The abortionistas at University of California-Berkeley have really outdone themselves this time: the student senate is demanding the school provide on-campus abortion, and think administrators should have to take a pay cut to finance them…
“When medication abortion is not available at UHS (University Health Services), students who are seeking an abortion face financial, time, and travel constraint burdens that create negative impacts on academic performance and mental health,” the bill states. “UHS is a health center dedicated to meeting the health needs of students in order for students to be able to upkeep their academic well-being. Abortion is a common health-care service and access to abortion is necessary and relevant in student life.”
The bill employs several statistics to reinforce its logic, including things like: women aged 18-24 account for 44 percent of all abortions in the United States, one in four women will have an abortion by age 30, and women make up 52 percent of UCB’s undergraduate population.
The flipside of the numbers is that more than half of unintended pregnancies, 60%, end in birth (to say nothing of those who somehow figure out how to not get pregnant in the first place). This would seem to suggest abortion isn’t so necessary to success after all, but then again I’m a guy, so what do I know? Fortunately, you don’t have to take my word for it… take Elissa Graves’s:
I worked countless jobs to pay for school and strived incredibly hard to achieve my dreams. I attended a top law school and then became a constitutional litigator. I am the first lawyer in my family—and I did it all without needing abortion. I am not alone. I have dozens of friends and colleagues with similar stories […]
Judge Edith Jones is the former chief judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit. Susana Martinez is the governor of New Mexico. Mary Ann Glendon is a law professor and former U.S. ambassador. What do all of these women have in common? They have enormously successful legal careers and have taken public pro-life positions. Abortion is not necessary for a woman to have a successful career.
Proclaiming that women cannot be successful without abortion embraces female inequality. It says women must become like men by eliminating their motherhood. This is the opposite of equality. It imposes male physical norms on women.
Next, Aanchal Chugh, the ringleader of this effort, explains how she expects Berkeley to finance it:
I believe the University should reorganize funds from the administration’s paychecks to university health services. Many of the administrators at UC Berkeley receive more than generous paychecks while they continue to put student health on the backburner. This resolution is demanding that the university reconsider and reprioritize its funding. Instead of investing money into the administration’s paychecks, the university should be investing in students’ health and safety needs […] The resolution does not expect students to pay for these services as I, and those who voted for it, believe that health is a right not a privilege.
Far be it from me to defend a school that teaches pro-abortion nonsense and responded to this resolution by declaring “UC Berkeley’s University Health Services fully supports women’s access to the full spectrum of contraception, emergency contraception, abortion and other pregnancy alternatives.” They’ve made their bed, both by legitimizing abortion and utterly failing to teach them the philosophical basics of what is and isn’t a right, and now have to lie in it.
There is no right to abortion, legally (because the Constitution doesn’t contain one) or naturally (because something cannot be a right if it harms or deprives someone else). The latter reason is also why, even if there was a right to abortion, there still wouldn’t be a right to force someone else to use their own money to provide you with one—regardless of whether they “need” their “generous paychecks.” Technically, nobody “needs” to write their opinions, either, but that doesn’t mean our free speech rights don’t matter.
That’s easy for us to say, though—if we were in the university’s shoes, we’d simply be practicing what we preach. Berkeley, however, is in more of a pickle. While they don’t have to do what the student senate demands, they do have to explain not going along with the principles they’ve been teaching their students… leading to the delightful irony of university spokesman Roqua Montez’s explanation:
[T]he question is larger than the one regarding cost […] Fortunately, the Berkeley campus is surrounded by a high-quality, well-established network of health providers who are expert [sic] in this area.
So it’s unnecessary to force people to subsidize a service because there’s already an abundance of alternative providers? Hmm, where have I heard that before?
Unfortunately, though there’s definite schadenfreude to be had here, it’s soon overshadowed by the grim realization that it’s only a matter of time before these Berkeley students go out into the world and start inflicting this sense of pro-abortion entitlement on the rest of us.
