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Here's the scoop: Students for the Family is trying to raise $8,000 by midnight tonight in order to fund its next conference, coming this October. Students for the Family is an offshoot of the group that put together the BYU Symposium last year which attracted 700 students! The Ruth Institute ran the highly successful essay contest at this conference.
Students for the Family do great work for strengthening and fostering the ideal family unit of a man and a woman married to each other, and the children they have and raise together.
Tipping Bucket is a grassroots fundraising social network where, for every $1 donated, $5 will be matched to it! But, if the goal of $8K is not reached, all the money donated will be returned to the donors!
If everyone receiving this newsletter today donated $1, the goal would be reached! Go right now to donate $1 (or more!) to help the future leaders of this country learn the importance of preserving natural marriage and the traditional family unit.
And speaking of deadlines....
May 31st is the last day to apply for this year's ITAF Conference. This is sure to be our best conference yet! We have more applicants than ever before, including several from Italy, Guatemala, Spain, Argentina, and Denmark! This will be an international event you won't want to miss! If you haven't done so already, apply now, or send this newsletter to young adults you know, so they can apply, too! You won't want to miss out on this exciting opportunity to learn why "It Takes a Family to Raise a Village!"
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 by Ruth Institute Board Member Helen Alvaré, Greg Pfundstein, Matthew Schmitz and Ryan T. Anderson
Do pro-lifers care about life after birth?
One of the most frequently repeated truisms of the abortion debate is that pro-lifers really don’t care about life. As much as they talk about protecting the unborn, we are told, pro-lifers do nothing to support mothers and infants who are already in the world. Liberal writers such as Matthew Yglesias are given to observing that pro-lifers believe that “life begins at conception and ends at birth.” At Commonweal, David Gibson, a journalist who frequently covers the abortion debate, asks how much pro-lifers do for mothers: “I just want to know what realistic steps they are proposing or backing. I’m not sure I’d expect to hear anything from pro-life groups now since there’s really been nothing for years.”
This lazy slander is as common as it is untrue. Of course, there is much more that needs to be done, but in the decades since Roe v. Wade, pro-lifers have taken the lead in offering vital services to mothers and infants in need. Operating with little support–and often actual opposition–from agencies, foundations, and local governments, pro-lifers have relied upon a network of committed donors and volunteers to make great strides in supporting mothers and their infants. It’s time the media takes notice.
In the United States there are some 2,300 affiliates of the three largest pregnancy resource center umbrella groups, Heartbeat International, CareNet, and the National Institute of Family and Life Advocates (NIFLA). Over 1.9 million American women take advantage of these services each year. Many stay at one of the 350 residential facilities for women and children operated by pro-life groups.
In New York City alone, there are twenty-two centers serving 12,000 women a year. These centers provide services including pre-natal care, STI testing, STI treatment, ultrasound, childbirth classes, labor coaching, midwife services, lactation consultation, nutrition consulting, social work, abstinence education, parenting classes, material assistance, and post-abortion counseling.
Religious groups also provide crucial services to needy mothers and infants. John Cardinal O’Connor, the late Archbishop of New York, famously pledged to assist any woman from anywhere experiencing a crisis pregnancy, and the current Archbishop of New York, Timothy Dolan, recently renewed Cardinal O’Connor’s pledge. The Catholic Church–perhaps the single most influential pro-life institution in the United States–makes the largest financial, institutional and personnel commitments to charitable causes of any private source in the United States. These include AIDS ministry, health care, education, housing services, and care for the elderly, disabled, and immigrants.
In 2004 alone, 562 Catholic hospitals treated over 85 million patients; Catholic elementary and high schools educated over 2 million students; Catholic colleges educated nearly 800,000 students; Catholic Charities served over eight-and-a-half million different individuals. In 2007, the Catholic Campaign for Human Development awarded nine million dollars in grants to reduce poverty. And in 2009, the Catholic Legal Immigration Network spent nearly five million dollars in services for impoverished immigrants.
The Catholic Church is far from the only pro-life religious group that assists the needy. At the Manhattan Bible Church, a pro-life church in New York since 1973, Pastor Bill Devlin and his congregation run a soup kitchen that has served over a million people and a K-8 school that has educated 90,000 needy students. Pastor Devlin and other church families have adopted scores of babies, and taken in scores of pregnant women, including some who were both drug-addicted and HIV positive. The church runs a one-hundred-and-fifty bed residential drug rehabilitation center and a prison ministry at Rikers Island. All told, the church runs some forty ministries, and all without a government dime.
Keep reading.
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