Last Thursday (Oct 24), Winona State students got the surprise of their life. It was such a beautiful day that everyone’s hopes were high while they strolled along the color-changing foliage on campus. My friends and I were on our way to set up for a sorority event when we heard about a commotion outside of Kryzsko Commons and headed over to see what the deal was.
We soon learned that Warriors for Life, an on-campus club whose purpose is to educate the WSU community on the life and dignity of human beings (who shouldn’t be confused with the Winona State Football Association, whose website is warriorsforlife.org), decided to write their bigoted opinions all over campus. As you can see from the pictures throughout this article, their only focus was protesting abortion. According to them, over 3,500 women get abortions every day. After doing some research myself, I found that there is no statistical evidence of the amount of abortion procedures being that high since 2014, and even then, the number was about half.
“These hearts represent the 3,500+ lives lost every day from abortion.”
According to my research, this number is false and inflated.
According to the Center of Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), 11.8 women out of a thousand had an abortion in 2015, which had actually decreased by 2% from the previous year. A total of 638,169 women had an abortion that year, which is roughly 1,750 abortions a day. As you can tell, this is half the number Warriors for Life had originally claimed.
In 2017, the abortion rate dropped to 10.3 abortions per thousand and the total number of abortions dropped to 339,640, making the total number 930 procedures done per day. Now, I’m no math genius, but something tells me that that 3,500 figure I mentioned earlier is completely false with no research behind it—the numbers just don’t add up.
Warriors for Life is also against Planned Parenthood, probably for the sole reason that they offer abortion procedures. There are 650 affiliating Planned Parenthood offices across the country, which gives us an average of 13 per state. However, not every Planned Parenthood offers abortion services. In 2014, the number of abortion clinics in the U.S. dwindled from 452 to 272, with an average of five per state. But, there are currently six states that only have one abortion clinic for the entire female population: North Dakota, South Dakota, Missori, West Virginia, Kentucky and Montana. Mississippi lawmakers are fighting to make abortion completely illegal and to close their sole clinic.
Apparently being pro-woman means letting a society run by men control your body.
Now, I’m sure you’re wondering, Does Warriors for Life know that Planned Parenthood offers more than just abortions?
I’m wondering the same thing. If anyone from Warriors for Life is reading this, I’m providing a list of the services that Planned Parenthood offers to their patients:
- Breast exams
- Cervical cancer screenings
- Colposcopy
- Cryotherapy
- Incontinence
- Infertility
- LEEP
- Mammogram referrals
- Menopause testing and treatment
- Pap test
- Sexual response education
- UTI testing and treatment
- Vaginal infections testing and treatment
- Testing and treatment for chlamydia, genital warts, gonorrhea and other STDs
- HPV vaccine
- Hepatitis A and B vaccines
- Treatments for herpes, syphilis and trichomoniasis
- STD prevention and education
- Safer sex education
- Pregnancy testing and pregnancy planning services
- Adoption services and referral
- Fertility awareness education
- Childbirth classes
- Postpartum exams
- Erectile dysfunction education, referral, exam and treatment
- Jock itch exam and treatment
- Male infertility screening and referral
- Premature ejaculation education, referral, exam and treatment
- Testicular cancer screening
- Prostate cancer screening
- Vasectomy
- Abortion
and that’s not even half of their services. You don’t need to read the whole thing to know that Planned Parenthood improves the health and lives of many people (not just women!).
Near the Darrell W. Krueger Library on campus, Warriors for Life wrote numerous messages about adoption. I respect their opinion for them to choose adoption over abortion—because, you know, pro-choice—but there are currently 400,000 children in foster care with 20,000 every year “aging out” of the system, meaning they become adults before being adopted. If we were to go by Warriors for Life’s completely false number of 3,500 abortions a day, we would have to add 1,277,500 more children to the foster care system every year. Sure, some of those babies born might stay with their birth families after some miracle revolation, but a majority of them will go into the foster care system. Of the 20,000 children being aged out, that’s 5% of all those in the foster care system. Imagine this: with the added 1,277,500 to the equation, that’s approximately 83,875 kids who are aging out if abortion were 100% illegal.
According to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, the government federally funds $4,155 to $33,901 per month depending on the disability or eligibility of the child. That would be $6.97 billion to $56.87 billion that the government would pay each month if all those children “saved” from abortions were put into the foster care system, waiting to be adopted. Want to see something even crazier? The cost per year would be $83.64 billion to $682.44 billion.
In contrast, the government currently spends $63.84 billion a year to assist the 40 million Americans on SNAP benefits, which is a supplement for those in poverty to purchase food to survive. Americans have wanted to cut SNAP benefits or make it harder for those in need to receive it since it became a thing in 1974, so what makes you think that people who already don’t even want our poor, already-born citizens to survive will want the government to spend 1.3 to 10.7 times the amount to feed the beings who aren’t even born?
This question brings me back to Warriors for Life’s purpose (taken directly from their Facebook page): “The Warriors for Life promote a culture of life by educating Winona State University about issues/events relating to the life & dignity of human beings.”
They want to educate the student body about issues and events, but from my actual research with my sources listed below, I have proven that their information is false. You cannot educate the Winona State University community with uncredible and out-dated data. I also pointed out the fact that not only would banning abortion completely result in a flooding of our already over-flowing foster care system, but deplete our government’s funding for programs that are already in place.
My last issue with their purpose is that they really aren’t pro-life: they are pro-fertilized egg. If they really wanted to spread the word about life and dignity of human beings, they would be protesting for organizations such as Black Lives Matter or fighting for the rights of the immigrants kept in cages. They would be raising money and awareness for the thousands of people in foster care needing to find a family. They would be donating things such as money, clothing, food or sanitation products to those in need, like homeless people or the on-campus food shelf. Perhaps Warriors for Life should change the name of their organization so it reflects the true nature of their club: Anti-Abortion Activists, F*ck Abortion Club, and I-Forgot-Separation-of-Church-and-State-Was-a-Thing Club, just to name a few I’ve come up with.
A person’s life starts when they are born, not fertilized. Pro-life is a lifelong movement, but Warriors for Life only seem to be looking at the un-born part of it. Not having an abortion is a personal choice for a woman and only that woman. I’m starting to believe that those in Warriors for Life do not know the difference between pro-choice and pro-abortion. Being pro-choice means that one is respecting the decision someone makes for their own body—it is not wanting every single pregnancy to end in abortion.
This was Warriors for Life’s Facebook post regarding their messages across campus:
Warriors for Life is not spreading love. They are spreading hate and are not educated on what they are preaching. Women support women and since they cannot do that, especially with credible resources, they may want to think about having their false information scrawled across a liberal campus.
Being pregnant doesn’t make a woman powerful—standing up for yourself and others who may not have a voice in this injustice makes us powerful.
Educate yourselves before you mislead others around you.
Sources: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13