5 times pro-abortion students disrupted pro-life tour in 2022
Students at the University of Missouri told members of a pro-life organization to ‘kill themselves’ while they hosted an Abortion Is Not Right display.
Students at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis brought coat hangers painted red to resemble blood to a pro-life display.
Pro-abortion students allegedly responded to the Students for Life of America (SFLA) fall 2022 Abortion Is Not Right tour with bloody imagery, defacement, smear campaigns, and vulgar language.
Campus Reform compiled a list of the top five counter-protests SFLA encountered while traveling “to hundreds of college campuses” to assert that, after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, “abortion was never a right.”
1. Pro-life students told to ‘kill themselves’ during campus event
Students at the University of Missouri (Mizzou) told SFLA chapter members to “kill themselves” while they hosted an Abortion Is Not Right display.
The counter-protests did not stop at verbal harassment. Students also threw SFLA recruitment materials in the trash, threw the chapter’s panels to the ground, and turned an “Abortion Is Not Right” banner backwards.
SFLA called campus police “to settle the crowd.”
2. Pro-abortion students write ‘F**k dem Kids’ in front of pro-life display
Pro-abortion students at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis suggested the humanity of unborn children by chalking “F*ck dem kids” in front of an SFLA display.
Students also brought coat hangers painted red to resemble blood, a callback to protests before the Supreme Court decided Roe in 1973 and a reference to self-induced abortions.
3. Urine allegedly thrown at pro-life students as they rallied at a Virginia college
The College of William & Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia, hosted the Abortion Is Not Right tour, and a pro-abortion student allegedly threw a “cup of urine” at SFLA members.
Suzanne Clavet, the college’s Director of News & Media, condemned the alleged attack: “William & Mary encourages students and members of our community to engage in constitutionally protected expression.”
Campus Reform later reported that campus police arrested the student who threw the urine according to an SFLA press release.
4. Students for Life sends legal letter to George Mason University
The Black African Heritage and Caribbean Coalition (BLACC) at George Mason University (GMU) condemned the Abortion Is Not Right tour because the tour included flyers equating “abortion to other rights injustices, including slavery and Jim Crow.”
BLACC accused SFLA of using “slavery as a ‘pawn in a game of woke chess’ to ‘trick people into agreeing with [their] anti-abortion views.’”
SFLA “sent a legal demand letter” to GMU after the Center for Cultural Equity and Empowerment (CCEE) issued a statement saying that “it was ‘working closely with black student leaders to repair harm.’” The demand letter asked that BLACC and CCEE “be ‘held accountable’ after launching an alleged ‘smear campaign’ against SFL at GMU.”
The members of SFL at GMU alleged receiving “‘harassing posts and comments.’”
5. Protester plays sounds of crying baby to disrupt Kristan Hawkins event
When SFLA President Kristan Hawkins spoke at the University of Cincinnati in October, a student played the sound of a crying baby but “allegedly denied making the noise.”
SFLA Ohio Regional Coordinator Jamie Scherdin found a speaker in the student’s bag, but he told her that it “was his ‘baby monitor’ before leaving.”
Hawkins appeared at the University of Cincinnati as part of her “‘Make Abortion Illegal Again’ fall tour.”
“The pro-abortion student didn’t think through their protest at this event very well because playing the sound of a crying baby seems to speak much more into a pro-life perspective than a pro-abortion one,” SFLA Staff Writer Caroline Wharton told Campus Reform.
