Students walking through the Oregon State University campus in late April couldn’t help but notice 1,000 landscape flags planted as a “Cemetery of Innocents.” Each one represented 73,000 annual global abortions. It was the work of Students for Life at OSU, also known as “Beavers for Babies,” a pro-life student club affiliated with Students for Life of America.
“Our club this winter and spring term has been able to hold an event, display or tabling day almost every week!” says Rebecca Lang, club president and founder. “Our mission is to create a culture that values life from conception to natural death on OSU’s campus by educating our peers on life issues, creating resources supporting pregnant and parenting students, exposing the abortion industry’s method of targeting young women on our campus and offering hope and healing to people suffering from past abortions.”
Beavers for Babies currently has 16 members and has been around in some form for a decade. “The best part is we get to offer actual hope to women in our campus in real time and form ourselves with apologetics to articulate compelling arguments that actually change hearts on abortion,” Lang says. “We get to show people the truth and watch it transform their minds and their lives!”
That truth has not come without pushback, however. The Cemetery of Innocents display was vandalized, necessitating a call to the emergency campus security line. In May, during a recruiting event, a group wearing masks shouted at, insulted and tried to block anyone coming near with noisemakers, drums and signs.
“A few hours into the tabling, though, we were approached by a couple of girls from the protestors who were willing to engage in good, solid conversations about actually caring for women, and we shared our positions as well as the resources we offer to women,” Lang says. The same group told a Beavers for Babies speaker a few days later that they wished her mother had aborted her.
Even so, Lang and other Beavers for Babies members remain undeterred.
“Our biggest hope as a club is that our words, education and support are multiplied by other students on campus and that our efforts begin to snowball into actual change on campus — for women to feel like they can choose life, and that abortion would be unthinkable” she says. “We truly want to abolish abortion in our lifetime and believe that it is possible.”
For more information on Beavers for Babies, check out their Instagram page: @beaversforbabies. To learn more about Students for Life, see studentsforlife.org.
