leaders and the European group leaders.
“I’m so grateful they invited me to speak. They had not one unkind word to say about any other pro-life group. Their entire focus was on saving the preborn.”
Two American girls from Rochester, New York, said they had come all the way to Ireland to attend the conference, staying in Dublin for five days. Catrina Furth, a 22-year-old biology researcher studying song birds at the University of Rochester, said that life as a pro-life scientist working in academia is not easy.
“I had to leave one job because I didn’t realise that it was getting into second trimester foetal stem cells. As soon as I found out, I quit, and it was actually really hard because I was unemployed for six weeks.
“But other than that, there’s a lot of internal pressure from people who think that stem cells are the wave of the future…But it makes me think, isn’t this just more proof that these are human beings?”
Furth said she had not been involved actively in the pro-life movement for long, “but I’ve come all the way to Ireland, so I guess this is serious now.”
Another, a 19-year-old American, said she had attended both the March for Life in Washington and a pro-abortion rally. “That was terrifying. It was really scary. They throw things at you and come and yell at you and take your signs away.” She said one of her friends, a young man, was attacked.
She contrasted the reaction of pro-abortion Irish: “The worst I’ve seen here is someone push over one of our signs. And he was just really grumpy about life in general. That’s the worst I’ve ever seen.”