Abortion at UNC
An Investigation of Abortion Practices at the University
Ann Howell Brown
January 2006
The Silent Scream: Inside an Actual Abortion
Since the infamous Supreme Court case Roe v. Wade in 1973, our nation has been legally “pro-choice.” Over 40 million babies have been either chemically or surgically aborted in the US since Roe v. Wade. And we live under the illusion that this legal murder is acceptable because it is the woman’s choice. But how many choices are actually part of the pro-choice movement?
Choice USA, an activist, abortion-promoting group, claims that women “must be informed about their safe and legal reproductive health choices.” They say these choices include “abstinence, contraception, abortion, adoption, and parenthood.” If you take a closer look at America, however, you begin to see that this same pro-choice movement has basically eliminated abstinence, adoption, and parenthood from a woman’s list of options.
Feminists for Life, an organization working to promote women and choices for women, ask college students they address if any of them know women who have gotten pregnant while in college. Most students nod “yes.” Feminists for Life will then ask the group of students if they have actually seen a pregnant student on campus. In response to this question the nodding is much weaker.
This is reflective of the abortion situation on college campuses: pregnant college students either have abortions or they drop out of school to care for the baby. Is this system really pro-choice? Not at all. Many college women facing pregnancy are not offered a real choice.
It appears that at UNC-Chapel Hill the situation is no different.
When I arrived at UNC in the fall of 2005, I decided to investigate on my own and evaluate the choices this liberal university has to offer pregnant students. So, I walked into Student Health one day early in the year to get some antibiotics for a really bad cold. While I was with the doctor, I asked her what she would tell a pregnant UNC student who did not know what options were available to her. Immediately the doctor handed me a Planned Parenthood pamphlet and told me that they offer a “variety of services—surgical abortion, chemical abortion, and birth control.”
I was shocked at the sheer lack of any choice in the options the doctor laid out. As she was leaving, I lamely asked her one more time: “So, if a student just goes to Planned Parenthood, then they’ll review her options with her and help her make a decision about what to do with this baby?” The doctor turned and enthusiastically nodded her head, saying that Planned Parenthood was “a very non-biased health care clinic,” and they probably would not “look down” on someone if she chose to put her child up for adoption or keep it.
I found it interesting that Planned Parenthood was the only place the University refers pregnant students. Pregnancy Support Services, which is located right on Franklin Street and offers pregnancy tests, STD testing, ultrasounds, maternity and baby clothes and supplies, peer support and counseling, pre- and post-natal care references, and community support references, is completely free.
Pregnancy Support Services actually counsels women, lets them know what their real options are, and makes those options available. If a student still wanted to abort her child, then she would be free to do so and could then go and throw her money at the surgeon and discard her baby’s corpse in the dumpster behind Planned Parenthood. When I talked to Pregnancy Support Services, they acknowledged that sometimes their clients still choose abortion after receiving counsel, and they absolutely do not try to change or make a decision for any pregnant client.
The counseling Planned Parenthood offers students, on the other hand, is completely inadequate. When talking to students who are trying to decide whether or not to keep their baby, they discuss the following: a person is ready for parenthood, they say, when they are ready to make a child feel loved and wanted (implying that the child has no inherent worth of its own—it is all based on the mother’s feelings at the moment), and when they have the support of family and friends (implying that if your friends do not want you to have a baby, then you should simply kill it).
This is no counseling for a college student, and will automatically make the parenting option seem completely unfeasible. Students need real counsel; they need to know that someone is there for them to provide baby clothes and supplies if they decide to keep their baby and that people are behind them, supporting their decision.
Yet, Pregnancy Support Services told me that they rarely serve college students.
Why is this? Why not send students somewhere that is free and will offer them counseling and options instead of sending them directly to the largest abortion provider in the country?
I was unable to find a sufficient answer to this question. Planned Parenthood said that they were not at liberty to discuss the numbers of students or the number of college-aged students who came in to their clinic.
It seems that the UNC Student Health Center does not refer students to Pregnancy Support Services, and, as a result, they “have not seen hardly any UNC students.” In fact, last year Pregnancy Support Services had to fight to get their link posted on the Carolina Women’s Center website, after a student from Carolina Students for Life wrote a letter complaining. This is completely unfair and is exemplary of the anti-choice environment at UNC.
In addition to the lack of choice that results from referring students to Planned Parenthood, it is interesting that the University chose Planned Parenthood as their “all-choices” counseling organization. Planned Parenthood, a for-profit business, is the largest abortion provider in the United States and was founded by Margaret Sanger.
Sanger wrote in her 1923 book, “Women and the New Race” that “birth control, itself often denounced as a violation of natural law, is nothing more or less than the facilitation of the process of weeding out the unfit, of preventing the birth of defectives or of those who will become defectives.”
Sanger also took part in the controversial Negro Project, which, according to Concerned Women For America’s website, was a campaign to restrict the black population through eugenics. In a Feb. 7, 2005 article Randy Hall of Catholic News Service published a study relying on Census 2000 statistics verifying that Planned Parenthood has targeted African-Americans for abortion by placing their facilities in black communities. It was found consistently that black communities and predominantly black cities received over 60 percent of the Planned Parenthood facilities in the country.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, this has taken a devastating toll on the black community as more African-American babies have been killed by abortion since 1973 than the total number of African-American deaths from cancer, AIDS, violent crimes, accidents, and heart disease combined. Over one-fourth of the total potential black population has been aborted, and African Americans, though they account for 12.3 percent of the population, receive 36 percent of all abortions and are three times as likely as their white contemporaries to have an abortion (US Center for Disease Control, Abortion Surveillance Report).
In their 25-year “Vision” plan, Planned Parenthood acknowledged that they are a social movement, and that they are a political activist group working to “ensure worldwide implementation of human rights and well-being agenda as currently expressed in the Cairo Agreement.” Furthermore, they will work to “secure passage of laws and policies, including state and federal constitutional amendments, that grant reproductive freedom for all.”
Planned Parenthood is an ideologically driven abortion and birth control promoting organization, not a healthcare clinic, despite its claims of medical orientation and all-options counseling. This does not exactly sound like an all-choices counseling organization. Yet, this is exactly where the University of North Carolina is referring pregnant students.
To be fair, I decided to try and give Planned Parenthood a chance and call them myself to ask what they would tell a UNC student who was sent to them, looking for “all-choices counseling.” Besides feeding me all the regular lies such as “it’s not a baby, it’s a blob of tissue” (even at 12 weeks), the nurse claimed that abortion poses absolutely no health risks and is infinitely safer than birthing a baby. However, Mika Gissler’s 13-year population study published in the American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology shows that the death rate associated with abortion is three times higher than that of childbirth. More importantly, the Planned Parenthood nurse did not mention any option other than abortion once during our conversation. She immediately told me the times I could come in to have the “procedure” done and how much it would cost a student.
Abortions are very pricey, and the further developed a baby is, the more abortion costs because, according to the second nurse I talked to, “more tissue is being passed.” Before 12 weeks an abortion costs $360. At 14 weeks it goes up to $480. And the price keeps going up consistently to $800 if a woman waits until 17 weeks to abort. After that, women must go to a special clinic to have an abortion because there is “simply too much tissue to pass,” and the doctors at Planned Parenthood do not have the necessary equipment to deal with that, according to the nurse.
If a student seeking an abortion cannot pay for it, they are out of luck. A student could apply for some scholarships through outside organizations, but Planned Parenthood does not offer assistance, and neither does UNC. One could take out a generic medical fees loan from the University, but it must be paid back by the end of the semester.
The lack of financial assistance may be surprising. However, Planned Parenthood is a business and a political action committee that reaps profits off the abortions they perform. At an average of $372 per abortion, the industry as a whole brings in a cold $400 million dollars per year.
In order for UNC to actually live up to its pro-choice creed, many changes have to be made. Instead of referring students directly to Planned Parenthood, the largest abortion provider in the country and a profit-reaping, activist organization, Student Health must guide students towards organizations that will offer them true choices rather than feed them lies about their developing child and then make money off their ignorance and circumstances. UNC Student Health must accurately represent all counseling organizations and promote the ones that do not make money off pregnant college students’ situations.
Right now, the pro-choice options of “abstinence, contraception, abortion, adoption, and parenthood” are not represented equally, and this is unfair to UNC students. The pro-choice movement that is supposedly liberating women and ensuring equal rights is doing nothing except feeding money into abortionists’ pockets and leaving a group of Carolina students who are most in need of guidance and truth hurt and lost. It is my hope that UNC will stand up for those who are affected by the unfairness of this system and work for actual “pro-choice” change. The least we can do is hold the pro-choicers to choice and refuse to let them twist the meaning of “pro-choice” into “Planned Parenthood.”