High school students across the country have started walkouts in protest that the Supreme Court may be poised to overturn Roe v. Wade and return the power to make abortion laws back to the states.
In Virginia, students at 45 high schools walked out on Monday to protest the fact that abortion, which ends the life of an unborn child, would no longer be considered a constitutional right if Roe were to be overturned, as a leaked opinion draft by Justice Samuel Alito indicates.
High school junior Felix Hedberg and Generation Ratify Virginia policy director at Open High School said that young Virginians were not going to let Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin and state Republicans make Virginia “a commonwealth against abortion access.”
“It’s time to listen to youth. Virginia was the 38th state to ratify the ERA, shining the spotlight on Virginia in the movement for gender equality and reproductive justice,” Hedberg claimed.
Students in Wisconsin also protested the potential Roe reversal claiming that their “rights” were being threatened.
“As people with uteruses and as young people we are already so afraid of people taking control of our bodies,” said one sophomore at Oregon High School, in Oregon, Wisconsin.
While some young people are seemingly upset about the outcome of the upcoming Supreme Court ruling, the news comes just months after the annual March for Life in Washington, D.C, which generally attracts thousands of young pro-lifers many of who hold signs declaring things like “I am the pro-life generation.”
Prominent pro-life group Students For Life says it has trained 127,000 advocates for life since 2006 and focuses on starting pro-life groups at campuses across the country with the purpose of abolishing abortion.
“For so long in the pro-life movement, everyone had a youth outreach division, but it was a secondary thing,” Students for Life President Kristan Hawkins said back in 2018, according to The Catholic Spirit. “Our entire organization is focused on developing the pro-life generation because we realize these are the people being directly targeted by abortion.”
The student protests come as pro-abortion groups across the country take to the streets to protest Alito’s leaked opinion draft. Protesters have shown up outside the homes of Supreme Court Justices Brett Kavanaugh and John Roberts.
Some of the backlash may be getting violent as several pro-life centers have been targeted by vandals and arsonists across the country in states including Wisconsin and Maryland in recent days.
“Unfortunately, this is not the first time our center has been vandalized. We were previously vandalized twice in 2014 in the same manner. These acts of vandalism are an attempt to intimidate our staff and volunteers; and to mislead our clients,” Linda King, the director of a pregnancy care clinic in Frederick, Maryland, told The Daily Wire.