A professor at a Catholic seminary was fired last year after offering his services as a pilot to women seeking to travel for an abortion.
The Guardian reports that Greg Williams lost his job as a Greek and Latin teacher at St. Joseph Seminary College in Louisiana after a Facebook post he wrote on June 28, 2022, just days after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade.
“If any women need to make an unexpected trip from the south to, say, Illinois or New Mexico or Virginia for reasons that are none of my business, I can provide safe, private air transport that would get you where you need to go and back the same day at a price that will work for you,” Williams said in the post.
Williams referred to those states because they are known to have abortion-friendly laws.
Per The Guardian, Williams was relieved from his teaching position in early July last year. “Your Facebook post publicly and deliberately advocated a position contrary to the official teaching of the Catholic Church,” said the termination letter written by Gregory Boquet, the seminary’s rector. “The decision is to terminate your employment … effective immediately.”
In addition to his teaching position, Williams also worked as a volunteer with Pilots for Patients, a nonprofit that offers free flights for patients needing medical treatment outside their local area. The organization told The Guardian that it does not offer transport for abortion, however, it also “acknowledged it does not control what trips its unpaid volunteers might take on during their own time.”
Though the seminary has a clearly-defined Conflict of Interest Policy which says that all employees “shall act with the highest degree of integrity and moral standards that will reflect favorably on SJASC and consistent of the teachings of both the Order of St. Benedict and the Roman Catholic Church,” Williams responded to his termination by calling the school hypocritical in light of the church sex abuse scandal.
“It’s a hell of a thing to have [the church] have an official letter addressed to me saying I’m doing heinous evil,” he said. “It’s like – what are you talking about?”
The concept of pilots offering their services to women who want to travel elsewhere for abortion isn’t unique. Live Action News has previously discussed an organization of pilots called Elevated Access that exists solely to fly women across state borders so that they can have their preborn children killed at abortion businesses.
