Teenagers are Becoming More Pro-Life Than Their Parents
>
> New York, NY -- For her high school class in persuasive speech, Afton
> Dahl, 16, chose to present an argument that abortion should be illegal.
> She described the details of various abortion techniques, including facts
> about fetal heart development.
>
> "The baby's heartbeat starts at around 12 to 18 days, so it's murder to
> kill someone with a heartbeat," Miss Dahl said recently, recalling the
> argument she used in class in January. "I don't believe in abortion under
> any circumstances, including rape. I think it would be better to overturn
> Roe v. Wade."
>
> Dahl, a sophomore, attends Red Wing High School in Red Wing, Minn., a
> small city that is the home of Red Wing shoes and a town where a majority
> voted for Al Gore for president. Dahl's abortion views are not something
> she learned from her parents: her mother, Fran Dahl, 47, maintains that
> abortion should be "a woman's choice."
>
> "Nowadays kids don't grow up knowing or being aware of what was going on
> when abortion was illegal," said Ms. Dahl, a former nurse. "It's not a
> choice that I would have taken personally, but for the future of women I
> want to see the right to an abortion maintained."
>
> This contrast between mother and teenage daughter illustrates a trend
> noted in polls: that teenagers and college-age Americans are more pro-life
> about abortion than their counterparts were a generation ago. Many people
> old enough to have teenage children and who equate youth with liberal
> social opinions on topics like gay rights and the use of marijuana for
> medical purposes have been surprised at this discovery. Miss Dahl was one
> of numerous students in her class who chose to make speeches about
> abortion, and most took the pro-life side.
>
> "I was shocked that there were that many students who felt strong enough
> and confident enough to speak about being pro-life," said Nina Verin, a
> parent of another student in the class (whose oral argument was about war
> in Iraq). "The people I associate with in town are pro-choice, so I'm
> troubled - where do these kids come from?"
>
> A study of American college freshmen shows that support for abortion has
> been dropping since the early 1990's: 54 percent of 282,549 students
> polled at 437 schools last fall by the University of California at Los
> Angeles agreed that abortion should be legal. The figure was down from 67
> percent a decade earlier. A New York Times/CBS News poll in January found
> that among people 18 to 29, the share who agree that abortion should be
> generally available to those who want it was 39 percent, down from 48
> percent in 1993.
>
> Experts offer a number of reasons why young people today seem to favor
> stricter abortion laws than their parents did at the same age. They
> include the decline in teenage pregnancy over the last 10 years, which has
> reduced the demand for abortion. They also cite society's greater
> acceptance of single parenthood; the spread of ultrasound technology,
> which has displayed the humanity of the unborn child; and the easing of
> the stigma once attached to giving up a child for adoption.
>
> "Young people think sacrifice is a good thing, particularly conservative
> Christian kids. One of the main sacrifices you can give is the gift of a
> child to a deserving couple," said Frances Kissling, president of
> "Catholics" for a Free Choice, a pro-abortion group.
>
> The most commonly cited reason for the increasingly pro-life views of
> young people is their receptiveness to the way pro-life advocates have
> reframed the national debate on the contentious topic, shifting the
> emphasis from a woman's rights to the rights of the unborn child.
>
> Abortion opponents celebrated on March 13 when the Senate passed a ban on
> partial-birth abortion; the bill is expected to pass the House quickly and
> be signed by President Bush, and to immediately face a court challenge.
> Even though the procedure is used in only a tiny fraction of cases,
> graphic descriptions of it since the mid-90's, and even the name its foes
> have given it (doctors call it dilation and extraction), have had an
> impact on young people.
>
> "There's been so much media attention over the last seven to eight years
> on partial-birth abortion, we shouldn't be surprised that some of it has
> had an effect on 12-to-14-year-olds, and it is a public relations coup for
> the National Right to Life Committee," said David J. Garrow, a legal
> historian at Emory University who has focused on reproductive rights.
>
> Britni Hoffbeck, another speech student at Red Wing High who opposes
> abortion, and who says her views are more pro-life than those of her
> parents, put her argument succinctly: "It's more about the baby's rights
> than the woman's rights."
>
> Tom Cosgrove, a communications consultant in Cambridge, Mass., who has
> researched the views of young people for national pro-abortion groups,
> said: "All the restrictions that the right-to-life movement has imposed
> young people look at and say, `They're a good thing, because it's meant to
> protect a young woman's health.' They don't want the label of pro-choice.
> The pro-life side figured out a long time ago that this is about children,
> whereas the pro-choice movement is focused on women and choice."
>
> Some young people who oppose abortion, and who were born after the Roe v.
> Wade decision in 1973 declared that were is a constitutional right to
> abortion, have adopted a new rhetoric.
>
> One of them is Kelly Kroll, a junior at Boston College and president of
> American Collegians for Life, who says she is a "survivor of the abortion
> holocaust" because she was adopted. "Myself and my classmates have never
> known a world in which abortion wasn't legalized," she said. "We've
> realized that any one of us could have been aborted. When I talk about
> being a survivor of abortion, I am talking about it from a personal
> place."
>
> Some parents trace their teenagers' pro-life views to sexuality education
> programs that stress abstinence as the only way to prevent pregnancy and
> disease. Since 1996 the federal government has budgeted $50 million
> annually to "abstinence only till marriage" programs, which are taught in
> 35 percent of public schools in the country, according to the Alan
> Guttmacher Institute, affiliated with Planned Parenthood.
>
> Renee Walker gave permission for her seventh-grade son to participate in
> such a program last fall in his public school in Concord, Calif. But she
> said she became alarmed when, reviewing his class notes, she found a list
> of the disadvantages of abortion, including the circled words "killing a
> baby." He said he had been told abortion "tears the arms and legs off."
>
> Walker sent a letter of complaint to officials of the school district,
> Mount Diablo Unified School District, expressing her surprise that the
> abstinence curriculum had been created by First Resort, a crisis pregnancy
> center. "Most parents are busy, doing laundry, running around like me, and
> we're trusting the schools to reflect public policy," she said.
>
> The district agreed with Walker about the First Resort program and it
> asked for, and got, modifications, she said.
>
> If today's teenagers and young adults maintain their views on abortion
> into older adulthood, and if succeeding waves of students are also
> pro-life, the balance could tip somewhat in the America's long-running
> abortion war, some experts speculate.
>
> It's unclear whether the shift will ever be substantial enough to change
> the centrist position of many Americans of all ages: that abortion should
> be legal, but with restrictions. In Red Wing, the certainty of the
> youthful opinions of the students reminded their speech-lcass teacher,
> Jillynne Raymond, of an earlier generation's certainty - her own.
>
> "Teenagers have strong opinions," Ms. Raymond, 41, said. "It's no
> different than the 70's when I was a teenager, but the difference is that
> the majority of speeches then were pro-choice. I wanted the right to an
> abortion as a woman."
>
> "Today," she said of her students, "the majority is pro-life."
>
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