Feisty young pro-life advocates are jumping into the abortion battle, and they mean to win.

They come from middle schools, high schools, university campuses and coffee shops. Many are clean-cut, while others are tattooed and pierced, green-haired marvels. And I say, "Who cares? Welcome!"

The common thread in our pro-life patchwork quilt is a conviction that abortion is unjustifiable homicide.

Between Jan. 19-22, youth rallies join traditional demonstrations in Washington, D.C., to protest the 1973 U.S. Supreme Court decision legalizing abortion. According to the Alan Guttmacher Institute, 4,400 mini-Americans die daily. The Centers for Disease Control reports 42 million aborted babies since the court's ruling.

These fresh troops are members of the "abortion generation" – born since the 1973 verdict. They consider themselves "survivors of Roe v. Wade," says Derrick Jones, former president of Teens for Life, a national group established in 1985.

"Twenty-nine years ago, the Supreme Court declared war on a group of people," says Bryan Kemper, director of RockForLife.org, a division of the Youth Outreach Program of American Life League. "The very persons who survived the Roe decision are coming here to protest. Medical advances make what happens (during abortion) obvious."

"A third of our generation is gone," Jones adds. Holly Miller, former president of National College Students for Life (with coast-to-coast affiliates and the entire Ivy League) says, "We should leave every third seat empty in our classrooms as a reminder."

Both groups now work for National Right to Life and its 3,000 chapters nationwide, educating others on abortion alternatives and on the emotional and physical damage done to aborting mothers. Miller often places crisis-pregnancy clinic cards in women's restrooms for those contemplating abortion.

Over the last three decades, attempts were made to stop the carnage. Twice Congress approved the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act, prohibiting a procedure in which late-term infants are partially withdrawn from the mother, lanced and discarded.

President Clinton vetoed both bills, which stunned the pro-life community.

So we welcome this determined young cohort. And they are bold.

Andrea Lawyer, 15, was told to change her T-shirt or face suspension from Prosser High School in Tennessee. It read, "Abortion is Homicide – You will not silence my message. You will not mock my God. You will hear my cry and stop killing my generation."

She refused – and the district backed down.

At age 12, Kara Crawford – now a 21-year-old Catholic university student and intern at the Northwest Pregnancy Center in Washington, D.C., – tried unsuccessfully to introduce an ultra-sound video into her sex-ed class.

"There was a lot of information on the pill and abortion, but I was really irked at the complete lack of information on prenatal development," she says.

University of Notre Dame students annually erect 4,400 white crosses in a "cemetery for the innocent." Georgetown University students place 4,400 pink and blue flags on campus to lament the dead.

Adoptee John Paul Karliak, 20, of the University of Southern California is "thankful I made it" onto the planet intact. His parents were unmarried college students.

Savvy young pro-lifers use 21st century technology. "Veritas vincit omnia" (truth conquers all) is the motto of American Collegians for Life, one of many student groups that maintain sophisticated websites.

The Stanford University site begins with "A person's a person, no matter how small," from the Dr. Seuss favorite, "Horton Hears a Who." All the websites are replete with abortion-related data. A primary focus is education and lobbying to affect public policy and legislation.

A national spokeswoman for Planned Parenthood of America – the nation's top abortionist – sees pro-life youth as pipsqueaks, "marginal and poorly educated on issues. I don't give them credence." Clearly, she's ignorant of their numbers and knowledge.

The pro-lifers agree with a 1963 PPA pamphlet that states, "An abortion kills the life of the baby after it has begun" – whereas PPA now denies the personhood of unborn children.

They are not a bunch of idealistic airheads, but astute young colleagues.

They are not hoodwinked by pro-abortion rhetoric or by the legal arguments used to con a morally compromised Supreme Court 42 million deaths ago.