Walker Wildmon
AFA vice president
December 2015 – If I asked what the greatest atrocity in human history is, most would say the holocaust, maybe Rwanda, or the first and second World Wars. Very few would likely say abortion. According to the World Health Organization, in 2008 there were an estimated 43.8 million abortions worldwide. That is one in every five pregnancies ending in abortion around the globe. If these estimates are accurate, more babies were killed in 2008 than all nations combined lost during World War I. A total of 37.5 million soldiers died during WWI while in 2008 alone, over 40 million babies were aborted. The assertion that abortion is the greatest atrocity in human history is not debatable.
One movement to counter abortion is Students For Life, America’s largest and most active pro-life organization for students. SFL was founded in the late 1970s as a student-run volunteer organization that hosted annual conferences. Since 2006, SFL has been training and organizing pro-life groups and chapters across the U.S.
Last January my brother Wesley and I attended a Students For Life conference on behalf of AFA. We attended the East Coast conference in Glenarden, Maryland, about 15 minutes outside Washington, D.C. Almost 2,500 high school and college age attendees from across the country were there. SFL president Kristan Hawkins opened the conference reading a letter that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. had written while jailed in Birmingham, Alabama, during the civil rights protests of the 1960s.
Dr. King wrote, “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.” That letter resonated with the prolife students because the injustice of abortion in America threatens justice across the world, because the killing of babies in America sets the pace for killing babies worldwide. Speakers included Lila Rose, president of Live Action, who opened her speech with the startling statistic that nearly 3,000 babies are aborted every day in the United States.
As Wesley and I stood in the halls of Glenarden First Baptist Church, we were amazed at the number of students who are in this fight for life. We were also saddened that it is legal to kill innocent babies in a mother’s womb.
The abortion issue had never hit home with me as it did at the SFL conference. I knew the politics of it, but I had never recognized the darkness behind it. There is much to be said about abortion and the devastating effects it has on our culture. The American family has to continue to fight for these children in the womb who have no voice of their own.
Some may claim the Millennial generation is out of touch with the abortion issue. Not so. I think today’s Millennials may be more engaged on the issue of abortion than any other generation has ever been. Engaging in conversation with student after student at the conference helped me realize that AFA isn’t alone in this fight for life. There are organizations, students, and adults across the nation who recognize this truth: Life begins at conception. AFA will again have representatives at the 2016 Students For Life conference with the goal of supporting the pro-life movement and engaging students in defending he sanctity of life. 
2016 SFL Born to Win conferences
▶ East Coast January 23, Glenarden, Maryland $45 student
▶ West Coast January 24, San Francisco, California $40 student
Information/registration: http://sflalive.org
