The pro-choice movement has locked its teeth on college campuses, taking advantage of and manipulating young women across the country. Their agenda has crept its way into course loads, “reproductive health” propaganda, and even supposed science-driven informational seminars for medical students.
Why do Planned Parenthood and other abortion care providers seem to “care” so much about the American youth?
For the same reason that addictive nicotine products are marketed as “cool” to young people; by marketing to a juvenile consumer base, these abortion providers secure life-long customers and fill their pockets with a pretty paycheck.
Texas A&M University has chosen to overlook the indoctrination of their beloved Aggies this past week when the student group Medical Students for Choice hosted Dr. April Lockley for her informative workshop titled “Self-Managed Abortion.”
In this seminar, Lockley promoted lies under the guise of science, promoted the violation of federal law on the pretense of justice, and promoted promiscuous behavior with the thinly veiled belief that the abortion pill regimen is just an “emergency contraceptive.”
Dr. Lockley made the bold claim that “abortion is safer than continuing with the pregnancy and giving birth”—to which I must ask, for whom? For the mother or for the innocent baby in the womb?
Additionally, her accusation is fictitious at best.
A study by The Elliot Institute and Bowling Green State University revealed that “an abortion prior to 12 weeks is associated with 80% higher risk of death within the first year after the procedure and a 40% higher risk of death over 10 years.”
Abortion hurts women. And, women, you deserve better. You deserve options that will not put your life at risk, you deserve for American lawmakers to prioritize your health, and you deserve a culture that loves you enough to want you to succeed.
Another Finnish study also showed that “compared to women who carried to term, women who aborted in the year prior to their deaths were 60 percent more likely to die of natural causes [and] seven times more likely to die of suicide.”
Women worldwide are being manipulated into believing that a perfect pill exists that will “terminate their pregnancy” and leave them perfectly able to return to life as normal, but this is simply not true.
They buy into the abortion scam because they are hurting, they are scared, and they feel as though they have no other options. Post-abortion, many of these women feel just as broken-hearted than before, if not more.
If the future is female, then we ought to start acting like it; we must begin promoting options that are life-affirming for the mother and the child.
Some of these options can be found here at Standing With You, and they most certainly do not include the purchase of mifepristone and misoprostol from overseas pharmacies, as proposed by Dr. Lockley.
“As we know, in the United States, you can’t really just call your pharmacy and get whatever medication you want,’’ explained Dr. Lockley. “But there are some overseas pharmacies where you go to their site and then you can order mifepristone and misoprostol through their sites.”
To the unaware ear, she was simply recommending some “helpful resources” for the medical students to look into in order to obtain the abortion pill regimen. To the knowing ear, she was encouraging impressionable college students to engage in illegal drug smuggling across national and state lines.
Importing RU-486 into the United States and across state lines would be in direct violation of federal law, namely 18 U.S. Code § 1462(c), which states, “Whoever brings into the United States, or any place subject to the jurisdiction thereof, or knowingly uses any express company or common carrier or interactive computer service, for carriage in interstate or foreign commerce-…(c) any drug, medicine, article, or thing designed, adapted, or intended for producing abortion” may be fined or imprisoned.
The pro-choice movement claims to care about women, so much so that they will empower women to break the glass ceiling and federal law all at the same time. After all, why should illegal abortion providers such as PlanC care about the outcome of their beloved consumer base when the check is already in their pocket?
More specifically, in order for these pills to reach Texas A&M medical students, the pills would have to travel across state lines into the Lone Star State, which would violate Texas law. Senate Bill 4 states, “A manufacturer, supplier, physician, or any other person may not provide to a patient any abortion-inducing drug by courier, delivery, or mail service,” not to mention the numerous laws protecting unborn life from fertilization to natural death. It is important to note that this law punishes the provider and not the woman herself.
I want to be proud of my Aggie family, but our honor code states, “An Aggie does not lie, cheat or steal, or tolerate those who do.”
I cannot tolerate the iteration of behaviors that seek to lie to innocent women in need of help, cheat the law, and steal from this world many generations of new Aggies, who all deserve a chance at life.
Dr. Lockley explained that the uses of these abortion-providing resources were to terminate pregnancies such as in the case that a couple finds themselves in “an episode of sex without a condom.”
Couples do not simply find themselves in an “episode” of irresponsible, yet consensual, promiscuous behavior. The parties know what they are doing and they know what the plausible implications of their actions could be.
In America, we are blessed with an abundance of free will and choice, but with great freedom comes great responsibility. We are Americans, not hedonists.
Sex is a decision that should be made with great care and thought. A lack of thought or the mental fortitude to say no until the act can be performed in a responsible manner is not ample justification for the ending of a human life.
Our verbiage is important. We are shaped by the words that we speak and by the words that we hear, so I implore our persons of medical practice to be more precise with their diction, to inform students of the outcomes of intercourse so they might make responsible decisions concerning their bodies, instead of desperately scrambling to obtain life-ending drugs for their irresponsible “episode.”
In order to convince her audience that self-managed abortion is completely normal, Dr. Lockley cited three case studies of self-managed abortions throughout history.
First, “in the United States, medication abortion, as of last year, was about 55 percent of all abortions,” which is true. That fact motivated pro-life lawmakers to pass legislation, such as Senate Bill 4, to protect unborn life.
However, she also said that “in India, something like 80 percent of all abortions are self-managed.” While this may be true, it means little without context. For context, the nation of India is notorious for violent abortions via a coat hanger and for forced administration of the abortion pill against the mother’s will upon discovering the sex of the baby.
These women are considered subservient and are often abused by their husbands, who engage in bride-burning and throw acid in their faces. Many Indian wives have undergone multiple “self-managed abortions,” which contributes to the 80 percent cited above. The widespread infanticide and forced sterilization of women in India is not a case for self-managing abortion, but rather a reason to seek justice.
It is a reason to convince American women that they have amazing opportunities to develop themselves professionally, academically, and socially, which are not hindered by their pregnancy; to convince American women that pregnancy is not some abhorrent byproduct of intercourse, but one of the greatest gifts that God gave mankind; and to convince American women that there are people who are ready and waiting to stand with them in love.
Dr. Lockley instead tried, once more, to convince American women that self-administering abortion is normal, saying, “Enslaved people were obviously ending their own pregnancies without going to the doctor.”
Once again, consider the circumstances. Enslaved women must have been terrified to bring an unborn child into such a difficult circumstance. These women likely saw no way out of their situation; they were hurting and they were lost. I honestly believe that if one of these enslaved pregnant women was given means to escape while considering self-inducing an abortion via violent means, she would have chosen to escape and have her child.
Hard circumstances do not justify the ending of an innocent life. The problem was never the baby; the problem was the cruelty of slavery. Therefore, the solution was not to keep ending pregnancies, but to end slavery.
Nowadays, the solution is not to keep promoting abortion, but to promote emotional, spiritual, and financial assistance for mothers in need, to educate them on life-affirming options, and to nurture a culture that loves both the mother and the child.
In all honesty, I want to be angry with Texas A&M for allowing such a seminar. I want to be angry with Dr. Lockley for making comments about how her team “tak[es] care of whole families,” when they really only take care of the parts of the family that they deem worthy of life. And I want to be angry that we live in a deceptive culture that only cares about the women who are already out of the womb.
Instead, I am choosing hope.
I am hopeful because of Pro-life Aggies, which fights for maternal rights on campus, provides resources to parenting students and gracefully combats toxic pro-choice culture. I am hopeful because of Students for Life Action, which empowers the next generation of leaders to fight for the unborn, is constructing change from the ground up. I am hopeful because of my friends at Sanctuary Cities For The Unborn, including Mark Lee Dickson, who fights daily, city by city, to protect every heartbeat, every fingerprint, and every little voice that deserves to one day be heard.
Although abortion has wedged its way into our higher education institutions and our media, there is hope in knowing the brilliant minds who have worked, and who are continuing to work, to reverse toxic pro-choice culture and save lives, one child at a time.
This is a commentary published with the author’s permission. If you wish to submit a commentary to Texas Scorecard, please submit your article to submission@texasscorecard.com.
