Students for Life of America (SFLA) rallied on Capitol Hill and delivered nearly 200,000 baby socks to members of Congress Wednesday as they urged lawmakers to eliminate Planned Parenthood’s taxpayer funding.
The nation’s largest organization of pro-life youth promoted its #Sockit2PP campaign in which students have been collecting baby socks for the past month. SFLA hopes to eventually collect 323,999 baby socks, to represent the number of abortions performed by Planned Parenthood last year.
“We’ve had students from California to Texas to Georgia collect and mail us baby socks to present to Congress to show that this generation wants to defund Planned Parenthood,” SFLA president Kristan Hawkins said in a statement. “They expect our elected officials to keep the promises they made during the election.”
Hawkins said the socks campaign serves as a reminder to America’s lawmakers that Planned Parenthood is “the nation’s largest vendor of abortions.”
“There is no excuse for the government to keep funding Planned Parenthood,” she said. “These socks represent all the women betrayed by the abortion industry and their preborn babies who will never be able to wear the baby socks because of Planned Parenthood.”
Among the speakers at the rally was Republican Sen. Ben Sasse (NE).
Observing the massive display of baby socks, Sasse said, “We need to have images like this so people start to reflect on the magnitude of the suffering that’s happening out there.”
“Our movement is not primarily about legislation,” the senator continued. “Our movement is not primarily about compulsion. This movement is not primarily about power. It’s about celebrating human dignity, and talking about the gift of life.”
Sasse, the lead sponsor in the Senate of the Born Alive Act – which seeks to protect babies born alive during abortion – condemned the action of Democratic National Committee chairman Tom Perez, who announced there is no room for pro-lifers in his party.
“America exists to fight for the most vulnerable,” Sasse said, noting that Perez says on his Twitter account that he is “fighting for the little guy.”
“That shouldn’t be a Republican or a Democratic proposition,” he explained. “That should be an American proposition, and that should be a human proposition.”
Sasse said that while multiple “legislative conversations” must happen, “the first thing we should try to do is persuade our brothers and sisters to look at the gift of life and the glories of what is actually happening within a womb, and the truth about the fact that that baby has dignity.”
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