OPINION: Student Pregnancy Center Is Interesting Idea, But Wrong Approach
Should there be a pregnancy resource center on-campus just as there are LGBT and Military Veterans’ Resource Centers? This is what Kristan Mercer-Hawkins of Students For Life and Standing With You would like to see for pregnant and parenting students, according an Instagram post on Thursday.
“Honestly, I would love for their just to be an office,” Hawkins told a student questioner during a question and answer forum at an unidentified college.
“A lot of schools have offices of diversity, equity and inclusion…but I would love for there to actually be a place she can go, if she’s pregnant or parenting, a pregnant parenting support center, where she can go an learn about her Title IX rights as a pregnant or parenting student…and that office be the coordinator or the liaison with the administration,” she said.
Hawkins envisions one center where pregnant and parenting students can go to get help with all coordination’s required for students who are pregnant or parenting on-campus. According to Hawkins, this includes information about communicating with professors whenever the pregnant or parenting student needs to miss class. It would also help to make sure athletes don’t lose their scholarship if they become pregnant. Overall, it sounds like a good idea.
However, while if I ran a private college, I would want to make sure parenting students had every reason to choose life over abortion, I don’t think I would support this model at a public university.
Centers for Interest Groups
Firstly, a reason why I don’t think I would support this model at a public university is because I don’t believe in resource centers for special interest groups.
As much as I support pregnant students, it’s unfair to grant special attention to LGBTQ, military veterans or any other special interest groups above all other students. (Military veterans are a little different interest group because there are specific laws in the Texas and United States codes that treat them differently.
For example, veterans obtain special benefits and programs, such as the GI bill or the Hazelwood tuition exemption, compared with other citizens. This is not due to their private lifestyle decisions, but due to their public [military] service. In other words, military programs are about rewarding meritocratic service rather than private religious or philosophical decisions of being pregnant, gay, trans or whatever else. [Yes, I think identification of gay or trans is ultimately a choice.] So military veterans are a little different than other groups.)
To put it another way, what if there was a Muslim or a Christian resource center. Would you support this now?
I wouldn’t support a Christian resource center for this same reason, which is that I don’t believe class differentiations are helpful in public education policies. I favor support for Muslim, Buddhist and other students. I just don’t believe there should be special treatment for these individuals that would separate them from the rest of the student body, such as through receipts of special benefits or resources.
Not only do I believe it is not right in principle, but I also believe special benefits can create resentment from other students who may resent these groups as having undeserved privilege. So, I don’t support resource centers for special interest groups in principle of maintaining a single student body identity, but also because of the way special attention through class-specific resource centers can create negative resentment towards recipient groups.
Student Fee Money
Another reason I don’t think a pregnancy resource center would be good (along with any other resource center) is the use of student fee money it would take to create the center at UT-Tyler since the campus uses student fees to fund the resource center it has now. In 202-2022academic year, The Veterans Resource Center received over $173,000 dollars of student fee money to provide resources to veterans, according to UT-Tyler’s budget.
The problem here is that the student service fee is supposed to be for student services that will benefit everybody. Not every student is a veteran, so then why are they paying a student service fee for services that will only go to benefit student veterans?
A problem with having a Muslim resource center or a Christian or pregnant resource center is that it would compel the everyday students to pay for services from which they may never benefit.. Students paying for services that don’t directly benefit them exceeds the The Student Service Fee’s purpose.
Even if the money did not come from student service fee, but from the university’s money from tuition, then it would still be wrong for the university to take those scarce resources of designated tuition and devote them to one special interest group. Unless the class of student has protections required by law, such as disabled students, minority students, or veteran students, then the university should stay away from entire centers dedicated to assisting pregnant students with university accommodations.
In this case, the university would not be acting to protect dropouts but to serve the pro-life movement.(It would also prevent students from the trauma and injustice of getting an abortion.) Yet, while murdering an unborn child is immoral, reworking the education system for interventionist purposes is not a sustainable long-term solution for promoting life within a society with an ordered liberty.
The university should not open a pregnancy or parenting resource center. It wrongfully promotes special interest that divides the student body, encourages resentment from non-favored students towards favored groups and misuses scarce student and university resources to serve causes that fall outside of its fundamental mission. The university shouldn’t do it.
Roman Catholics and Protestants
However, on another note, I’d like to note here what I think is the difference between some Roman Catholic approaches to liberty and Protestant approaches.
Hawkin’s Students for Life and Standing With You is a Roman Catholic-affiliated group. They hold the sanctity of life as a religious position, as they should. However, in this respect, the group shows its interest in preserving the mother’s and the child’s life even through dependence upon government intervention such as through Title IX and other forms of governmental intervention. The group also calls for special maternity parking at university. The group embraces government interventionism.
Notice how the pro-life outcome in this case is not through enabling the mother to make responsible private choices on her own, but to change the rules of society to elevate the mother. In other words, the Roman Catholic group (my words, “ pro-life group”) attains an ordered outcome according to life’s sanctity, but at the expense of personal liberty.
Meaning, if it should take more government intervention to protect life and the mother, then this group at least is willing to accept this in order to achieve an outcome that accords with its religious view of the sanctity of life.
The pro-life Roman Catholic group’s willingness to depend upon what many conservatives call “big government” to attain its desired moral outcome, I think, illustrates a difference in the definition of righteousness we Protestants and Roman Catholics hold.
Definitions of Righteousness
In my view (speaking as a Protestant), one of the problems with the Roman standard of righteousness is its satisfaction with outward conformity rather than inward intention. In other words, Roman Catholicism often emphasizes the importance of rituals such as going to confession, going to mass and adhering to church teaching as a standard of righteousness.
However, in the Protestant (and Puritan) tradition has a different definition of righteousness. In the Protestant (or Puritan) tradition, the standard of righteousness includes the heart’s intention. In other words, if when Puritans go to mass (they don’t, but if they did), then it would be not enough to merely “go to mass”. Rather, the purity of the moral act would rest on why you went to mass. Was it really for God or was it so that others could see you as religious? The heart’s inward attitude is the true standard of righteousness, we traditional Protestants maintain.
This means that it is not enough to merely order society in a manner in which pregnant mothers choose life. Rather, of paramount importance is why they would choose life, should they choose it. Again, it is not enough merely that they choose life. It is not enough that the church or the government extends its hands into the individual’s life and puppets them to take on a shape or a form that, for the individual, is insincere. (This amounts to just trading one form of vice for another.)
Instead, what becomes important for righteousness, but also for a healthy, well-functioning society, is that people have within themselves the righteousness of virtue; in other words, the capacity that makes them truly self-governing. It’s so that they make wise choices on their own—without the state’s or The Church’s intervention.
Therefore, this case is an interesting example of the differences between Protestant and Roman Catholic approaches to society (provided that this pro-life group really is this way due to its Roman Catholicism; it could not be. This is just an assertion so far as my theory goes.)
Now, at the time of America’s founding, nearly 80 percent of the American colonists were either Puritans or under Puritan influence, according to Ligonier Ministries’ W. Robert Godfrey. It was from this ethos then that gave birth to the American nation. That is, a community with the Protestant standard of righteousness gave birth to a society, not only of order, but also of order with liberty.
This suggests that Protestantism is really a key source of American liberty, although many Roman Catholic scholars have contributed to the history of liberty throughout Western history. Nevertheless, it was the Protestants who achieved it in this country.
I submit that this standard—that the inward man presents the most important aspect of a person—that is the proper basis a free society. Morality gives us a society of order, but personal responsibility before God for the inward life of the heart, as in the Protestant Puritan tradition, this gives us a society,of order but with liberty. The Protestant, Puritan mindset provides the best path forward and America’s best hopes to spring up the fountains of renewal.
Twitter: @jhescock12
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