After the fall of Roe v. Wade, some states have begun to pass legal protections for preborn children, while abortion remains unrestricted in others. Abortion advocates have claimed this is influencing where women choose to go to college, and urge universities to do all they can to support abortion. A handful of them are taking that to the extreme.
Writing for Teen Vogue, Brittney McNamara reported that a survey found five colleges across the country who said they would pay for students to travel so they could undergo an abortion. High school junior Talia Kantor Lieber contacted 61 colleges, asking if they would pay for students’ abortion travel; most of them either did not respond, said no, or gave “ambiguous” answers.
Yet five — the College of Wooster, Kenyon College, Oberlin College, the University of Idaho, and Vanderbilt University — said they would use either emergency funding or “student success” funds to pay for abortion travel.
“I immediately wondered whether the students on those campuses were aware those funds existed — or aware that they could be used when seeking access to abortion,” Kantor Lieber said in an interview with Teen Vogue. “It’s of utmost importance that these funds are widely discussed, by both administrators and students.”
READ: California prepares to offer chemical abortions on college campuses
Paying for students to undergo abortions is simply the latest in a series of policies being put into place to expand abortion. College campuses are already not particularly friendly places for pregnant or parenting students, who are often led to believe their choices are either to get an abortion or drop out of school. One woman, for example, told Live Action News of the challenges she faced when she got pregnant as a freshman in Salem College.
“There was no on-campus housing for married students,” she said. “Since I’d have to live off campus, my scholarship was cut. They actually reduced it by more than just the amount that covered housing, so my out of pocket costs were a lot higher. There were no services of any sort for day care.”
Pro-life organizations have stepped in where they can to help, but pregnant students still face a great deal of pregnancy discrimination.
Anna Allgaier, formerly the Pregnant on Campus director for Students for Life, also told Live Action News that colleges often don’t tell students what resources are available to them, and instead encourage abortion. “There are problems that many people do not think about. But some common ones would be a lack of understanding of Title IX issues, lack of housing and daycare options, and in general a culture on campuses that looks down on pregnant and parenting students,” she said, adding, “Other colleges will refer to Planned Parenthood or other abortion vendors. Meanwhile, many schools fail to take basic steps to ensure that Title IX protections are in place. In other words, they create a culture on campus that pushes abortion but does not protect life.”
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