Students for Life President Kristan Hawkins exposed that college athletes are facing incredible pressure to get abortions in an OP-ED for The Washington Examiner.
In a strange twist of fate, leading athletics programs seem to be ignoring federal protections for women that went into effect the year before Roe v. Wade and Doe v. Bolton created almost unlimited abortion access. While the 1972 Title IX was created to protect female athletes from discrimination on the basis of sex, many athletes report that rather than their pregnancies being welcomed or accommodated, they are facing incredible pressure to abort, almost as though Roe’s 1973 abortion ruling trumped their rights.
Last year, Olympian Sanya Richards-Ross told Sports Illustrated, “I literally don’t know another female track and field athlete who hasn’t had an abortion.†Richards-Ross herself openly recounts her own abortion two weeks before the Olympic games in Beijing. She told Sports Illustrated that abortion is pervasive among college athletes because they are often misinformed about their own reproductive capacity and she said that she didn’t know all of her pregnancy options when she underwent her abortion. And Richards-Ross’ story is representative of countless others like her own.
Something is seriously amiss when students don’t know that they have choices other than abortion. At Students for Life, we see egregious failures like this all too often. We encounter students who have never been told that they are protected by law from being kicked off of a sports team or losing a scholarship if they become pregnant. We meet students who have had abortions because they believed it was their only choice.
This is just more evidence proving that the Pro-Choice movement is nothing more than a Pro-Abortion movement. If they were Pro-Choice then they would be working with the Pro-Life movement to call out this bullying of young women. Instead, however, they will stay quiet and allow it to go on unchecked.
