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WASHINGTON, D.C. (LifeSiteNews) — Vice President Kamala Harris hosted a roundtable discussion to promote abortion with several higher education leaders on Monday.
Breaking with trans ideology, Harris referred to the situation “women” faced when it comes to being pregnant.
The possibility of further abortion bans “will impact, more specifically, women who are attending our colleges and universities,” the vice president said. “The principles that are at stake are of course that we must trust the women of America to make those most intimate decisions for themselves, and if they choose in consultation with their family members, with their faith leader and with their physician,” she said.
“But the government should not be making this decision for her,” Harris said. She boasted of the Biden administration’s efforts to use taxpayer dollars to help women travel to other states to kill their babies through abortion.
Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona said that the possible restrictions on abortion compounded other problems that COVID brought about.
“The Supreme Court’s decision in the Dobbs case has the potential to hurt students, faculty and staff in our nation’s higher education institutions,” Cardona said. There is “now … a new set of barriers to accessing health care, at a time when the pandemic has already put a strain on their mental health and overall wellness many colleges and universities are also concerned about how the decision will impact their medical teaching” as well as “research” and serving their “communities.”
Ted Mitchell, president of the American Council on Education, bemoaned the “patchwork” laws on abortion that universities would now have to face, because the Supreme Court affirmed that states have the right to regulate abortion.
“The biggest challenge that schools, faculty, staff and students face today is the confusion and uncertainty around a 50-state patchwork quilt of varying laws and guidance that, frankly, has only become more complex and more chaotic with the Dobbs decision,” according to Mitchell. “So the clock is ticking on every campus, in every university in America, to figure out what can and cannot be done to support students, faculty and staff.”
@UCIrvine Chancellor Howard Gillman had the privilege of joining Vice President Kamala Harris’ White House roundtable discussion on the challenges students face after the recent Supreme Court decision to end the federally protected right to abortion. https://t.co/OENsSzNuZz
— Steve A. N. Goldstein, M.D., Ph.D. (@UCI_OVCHA) August 9, 2022
He said “in particular” there is a struggle “to answer the questions whether their students do or do not have access to the full range of reproductive healthcare.”
President Carmen Ambar, president of Ohio’s Oberlin College, said the issue of abortion is a racial one. The reversal of Roe v. Wade ” is about more than a woman’s right to choose. For Oberlin’s campus, it’s about the fundamental and growing issues of inequity that this decision portends.”
Pro-life laws “impact women’s essential right to live their lives as they choose to have destinies that are unconstrained, where their pursuit of happiness is unfettered and higher education at its core,” Ambar said.
The Dobbs decision, Ambar said, “dramatically worsens [the ability of students to get an education] it disproportionately impacts women of lesser means who are more often than not women of color and it limits basic access to quality health care.”
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President Audrey Bilger of Oregon’s Reed College also lamented the “patchwork” abortion laws while championing her state’s support for unrestricted access to abortion.
The college has been put on “high alert” by the Dobbs decision by the “unwieldy patchwork of laws” on abortion. She also fretted about the possibility of past Supreme Court decisions on homosexual unions and contraception being reversed.
The president of Gallaudet University, a school of the deaf, warned that pro-life laws would hurt the disabled.
Meanwhile, Howard University president Wayne Frederick also brought up the issue of “patchwork” pro-life laws and how it would affect his students.
Other participants included University of California Irvine president Howard Gilman, Glenda Glover of Tennessee State University and Phil Hanlon of Dartmouth College.