Yesterday, I had the privilege of addressing the Students for Life club at Harvard Law School. They invited me to discuss the MA ROE Act and the pro-life community’s response to it. We were informed Wednesday night that there was a planned student protest against my message, so I anticipated having to defend the pro-life position against arguments from some of the brightest young legal minds in the world. We met in a lecture hall at the Law School campus at noon, and since my presentation was scheduled to take place during lunch, the Students for Life members passed out Chick-fil-A sandwiches (very fitting!) to the room full of their classmates. I did see one student as a red-caped “Handmaid,” which has become a common symbol of abortion activism, but many of the students were in various Halloween costumes, so it was probably just a coincidence.
After I was introduced and began talking, roughly half of the room stood up and walked out in protest. I urged them to stay, reminding them that there would be a question and answer session at the end where they could challenge anything I said, but they didn’t seem interested in that. Not everyone who stayed was a pro-lifer, however. There were two male students who intentionally placed themselves in my line of sight and began passionately kissing each other. They kept this up for nearly the entire forty minutes of my talk. When it came time for questions from the audience, there were several students who, to their credit, disagreed with what I had to say and had waited patiently to voice their perspective, and they did so respectfully. What I found intriguing, however, was that none of them really challenged me on the issue of abortion per se. One student was offended that I had used the term “holocaust” to describe the deaths of 60 million unborn children since Roe v. Wade. Another student wanted to know why MFI opposes “comprehensive sex education” and contraception access for minors, which, they argued, would reduce the number of pregnancies resulting in abortion. As for the two men who had been more interested in each other than my presentation, you would think they would be the least concerned about “access to reproductive health.” But in the new politics of “intersectionality,” their act was not surprising. And when they finally took a break from their public display of affection, they demanded to know why MFI supports what they referred to as “conversion therapy.”
At the end of the day, none of the students challenged the fact that life begins at conception or that the MA ROE Act amounts to infanticide. Instead, the response of those who opposed the pro-life message was limited to protest and intersectional grievances. That’s the advantage we have when science and morality, justice and compassion, all point toward protecting the lives of the unborn.
For our Families,
