Your campus is not neutral ground, and the abortion industry figured that out a long time ago. Almost 79% of Planned Parenthood offices are within five miles of a college campus. More than half the women who walk in for an abortion are under 25.
Those two numbers are not a coincidence sitting next to each other. The freshman and sophomore years, when you are away from home and sorting out what you actually believe versus what you absorbed growing up, are the exact years somebody is betting you will keep your head down and your mouth shut.
You do not have to take that bet. There is a whole network out here set up for students like you, and the trick is just finding your corner of it before the loud parts of campus convince you that you are alone in this. We asked current and former students from a bunch of schools what worked. Seven things came up over and over.
1. See if your campus already has a pro-life club
Easiest first, because sometimes somebody already did the work and you just have to show up.
Check the club directory, walk the activities fair, ask at campus ministry. If there is already a chapter running, you skip the entire founding headache and walk into a room of people who are on your side. That is worth more in your first month than any amount of flyers.
These groups are not rare anymore either. Students for Life of America backs more than 1500 student groups across all fifty states. By their count there is a pro-life presence at something like 48% of private and Christian colleges and 57% of public ones. So before you assume your school has nothing, actually go look, because the odds are decent it does.
Source: Students for Life of America, 2025
2. No club yet? Try campus ministry
You will probably hit this one more than the first. The students who care are there, scattered around. What is missing is somebody to pull them together.
Walk into the Newman Center or the campus ministry office and just ask if anyone has thought about starting a pro-life group. A lot of the time you get back something like “yeah, we keep meaning to, nobody has run with it.”
And that is the opening. Being the one who runs with it sounds like a lot when you are eighteen or nineteen, but the people staffing those offices are usually praying somebody walks in and offers. You do not need a finished plan. You just have to be the one who says they will start.
3. Look past campus to the local churches
Maybe your school is a tough one. Small, secular, the ministry office is basically a closet, and the activities fair was nothing.
Okay, so look further out. The Catholic and Christian churches around campus are the next place to check, and a fair number of them run pro-life chapters already or at least know which families in the congregation are into it. The parish a few blocks off campus sometimes has what your school does not.
The work there has a different feel than the campus version too. It is more about the surrounding community, more practical, less tabling and more actual hands-on stuff with families who need it. You will not know if it fits until you sit through a couple of Sundays and see.
4. Call your local pregnancy help center
If you only do one hands-on thing off this entire list, this is the one I would point you at.
Look up the pregnancy resource center closest to campus and ask the plain question. Do you need volunteers, do you take donations, what are you short on this month. One person we talked to was in a club that went to their local center once a month and just did whatever the staff did not have time for. Not glamorous. Kind of the whole point.
It is hard to picture how much these centers actually do until you see the year laid out. In 2024 they served over a million new clients and gave away more than $452 million in goods and services, and the people who came through reported a 98 percent satisfaction rate. Most of that ran on roughly 47,000 volunteers.
The day-to-day stuff is about as basic as it gets:
- Around 6.3 million packs of diapers in one year.
- Close to 5 million baby outfits.
- Something like 1.6 million packs of wipes.
And the reason a few college kids hauling in supplies actually matters: these centers live almost entirely on donations and hand everything out free. There is no reimbursement on the back end. Whatever shows up at the door is what they have to work with that week.
Source: Charlotte Lozier Institute, 2025 National Pregnancy Center Report
5. Find a March for Life you can actually get to
Everybody pictures the big one. The national March for Life in D.C. every January, the huge crowd walking from the National Mall down to the Supreme Court. Organizers put 2025 at up to 150,000 people, and it is the largest yearly demonstration of its kind. Do it once if you ever get the chance, it is something to see.
But getting to D.C. in January is a grind, and a bus seat plus a hotel adds up fast when you are a student.
The fix is just that the national march does not have to be your only option. State and local Marches for Life have popped up all over the place the last few years. Find one you can drive to. You end up meeting the pro-life people who actually live near you, and that crowd, the ones you will keep bumping into, ends up mattering more for staying in it than one long trip you do once and never repeat.
Source: March for Life; Washington Post 2025 turnout estimate
6. Pray
No number on this one.
Prayer is the piece that never lands in any report, and for most people who stick with this stuff it is the thing holding the rest up. Keep it simple so you actually do it. A few times a week, for expectant moms and for the babies.
Hook it onto something you already do or it slips. On the walk to your morning class, or right before you fall asleep, whatever you will remember. Nobody is going to applaud you for it. The people who have been doing this twenty, thirty years will tell you it is the engine and everything else is the car.
7. Still nothing? Then you start it
You got all the way to the bottom and your campus is still empty. Fine. Then the thing that is missing is the thing you go build.
Starting a club is less than it sounds like in your head. You are not summoning forty members out of nowhere. You find three or four who care, you fill out whatever forms the school wants, and it grows from that. The Culture of Life Studies Program has a step-by-step guide for it, and Students for Life will give you a regional coordinator who has set up new chapters more times than they can count.
Point being, the scaffolding is already there. SFLA has been helping students start groups since 2006. You are not inventing anything, you are just dragging it onto a campus that somehow still does not have one.
That is the thing to sit with for a second. Every one of those fifteen hundred groups was once a single student who could not find what they wanted and decided to be it. The school with nothing right now is one stubborn freshman short of having something. No reason that cannot be you.
