Dear Friends and Alums of U of M Students for Life,

Greetings to all! Here is your last monthly update for the 2008-2009 school year.

At the beginning of April, we hosted a screening of Bella on campus. This is a wonderful pro-life movie, and the filmmakers want to spread its hopeful message about the beauty of life so much that they paid for the rights for us to show it at U of M! If any of you have not had the chance to see this film, it should be available at your library or video rental store. It is an uplifting and much-needed movie experience. Here is the official website, if you want to check it out: http://www.bellamoviesite.com/

The next exciting April event was the Students for Life of Michigan Conference. This was a state-wide conference for all the Students for Life groups in the state of Michigan, and this year, we had the privilege of hosting it on U of M's Ann Arbor campus! We kicked off the weekend with some epic chalking of pro-life messages on the Diag, which got quite a few peoples? attention. Then we had a fun night of social activities such as a Euchre tournament to get to know each other. Saturday morning, we brought 60 students to peacefully protest and/or pray in front of the local Planned Parenthood office at 3100 Professional Drive. It was very exciting to have such a crowd?apparently, Planned Parenthood was impressed, too, because they sent 8 employees and volunteers outside to supervise. Then we headed back to campus for speakers and workshops. Among the speakers were Dr. Janet Smith and Ed Rivet. Some of the workshops offered were on growing your group, leadership, and event planning. The entire weekend was very helpful, informative, and enjoyable, and we were proud to be able to host the conference at U of M.

Our final exploit of the year was a campus-wide student group event called Goodness Day, similar to Festifall in September. When we found out that our table was off to the side near Angell Hall, away from the main paths through the Diag, we were a bit disappointed with the location. But we ended up having a lot of people come over to see our table. Right to Life of Michigan let us borrow a copy of LIFE magazine with incredible photographs of life before birth, and a set of in utero fetal models, which were real eye-catchers. We also borrowed a quiz board, with interactive questions about abortion. Under the fetal models, we had a timeline for people to place stickers at where they thought life begins. This was an excellent conversation-starter, and was also very informative for us. Although there were a few stickers under "birth" and a few others scattered between conception and birth, the overwhelming majority of the stickers were under "conception." We were very glad to observe that people understand the science, but it was disheartening to hear many people say that although they believed life began at conception, they still thought abortion should be allowed. It seems that many people realize that the fetus is a human life, but they don't believe that pre-born life is valuable enough to defend. The challenge for pro-lifers is to uncompromisingly maintain that human life at all stages is valuable and worthy of protection.

Lastly, we held elections for next year?s leadership positions. The results are:

President: Katie Falvey
Vice President: Elise Aikman
Treasurer: Ben Meyers
Secretary: Sarah Osentoski
Events Chair: Marissa Mantey
Publicity Chair: Mike Hand
Historian: Lea Wojciechowski
Webmaster: Dave Dick

Well, that's about it for the 2008-2009 year! We wish everyone a fantastic and restful summer, and look forward to next fall!

For Life,

The University of Michigan Students for Life

P.S. Lila Rose, a pro-life college student at UCLA, has launched a website where she has posted footage from going under-cover at Planned Parenthood. Her website, http://www.liveactionfilms.org/ has very disturbing proof of multiple Planned Parenthood counselors covering up statutory rape. This is something that every pro-lifer needs to know about.