Transcript: You call this reproductive justice?

[This is a video transcript. For the video, click here.]

Hey everybody, Secular Pro-Life president Kelsey Hazzard here. I want to talk to you about an article, and normally this kind of thing would appear on our blog, but I just don’t think that the written word can quite capture how I’m feeling about this.

But for those of you who are deaf or hard of hearing, or just watching this at work (naughty naughty), there is a link to the transcript in the description, as well as a link to the article that I’m talking about.

So there’s this photojournalism piece with the journalism contributed by, I’m going to butcher this woman’s last name sorry, Melissa Fletcher Stoeltje, with photos by Carolyn Van Houten. It appeared in the San Antonio Express News in late July, and more recently a version of it was published in the New York Times.

It’s about abortion in Texas, and there’s a lot to dislike about it; like, it’s a very obviously biased pro-choice piece. Among other things, they refer to babies being “saved” from abortion, in scare quotes; like, are you suggesting they would have survived? I mean, that has happened, but it’s extraordinarily rare, and I don’t think that’s what you were getting at. You were getting at… something weird.

Right out of the gate they’ve got their claim that one in three women will have an abortion in her lifetime, which is a blatant lie that has been debunked repeatedly, including by the Washington Post.

And they also found the most religious people they could possibly find, although to be fair, it is Texas.

But let’s set all of that aside, because I want to talk about one aspect of this article that really leapt out at me, and it came from an interview with a young woman named Renee Rivas. Renee is described as being a student at the University of Texas where she is involved in a group called URGE, or Unite for Reproductive and Gender Equity—which sort of like the pro-choice counterpart to Students for Life of America. #ProLifeGen

URGE is one of these “reproductive justice” organizations that tries to make abortion more palatable by attaching it to every other cause you can think of. So for instance, URGE has a parenting page on its website where it talks about the need for “affordable prenatal care, accessible child care, quality jobs and financial and moral support to continue their education,” all of which sounds awesome.

Let’s see how cynical you are. Let’s see if you can guess where this is going.

We have a lovely picture of Renee, and it is captioned that she had an abortion because, without it, she would not have been able to pursue an internship with URGE.

If you really want to support mothers in the workplace, you might, I don’t know, start with your own friggin’ internship. Now, from the article, it’s unclear whether she came to URGE with her unplanned pregnancy and they flat-out told her she needed to get an abortion—which would be illegal—or if she just, through her years of campus advocacy on behalf of the organization, knew that it wasn’t worth asking… and actually, the latter is more damning.

Either way, she did have her internship this past summer, at the cost of one human life. Shame on you, URGE. Just… shame on you.