Gods of this age

Three years ago, Nicole Gibson was traveling with her family in Thailand when a missionary friend described to her a Buddhist temple built on human skulls.

"It was very disturbing because there's still human sacrifice going on in these countries," Gibson said. "They believe young children are innocent, so they sacrifice young children...These people don't realize there's a value to life."

But when she returned home after nine months, the Virginia Beach teen realized the same thing was happening in America. "Nothing seems so barbaric as the slaughter of innocent children, yet our civilized, sanitized culture freely condones this practice every day it allows abortion to continue, unopposed," Gibson, now 18, told a group of around 200 people at the closing banquet of the National Right to Life Convention last month. "Our gods are no longer stone figures and metal statues; they are ideas, concepts, promises and entitlements."

Gibson, a high school senior, took first place in the National Right to Life Committee's Jane B. Thompson Oratory Contest, held June 23-24 in Jacksonville, Fla. She competed against 20 other high school juniors and seniors representing state pro-life groups around the country and took home a $1,000 award.

"Miss Gibson gave a flawless presentation," said Olivia Gans, President of the Virginia Society for Human Life. "We are jubilant at Nicole's outstanding performance in defense of the dignity and value of every of human life, from conception to natural death, including the unborn child."

Gibson's speech confronted America's "entitlement culture," where "everything you need, everything you want, everything that would make your life more convenient is... something to which you have a right"-- even if that means ending another human life. She said that rhetoric is key to winning the abortion debate because pro-abortion advocates have tried to redefine the issue, painting pro-lifers as "abortion rights opponents."

"It is bad to be anti-choice, but it's far worse to be anti-life," Gibson said in her presentation.

"We need to appeal to those who disagree with us and make them agree with our views for their reasons," she told WORLD Virginia. "It's more important to show people on the fence that an unborn child is human... because some people don't think of [abortion] as even morally wrong or bad."

Gibson, a recent home school graduate, plans to study government at Regent University in the fall.

Because her dad was in the military, she spent much of her life living overseas in places such as Guam, Japan, Thailand and the Philippines. She hopes to someday work as an international lawyer in Japan or some of the other countries where she's lived and witnessed a "spiritual darkness." In the meantime, she plans to get involved with Regent's pro-life group and go "wherever God leads me from there."

"If my speech was a message that God wanted out into the world, that's what I wanted," Gibson said. "It's about this message, and hopefully it's something that will affect people."

Read the full text of Nicole's speech.

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