By Jack Watkins
Beginning in Fall 2023, Wesleyan University will cover a variety of abortion-related costs for students, despite its proclaimed Christian identity and affiliation with the Methodist Church.
Student tuition dollars will be spent for the purposes of providing transportation to and from a clinic, housing assistance, and obtaining post-abortion drugs and contraceptives.
The university decided to announce this plan in response to a petition created by the school’s Young Democratic Socialists of America chapter. Following the overturning of Roe V. Wade in 2022, many universities across the country would act to provide more access to contraceptives and more reproductive services. This petition received a total of 742 signatures at a campus of around 3,000 undergraduate students, almost a third of the undergraduate population. Alongside this student organization, several professors in the anthropology department teaching language to feminist/gender studies and various health advocacy group partners endorsed this petition.
But what about the organizations that support the university itself? How do they feel about it? Wesleyan University is a Methodist school supported by the Wesley Foundation, the United Methodist Church, Baptist Collegiate Ministries, the Georgia Baptist Convention, and Reformed University Fellowship. According to the United Methodist Church, they center their position on abortion as such:
“Additional official statements of The United Methodist Church express the denomination’s life-centered ethics.
As you read the petition, this student organization claims that “reproductive justice serves as an important framework for resisting white supremacist, colonialist, and capitalist forms of control.” Citing abortion statistics from 2018 and 2014, the petition tries to frame the issue against the overturning of Roe V. Wade as racist and oppressive to students. They reference that a majority of abortions in those years were performed on people of college age and that a majority came from low-income status, associating this group with people of color. It is no surprise to see that, yet again, people that claim something is racist are associating people of color with those of low income or of some need that is helpless without their support. Being a socialist group, their demands are presented as a “logical” next step to the care the university already provides for those that pay for the insurance plan. Instead of recommending these actions to be added to the insurance plan, they demand that the university, meaning the students, must fork the bill on reproductive-related costs for all students. Regardless of whether they use it or not, all students must now indirectly pay for medical services for other students who are not paying for insurance. Talk about resisting oppressive control, huh? Seems to them that the only way to “resist” oppression is to force everyone to pay more money out of their tuition for services that most of them can’t use.
