On its website, Northwestern’s Center for Awareness, Response and Education has a specific tab that provides abortion information and referrals to students. On this page, CARE writes, “Abortions are essential health care that people seek for many reasons, all of which are valid.”
While this statement and the descriptions of abortion that follow may sound neutral, they insult the values of NU’s pro-life students and faculty, who understand abortion to be a grave injustice that takes the life of an innocent and defenseless unborn child. Calling abortion “essential health care” and describing it as “gentle” while we believe that it violently kills a person excludes us from respectful dialogue.
On Aug. 9, the President’s Advisory Committee on Free Expression and Institutional Speech recommended new ways for NU to approach controversial topics, and on Sept. 27, President Schill and NU leadership committed to following these new guidelines. The committee encouraged the University to stop making official statements on controversial issues, except on those essential to University operations. However, even those statements should be rare according to the committee, because “Northwestern must take pains to avoid coercing dissenting community members into silence.”
CARE violates this new policy. Its statement on the controversial issue of abortion as an official University body unapologetically picks one side over the other and tries to tell pro-life students and faculty that our ideas are not welcome in our own university.
CARE may claim that providing abortion resources to students is essential to University operations, but these resources do not need to come from an official University body. CARE should instead let student organizations who express pro-choice views such as Sexual Health and Assault Peer Educators provide referrals and ideologically-driven descriptions of abortion. This way, NU students can still get access to the abortion resources that CARE would have provided while also opening up the conversation on abortion to pro-life students and faculty.
A university should work to foster spaces of respectful and intelligent disagreement on controversial issues, not promote the views of the majority through official statements. By embracing neutrality on many of these issues over the past few months, NU has taken noble steps toward welcoming ideological minorities on campus. However, if it doesn’t remove CARE’s statement and extend that same welcome to the pro-life minority, no matter how small and inconvenient we may seem, its words will be meaningless.
Thomas Belej is a McCormick sophomore. He can be contacted at [email protected]. If you would like to respond publicly to this op-ed, send a Letter to the Editor to [email protected]. The views expressed in this piece do not necessarily reflect the views of all staff members of The Daily Northwestern.
