An Iowa State University professor, one Chloe Clark, threatened to kick any student out of her English 250 class who did a paper or project that opposed the killing of unborn children. This threat was included in a warning in her syllabus for the class that outlined “grounds for dismissal” from the class.
“GIANT WARNING: any instances of othering that you participate in intentionally (racism, sexism, ableism, homophobia, sorophobia, transphobia, classism, mocking of mental health issues, body shaming, etc) in class are grounds for dismissal from the classroom. The same goes for any papers/projects: you cannot choose any topic that takes at its base that one side doesn’t deserve the same basic human rights as you do (ie: no arguments against gay marriage, abortion, Black Lives Matter, etc). I take this seriously.”
As Micaiah Bilger noted,
This is a fundamental misunderstanding of the abortion issue. The pro-life position is that all human beings deserve basic human rights, including human beings in the womb, and the most basic of all rights is the right to life. Without it, all other rights are meaningless.
When we devalue life in one instance, we are devaluing life in all instances. Allowing the most vulnerable among us to be killed for any reason other than to save the life of the mother is an abrogation of the God-given rights of every human being.
There is nothing wrong with trying to have civility in the classroom. However, universities should be locales where all ideas can be debated. Suppressing debate leads to the festering and growth of ideas that are an anathema to a civilized society. Abortion is certainly one of those ideas that needs to be relegated to the dustbins of history. This can only happen when all viewpoints are allowed to be expressed.