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WEST CHESTER, Ohio, June 24, 2011 (LifeSiteNews.com) – Tom Behan knows the meaning of hand cramps.

Since President Obama took office, the 17-year-old resident of a Cincinnati suburb says he has penned a steady stream of daily correspondence to the White House defending the unborn. Although he says that he hasn’t received a response for about the last 500 letters, this hasn’t stopped the high school senior, who vowed to write one letter every day, by hand, until the day Barack Obama steps out of the Oval Office.

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When the pro-abortion Obama won the November 2008 general election, “I was way too young to vote,” Behan explained to LifeSiteNews.com in a telephone interview. The lifelong pro-lifer had turned 15 a few months before.

Although powerless by political standards, his personal encounter with the beauty of an unborn child’s life – his married eldest sister has grieved two miscarriages – encouraged him to find another way to give voice to his beliefs.

“It just angered me how people in general want to get rid of their children, and my sister was trying so hard and she couldn’t [have any],” he said. “So it kind of fueled this passion that never stopped.”

In the very first letter, Behan inked his vow to keep writing until the end of the 44th presidency. The notes are shorter now, but Behan says that the first 300 or so each filled a sheet of paper front and back. Today the letters, which Behan now sends in bundles of one to two hundred, are approaching the 900 mark.

“Obviously I’ve got the president’s address stuck in my head now,” he says.

The responses, when they were still coming, were a little disappointing.

“The first ones that I got back were like, ‘Thank you for your support of the president and his inauguration’ and stuff. And I’m like, okay obviously he didn’t read it,” said Behan. He says he got about a half-dozen of those followed by a few general notes of appreciation, and then six or seven praising feedback on the “heart-wrenching issue” of abortion, before they stopped.

If he could get just one message across to President Obama, what would it be?

“I’d talk to him about how much pain abortion has caused, not only to the mother who often later regrets it, but also to other people watching,” Behan said. He also said he would mention the statistic that an estimated one third of his generation has been killed by abortion.

“That’s one third of creativity, that’s one third of human potential that has just been eradicated,” he said. “[It’s] wrong for us to take lives of those who can’t even defend themselves.”

And how about that postage bill? Behan says that ever since he first got media attention, the costs have been alleviated by pro-life donors who have sent stamps from as far as California.

“Speaking of postage, you probably should mention how much I appreciate my parents,” he says, noting that before the stamp donations his parents “had to have paid a couple hundred bucks for them.”

Behan, who turns 18 at the end of July, was dismissive when asked how readers could join the postage fund.

“I’m more interested in the readers becoming inspired to take action on their own, more than them sending stamps – I mean, because, stamps can only do so much,” he said. “If they start writing their own letters, and thousands of people write these letters, I’m sure something will happen.”