Content Warning: This article contains graphic descriptions of abortion.

Dear Mizzou Students For Life,

Every Monday evening on my way home from film class, I walk through Speakers Circle, MU’s hub for free speech. And recently, I’ve been utterly disgusted by what’s on the concrete beneath my feet.

Phrases like “Unborn lives matter,” “It’s not a choice, it’s a human being” and “Abortion stops a beating heart” have been written in chalk on Speakers Circle to promote Mizzou Students For Life’s anti-abortion ideologies.

Meanwhile, abortion-rights advocates across the country have been screaming at the top of their lungs for decades, begging legislators — on the state level, nearly 70% of lawmakers have no idea what it’s like to have a uterus, let alone get pregnant — to protect abortion access. Nevertheless, Missouri swiftly enacted a statewide abortion ban in the wake of Roe v. Wade’s reversal back in June, stripping millions of the right to comprehensive reproductive health care.

Missouri’s abortion ban is one of the strictist in the nation and is a wound many MU students must reckon with every day. The last thing we need on this campus is an organization rubbing salt in that wound. I speak directly to MSFL when I say that your chalking campaign is callous, unwarranted and steeped in the misguided notion that your coalition has any business telling other people what to do with their own bodies, especially when Missouri has already done so.

The incendiary language that appears on Speakers Circle week after week does nothing to empower people with uteruses to “choose life.” Instead, it stigmatizes abortion and shames those who decide to terminate their pregnancies. By resorting to sensationalist phrases like “Vote against the dismemberment of children,” MSFL shows no interest in truly empathizing with the array of circumstances pregnant people face.

Many factors, such as existing parental obligations, financial resources and the timing of a pregnancy, may inform a pregnant person considering abortion. Becoming a parent isn’t a viable decision for everyone, and while putting a child up for adoption is an alternative to parenthood, the U.S. foster care system is already overpopulated.

Notably, MSFL includes the web address for Standing With You, an online pregnancy resource, in some of its chalk messages. MSFL also volunteers at Columbia’s My Life Clinic, a facility that offers services like STD testing, pregnancy testing and ultrasounds. Both of these resources overemphasize the potential risks of abortion, despite the fact that legal abortions in the U.S. are safe and effective, rarely resulting in complications, according to a 2018 study from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine.

Abortion can have a diverse range of physical and emotional outcomes. But in light of My Life Clinic’s role as a Life Network of Central Missouri program, it’s abundantly clear that discouraging abortion is paramount for the clinic. Life Network of Central Missouri capitalizes on religion-infused, anti-abortion rhetoric that romanticizes “saving” mothers and the unborn from abortion, rather than looking at all reproductive health care options from a patient-oriented, pragmatic perspective.

Of course, resources for those who wish to continue their pregnancies are essential. Regardless of abortion’s legal status, pregnant folks deserve a society that’s willing to uplift them if they choose to pursue parenthood. This attitude is certainly echoed in MSFL chalk messages, but the distinct idea that “women deserve support, not abortion,” falls short of the egalitarian fervor it’s meant to evoke.

As well-intentioned as the phrases “love them both” and “women deserve support, not abortion” may sound, these sentiments are anything but feminist. Women deserve support AND access to abortion — the two don’t have to be mutually exclusive. Regardless of the magnitude of available resources, nothing should force a person to relinquish their bodily autonomy.

The dogmatic claim that “life begins at conception” is not shared by all facets of the U.S. population. Therefore, MSFL should stop using its anti-abortion precepts to endorse biased pregnancy resources, and it must do away with shaming people into believing they’re obligated to use their bodies a certain way.

Even though Speakers Circle facilitates free speech — a cornerstone of American democracy, to be sure — that doesn’t make MSFL’s protected speech any less explicit, insensitive or unsolicited.

I don’t anticipate that this open letter will change any minds. While I can accept this outcome, what I cannot accept from myself in this situation is silence. As a woman, an Illinoisan and a staunch abortion-rights supporter, I can no longer ignore the harmful views that have literally become part of the campus landscape.

Sincerely,
Savvy Sleevar

Edited by Ezra Bitterman and Molly Gibbs | ebitterman@themaneater.com
Copy edited by Jacob Richey