Amy Welborn’s musing about abortion includes this:
….A great number of abortions occur among women in college. Walk around a campus of 20,000 people and tell me how many pregnant students you see and then tell me that they’re all incredibly successful contracepters.
What would it take to discourage women in college from aborting their children? Would it take better health-care plans and access? Perhaps, for some. Parental leave? Can’t really see the impact there. Day care services? That would probably help for some. A few..
But honestly. Are any of these reasons - lack of health care, parental leave and day care - the most frequent reasons that an unexpectantly pregnant college student turns to abortion?
Of course not. The most frequent reason is, “There goes my life, shot to hell. What do I do now? And do I really want to be tied to that guy by a baby?”
The answer to that young woman’s dilemma will be multi-faceted, dependent on her family, her own values and flexibility. But, as pro-lifers aware of this problem, a decent strategy would be to do what we can to establish support systems for pregnant college students, offering concrete support both before and after birth, support that is offered by the Nurturing Network and promoted by Feminists for Life and others.
Such places do exist. But the strategy can only be piecemeal unless a college or university makes space in an explicit sort of way, for the idea that carrying a baby to term is an acceptable or even praiseworthy choice for a college woman.
How soon is that going to happen?
And then - read Dawn Eden’s piece, based on the blog of a med student who spent a day at Planned Parenthood. There is something at work here beyond concerns that social programs address….
This reminds me of walking around a college campus recently and thinking it a fine utopia, but a utopia in both good and bad senses: the good that it displayed was at the expense of the elimination of essential components of society. It was a fortress society that could not exist on its own in spite of its unwillingness to extend gratitude to the larger sustaining society.
That’s the root of Sue and Joe’s antagonism to college in general: a world without infants and as a result, ultimately, a world without life. A world which steals its life from elsewhere.
Soul of a nation is under the knife
Death is standing in the doorway of life
In the next room a man fighting with his wife
over Dignity