(Students for Life) The school year may be winding down on many college campuses, but the pressure has been turned up. These past couple weeks have been insane especially.
Our students are facing discrimination on campuses, Christian schools are hosting avid abortion activists like Cecile Richards and Bill Clinton, and that’s not even all of it.
Our team is working around the clock to make sure the pro-life message is heard loud and clear before summer break begins but we need your prayers for our students. It’s a constant battlefield.
All of these instances happened just in the past two weeks:
- Last week, Georgetown University, one of the most well-known Catholic universities in America, hosted Planned Parenthood president, Cecile Richards!! At the event, a Georgetown University employee thanked pro-abortion students for being “courageous” enough to bring Cecile to campus and said that God was “pro-choice.” The Students for Life group on campus organized an entire Respect Life Week to surround her talk. It included SFLA’s “We Don’t Need Planned Parenthood” Tour as well as our “Pregnant on Campus” Display. In addition, we helped the students bring Abby Johnson, a former Planned Parenthood Director now pro-life advocate, to campus the same day Cecile spoke.
- An atheist group at North Georgia University hosted a pro-abortion tabling event on campus that included baby-shaped cookies with their heads cut off!! Under the decapitated cookies was a sign that read “abortion is a constitutional right.” Our group was quick to respond, hosting their own table with pregnancy resources and educational materials.
- Notre Dame will be giving Vice President Joe Biden their highest honor at their graduation ceremony this spring, and Loyola Marymount University, another well known Catholic university in California, has asked President Bill Clinton to give their 2016 Commencement address! We are working to make sure all graduating pro-life students at these schools get SFLA’s graduation cords to wear during their big day to protest.
- At the University of Iowa, the school administration decided that our Students for Life group’s pro-life sidewalk chalk messages (some as simple as “Smile, your mom chose life!”) were too “offensive” and had them all washed off!
- At Southern Methodist University, the Students for Life group created a cemetery with 3,000 crosses to represent the number of lives lost to abortion every day. They came out the next day to find out their entire display had been taken down! Not only that, a young man filmed himself ranting about the display and saying that women need abortion to be successful. The video caught traction with the students and the Students for Life group filmed a brilliant response of women saying that pro-life is pro-woman! We are working with the group now to make sure the school takes appropriate action against the vandals.
- Our Students for Life group at the University of Colorado at Boulder had to fight with their student activities office to host Abby Johnson as a speaker. They initially denied funding to the group based on the content of Abby’s speech (a.k.a. viewpoint discrimination). With the help of our legal team and staff, the group received full funding and Abby was able to come and give an inspirational speech.
- Harvard Law Students for Life hosted Ryan Bomberger of the Radiance Foundation to talk about abortion and race. Because this is such a sensitive subject, they partnered with the Black Law Students Association who invited a pro-abortion professor to counter Ryan. During Ryan’s talk, pro-abortion students were disruptive and disrespectful and the pro-abortion professor made SFLA remove our filming equipment, but the pro-life students pushed through and had a successful event despite the push-back.
- And lastly, I just got an email from our Regional Coordinator, Lisa, saying that multiple schools in the Pacific Northwest are hosting Trapped, a pro-abortion documentary that argues against common-sense abortion regulations, and students are getting class credit for watching it! We are working on a unified response.
As you can see, we’ve had two busy weeks at Students for Life. We are never going to give up trying to end abortion, trying to help moms facing unplanned pregnancies and trying to expose supposedly Christian/Catholic schools who invite pro-abortion speakers and give them an open platform to students.
Editor’s Note: This article was originally printed on April 26, 2016 at the Students for Life blog and is reprinted here with permission.
