Since 1967 VSHL has worked closely with the General Assembly and has won many victories. Just since 1997 these include:

• Parental Notification
• Assisted Suicide Ban
• Partial-Birth Abortion Ban
• Patient Autonomy Protection Act (PAPA)
• Informed Consent
• Human Cloning Ban
• Partial-Birth Infanticide (currently court challenged)
• Parental Consent
• Protection of Infants (Safe Haven).

A study of American college freshmen shows that support for abortion rights 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% a decade earlier. A New York Times/CBS News poll in January found that among people 18-29, 39% agree that abortion should be generally available to those who want it, down from 48% in 1993!

An incredible testimony from one junior at Boston College, Kelly Kroll, said she is a survivor of abortion because she was adopted. She and her classmates have never known a world in which abortion wasn’t legalized. She has realized that she and any one of her classmates could have been aborted. The young people today believe that abortion is not a right’s issue, but a moral, ethical issue.

Even the former president of Planned Parenthood Federation of America for 14 years, Faye Wattleton, now president of the Center for the Advancement of Women, found in her own survey, only 30 percent support making abortion generally available, down from 34 percent in 2001. Ms. Wattleton stated she found these results “disturbing”! (“Progress and Perils: New Agenda for Women,” conducted by Princeton Survey Research Associates).

This is great news for the Commonwealth of Virginia and VSHL. I have known many of you from the early 1990s who worked endlessly and diligently during the General Assembly sessions helping to educate the public and legislators for common sense pro-life legislation. Being the largest grassroots pro-life organization in Virginia, VSHL continues to need your help and enthusiasm delivering the pro-life message, to your family, friends, churches and business associates. In turn, the halls of the General Assembly will hear your voice.

Won’t you support VSHL and help us continue to safeguard the laws already in place and continue to promote measures which will insure protection for all human life from conception to natural death? Use the coupon below.

Published in VSHL Lifesaver, August, 2003