California may force colleges to provide medication abortion on campus

The California Senate has voted to approve a bill that would require all public colleges and universities in the state to provide medication abortion pills on campus. The bill now will be sent to the California Assembly for approval.

Currently, none of California’s 34 colleges provide on-campus abortions. Instead, students are referred out from campus health centers to area abortionists. A group of private donors have already been lined up to pay the over $20 million in costs for the program. California State University officials, however, are wary. “Currently our CSU health centers offer basic health services, however, the administration of medications still requires a level of expertise that our health center staff may not have,” Toni Molle, a CSU spokeswoman, said. Molle also expressed concern that the bill, if passed, would “impose severe costs for liability insurance, safety improvements, medical training and round-the-clock phone support for medical emergencies.”

According to the bill’s sponsors, somewhere between 10 and 17 women try to get an abortion each month on every University of California campus, and between nine and 15 each month at CSU.

While the abortion industry maintains that medication abortion, or RU-486, is safe and practically harmless, the truth is quite different. As former abortionist Dr. Anthony Levatino explains, women have suffered adverse side effects, including death, after going through with a medication abortion.

1st Trimester Medical Abortion: Abortion Pills

Many women experience extremely heavy bleeding, painful and debilitating menstrual cramps, and nausea after going through with the abortion — and many of them likewise have said that they were given no warning from abortion facility staffers of what they were about to go through.

READ: These 15 women say taking the abortion pill is nothing like having a period

Women have died after taking RU-486, most often due to hemorrhage or infection. Even some practicing abortionists have quietly expressed their reservations about medication abortion, yet college campuses in California should be able to just give it to any woman that asks for it? Will these campuses be able to handle it if and when one of their students begins severely hemorrhaging and needs help?

Then, of course, there is the inescapable fact that, even very early in pregnancy, preborn babies are human beings, and their lives will be taken in even greater numbers if this bill is allowed to pass. If so many students are indeed seeking abortions, why are California’s lawmakers simply aiming to provide them with greater access to abortion, rather than examining what may be driving these women to feel they have no other choice? California’s women would be far better served with more options to allow them to stay in college — but let’s be honest, it’s much easier to just give women a pack of pills and send them on their way.

Live Action founder and president Lila Rose addressed this bill in an op-ed in the Washington Examiner, and also illustrated how lawmakers are lying to convince the public that this effort is needed.

The bill’s supporters argue that the law is needed to save students hours of travel and to cover the cost of their abortion pills. They say that dispensing pills on campus will ensure that young women have easy access to abortions anytime they want, especially if they don’t have cars or have trouble fitting an appointment into their school schedules.

This argument is disingenuous, and an attempt to hide the truth. Research from Californians for Life shows that the average distance from each public campus to the nearest abortion pill provider is less than six miles (the longest distance for any of them is about 15 miles). With all of the Ubers, cabs, and public transportation available, “access” is a manufactured issue. Not to mention that these same students who go through with the medication abortion will need to get emergency medical help off campus if complications arise.

“True empowerment would include options and support for women, not all of these lies about how easy and safe abortion is; not this encouragement to take a life for convenience’s sake,” she concluded.

This bill should not be allowed to pass. Please contact your local assembly member, and urge him/her to vote against SB320.