May 24, 2018
Valerie Schmaltz
Please contact your Assembly member to oppose SB 320, California legislation which would institutionalize a bias toward abortion as women’s health care on campus by requiring every campus health center to dispense medication abortion commonly known as RU 486.
The bill has passed the state Senate and is now before the state Assembly. You can express your opposition by going here www.nocampusabortions.com/ for more information and to find your Assembly member.
Feminists for Life of America executive director Serrin Foster wrote an op-ed opposing SB 320. Her article, “SB 320: Should public universities offer abortions via the pill? Feminists for Life Say ‘No,’” was published in April on Naomi Wolf’s website DailyClout and is reprinted below.
SB 320 institutionalizes a bias toward abortion on college campuses, telling a woman that the way to succeed is to destroy her baby. It would mandate that campus health centers offer the two part abortion pill regime, which terminates the pregnancy by denying the growing baby progesterone, the hormone needed to continue pregnancy. It is prescribed up to 10 weeks gestation.
While medication abortion typically induces heavy bleeding and expulsion of the tissue of the unborn baby, campus health centers do not offer round the clock care. RU 486 is touted as the simple private abortion, but even the bill’s authors acknowledge in the legislation text that medication abortion can require emergency room care or a surgical abortion. Further, Californians for Life notes that medication abortion is available an average of six miles away for the 23 California State University campuses and 11 University of California campuses.
The California Catholic Conference, the bishops’ public policy arm, notes: “SB 320 purposefully narrows a woman student’s alternatives, and on an issue of moral significance and continuing controversy, puts the state in a position of actually promoting, facilitating and potentially funding abortion.”
Let us give students real choices – not the bitter pill of an abortion. As Feminists for Life’s slogan states, “Women Deserve Better than Abortion.”
Valerie Schmalz is director of the Office of Human Life and Dignity, Archdiocese of San Francisco.