‘It was one of the happiest days of my life.’
‘It was one of the happiest days of my life.’
E ach year, hundreds of young right-wingers flock to Washington, D.C., to hear from the great leaders of the movement at Young America’s Foundation’s National Conservative Student Conference. Notably, there was something missing from last week’s gathering — the 44th NCSC in YAF’s history. The specter of Roe v. Wade no longer haunted the attendees.
On the first full day of the conference, former vice president Mike Pence told the crowd that after “50 years of heartbreak, 50 years praying and fasting and working and volunteering and caring, last month, at long last, with the support of three Supreme Court justices appointed during the Trump–Pence administration, we sent Roe v. Wade to the ash heap of history where it belongs.”
The cheers and applause were deafening.
“My fellow conservatives,” he continued, “now it falls to this generation to take the case for life to every state and every statehouse in America.” He would go on to say, “If we save the babies, we’ll save America.”
Pence’s statement perfectly encapsulated the attitude of the students at the conference, as multiple attendees expressed to National Review both their joy at the decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health and their sense of duty in the new post-Roe world they inhabit.
“I was so happy,” said Therese Purcell, a recent graduate of the University at Buffalo, describing her feelings when she heard the news that Roe was overturned. “I ran to my family, and we started crying. It was one of the happiest days of my life.”
Another student, Nicole Gillis, a sophomore at the University of Tampa, went out for a celebratory dinner with her mother the night of the June 24 decision. “I was kind of expecting it to happen,” she said, telling NR she felt “relief” that the Supreme Court “did the right thing.”
That relief must have been palpable for the young pro-lifers, as they were all conceived in a world in which they could have been aborted. The mother of Catriona Fee, a triplet who recently graduated from the Catholic University of America, rejected advice from her doctor to reduce her pregnancy by aborting Fee or one of her siblings.
“An abortionist would have selectively murdered myself or one or two of my sisters,” Fee told NR. “And this is extremely common. And it kind of shows what abortion is. Plainly, it is the selective reduction of human life in the name of convenience.”
Though young pro-lifers rejoiced at the news of Roe’s demise, they quickly recognized that the victory in the Supreme Court was merely “the end of the beginning,” as Pence put it in his speech.
“It feels good, but there’s still a lot of work to do,” said Joseph Ramirez, a junior at California Polytechnic State University. Central to the campaign will be on-the-ground persuasion of people who are not quite ready to support bans on abortion but still warm to the pro-life position, he said.
For a starting point, the pro-life movement will need to do a better job of “reaching out to communities who already agree with us on that basic premise,” according to Ramirez. “We don’t need to make that argument to them. They believe it.”
The campaign for illegalization, however, will not discount the nongovernmental facet of the future. The next step will be to build “a pro-life movement that is completely holistically pro-life,” said Fee. Young conservatives will support life “from the moment of conception to the moment of natural death, providing resources for the women who now will choose life because [abortion] is not legal.”
Helping pregnant women turn away from abortion will be nothing new for these students and their peers. Many of the activists at the conference have already been heavily involved in the fight against abortion through their campus chapters of Young Americans for Freedom, the campus arm of Young America’s Foundation.
Purcell and Fee both regularly prayed in front of abortion clinics and volunteered at crisis pregnancy centers during their time in college with YAF and other groups, they said. As a high schooler involved with YAF, Ramirez participated in an effort to collect donations of diapers, clothes, and money for pregnant women.
“For decades, we’ve been fighting back against the horrible decision in Roe v. Wade,” said the foundation’s spokeswoman, Kara Zupkus. “We’ve done protests all around the country. And we’ve obviously been working with our Young Americans for Freedom chapters to do different activism projects surrounding pro-life” issues, she said.
YAF members’ efforts have surely strengthened their resolve and fortitude, given the pushback they receive on campus and elsewhere for their pro-life and other conservative beliefs.
In April, the University at Buffalo YAF chapter, led by Purcell, brought Allen West to campus, where he gave a speech titled “America Is Not Racist.” A mob of left-wing students disrupted the lecture and chased Purcell into a men’s bathroom, where she had to hide out and call the police, but that experience taught her a valuable lesson that she applied to abortion
“In the past weeks since Roe was overturned, once again, rather than winning through ideals, the Left has turned to trying to bully conservatives and using violence to get what they want,” she told NR. “Now more than ever, conservatives must stand up for the unborn and not cave to the Left’s use of fear and violence.”
A month later, Fee and other members of the YAF chapter she led at Catholic University were studying for final exams when a leaker released the draft opinion of the Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs. Her chapter members grabbed signs left over from January’s March for Life and gathered outside the court, where they were verbally accosted by abortion proponents while they prayed.
“The backlash that we received was insane,” Fee said. “Those videos of protesters shouting in the faces of college students praying the rosary, holding pro-life signs in front of the Supreme Court: That’s what at least a few thousand Americans saw that night and the next morning when they checked the news to see about the Dobbs case. That’s what they saw, and I think that was really impactful.”
The most active members of the pro-life generation have seen the vitriol from abortion supporters firsthand. From these experiences they derive their resolve to build on the successes of their predecessors. Those who came before them secured their right to come of age in a world without Roe. Now, grateful to their forebears, these young people will secure the right of all Americans to be born. With students like these on the front lines, abortion will not be around for much longer.