A trend seen by prolife activists that frequently engage
college students on campuses nationwide is the growing acceptance of infanticide,
or killing the infant after he or she is born, campus prolife outreach leaders
tell The College Fix.
Anecdotal
evidence by leaders of prolife groups such as Created Equal and Survivors of
the Abortion Holocaust said in interviews that not only do they see more
college students willing to say they support infanticide, but some students
even suggest children up to 4 or 5-years-old can also be killed, because they
are not yet “self aware.”
“We encounter people who think it is morally acceptable
to kill babies after birth on a regular basis at almost every campus we visit,”
said Mark Harrington, director of Created Equal. “While this viewpoint is still
seen as shocking by most people, it is becoming increasingly popular.”
Campuses where the high school, college students, local
activists and staff members of Created Equal have encountered this opinion
include Purdue, University of Minnesota, and University of Central Florida. And
at Ohio State earlier this year, the group captured a debate on video between one of its members and an
older woman on campus who defended infanticide.
Friends, this is
the “slippery slope” that some of us warned about.“This is the whole problem
with devaluing human life at any stage—it will naturally grow to include other
groups of humans; in this case, born humans as well as preborn humans,”
Harrington said. “[I] talked with one young man at the University of Minnesota
who thought it was alright to kill children if they were under the age of 5 years
old, as he did not consider them persons until that age.”
Kristina Garza, spokeswoman for Survivors of
the Abortion Holocaust, a prolife organization that often sets up
anti-abortion displays on campuses along the West Coast, said her group also
frequently encounters college students who accept infanticide.
“For those who
are firmly for abortion, because they understand it kills a human being, it’s
very easy for them to accept killing a human being after birth,” Garza said.
“There is this notion that is common on campus, that it’s OK to kill babies
because somehow we don’t become human until we are self aware.”
“A common number
that is going around is 4 years old,” she adds.
As for the trend, Garza said there’s an explanation for
it. For one, the arguments put forth by Peter Singer and other philosophers who
support infanticide are given as reading assignments to college students.
Singer wrote in
1979 that “human babies are not born self-aware, or capable of grasping that
they exist over time. They are not persons … [therefore] the life of a newborn
is of less value than the life of a pig, a dog, or a chimpanzee.”
“He has been
saying things like this since the 70s, but I think it has been more recently that
this type of ideology is being promoted on college campuses,” Garza said. “When
he said this stuff, there was a very select few who accepted it. But nowadays,
we have become so desensitized, and college students lacking in a moral fiber
easily accept this kind of strange ideology.”
But prolife
advocacy and engagement on campuses has helped turn students away from
pro-choice stances, she adds.
“While the number of students who believe it is OK with
killing children after birth is growing, the number of students who accept that
life beings at conception is also growing, and that is growing at a larger and
faster rate than those who accept infanticide,” Garza said.
“The trends I am
seeing is it’s not so much students are better grounded in morals, it’s that we
as a prolife movement have done our job in presenting a better argument, and we
are pushing people out of the middle,” she said. “We are seeing more students
who see the logic and choose to be anti-abortion.”
Yet staunch
opposition to the prolife philosophy remains.
Asked about the
incident at Ohio State, at which a woman responded to a prolife display by
defending infanticide, a pro-abortion activism group at the campus
stated its views were similar to those of the woman in the clip.
“As for infanticide, I would imagine that my colleagues
would think the ‘post-birth’ part was largely irrelevant, as we believe very
strongly in abortion on demand, without apology, and it’s plain and simple that
we should look to the woman’s morals and not shove our opinions where they,
frankly, don’t belong,” Devin Deitsch, leader of VOX: Voices for Planned
Parenthood at Ohio State University, said in an email to The
College Fix.
“Speaking as the
primary leader of VOX, I assure you we are very pro-choice,” Deitsch also
noted. “… We are not here to advocate for women to get abortions, we advocate
for her ability to make that choice without fear, heckling, or barriers.
Essentially, we ask for a woman (and her body) to be respected. Nothing more,
nothing less.”
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