College and high school students and young people of all ages will be wearing pro-life T-shirts to school next week as a part of National Pro-Life T-shirt Week, sponsored by the pro-life group American Life League.
Participating youth can have fun, change some hearts, and maybe win some great prizes just for submitting photos of themselves wearing pro-life T-shirts around town, at school or around their homes with friends and family. Tom Mon, vice president at the pro-life organization explained that it wants pro-life youth to do more than wear a shirt — he hopes they will take their T-shirts to different places to ensure people get the pro-life message.
“You earn points for photos of completing any one of hundreds of listed tasks while wearing any pro-life t-shirt. The more tasks completed, the higher the points,” he said. “This contest is the most fun I get to have all year.”
The contestant who scores the most points by sending in photos of different completed tasks wins a new iPad 2. Second and third place winners will receive iPod Touches while even fourth and fifth place finishers will win iPod Shuffles. The 300 pro-life t-shirt wearing contest tasks range from the mundane (brushing your teeth) to the quite creative (“Cooking the Books” at a library) to the somewhat weird in public (like standing on a chair at a mall holding an umbrella in the air).
This year’s official ALL pro-life t-shirt shows a sonogram emblazoned simply “I am a Person.” It is getting a great response with thousands purchased but any pro-life t-shirt, even homemade, will qualify as long as it has the phrase on the shirt to let people know about the humanity of unborn children,
Seven years ago, the organizers of the Rock for Life youth pro-life group came up with the idea for a national pro-life t-shirt day. Since the idea has become so popular with the youth and young adults — who polls often show are more pro-life than their parents — organizers expanded the day to a full week.
The event takes place from April 12 through April 18 and pro-life students are encouraged to wear their favorite pro-life t-shirts every day that week or as many days as possible. [related]
Some students have encountered problems from school officials in wearing the shirts and they have been forced to remove them or sent home from school.
However, pro-life legal groups like the Alliance Defense Fund and Thomas More Society have provided free legal support for students and their families. In most cases, they’ve been successful in getting school officials to back down or restore the First Amendment rights of pro-life students wearing t-shirts against abortion.