Mathew Mesa is the president of the Students for Life group at Cal State Long Beach. When other students on his campus organized a pro-choice event, Mathew and his group decided to attend and provide a pro-life presence. Mathew shared:
Today, we attended our school’s “Reproductive Justice as a Human Right” event featuring feminist Loretta Ross. In a nutshell, Loretta gave an overview of her past activism and talked about quite a few issues relating to SJW politics; it wasn’t solely about abortion.
Four of us went, and our plan was to ask pro-life questions during the Q&A session to challenge her views. Since it was a Zoom Webinar, participants had to type their questions and submit them into a chat box, and only the admin could see all the questions. Unsurprisingly, the admin outright skipped over our questions (involving human rights, black genocide, etc.) and only acknowledged the ones that were politically friendly to Loretta. However, there were a few moments during event where Loretta said she wanted a dialogue, which allowed some participants to verbalize their question to her. I was one of the 6-7 people chosen to voice my question to her in front of everyone else.
I planned on asking a question about how can she claim to be a proponent of human rights while also advocating for the deaths of millions of preborn ones. But during our research, we noticed that her organization attempted to preempt this exact question in their resources by asserting that the UN’s “Declaration of Human Rights Doctrine” only applies human rights from *birth* onward. Keeping this in mind, my question was:
“Hi Loretta, thanks for doing this event, and I’m sorry to hear about your losses [from COVID]. You emphasize a human rights framework in your approach to reproductive justice. However, if all humans deserve human rights, then that would also include unborn humans. We know the unborn are humans because, unlike sperm and egg cells, they are organisms with a complete set of human chromosomes. I bring this up because you advocate for abortion, which kills about a million unborn humans in the US annually. Given this, how can you claim to support human rights while also advocating for abortion, which kills millions of innocent humans and deprives them of all basic rights? You might claim that one has to be *born* to have human rights, as does the UN, but if so, why? Why should we accept birth as the correct standard when it looks like a transparent tactic done solely to exclude the unborn and justify abortion? If the only requirement to receive women’s rights is to be a woman, then wouldn’t it follow that the only requirement to receive human rights is to be a human? Otherwise it sounds like you’re advocating for *born* rights, not human rights.”
Unfortunately, they cut off my audio when I got to the statement about women’s rights and didn’t allow me to engage in a back-and-forth with her. (But at least the audience got to hear the bulk of the question!) I came in expecting that I wouldn’t be allowed to make a follow-up question, so I made my question lengthy to preempt the common objections.
Loretta’s response was just as bad as anyone would expect, she effectively said: “Because the UN says you must be born to receive human rights, and we don’t give eggs these rights.” And then she startling babbling on about how abortion bans are a form of slavery and other tangents.
When I heard her response, I was like, huh?? I don’t know if she has bad hearing or what, but I explicitly acknowledged that the UN uses birth as a requirement for human rights (and then asked *why* we should accept that standard) and briefly touched on why egg cells don’t get human rights (they’re not humans!). But oh well, hopefully other people at the event noticed her obliviousness and was able to take away something insightful from my question.
Overall, I was the only pro-life person who got to ask a question. I don’t know if they’ll publish a replay of the event. Also, since it was a webinar, there was no option for participants to view how many people in total were at the event like how you can for ordinary Zoom meetings.
Even though they cut him off, Mathew’s SFLA Regional Coordinator, Jordan Brittain, noted how proud she was of their hard work. She even gave them an apologetics training so they could prepare questions and gather info prior to the event, and she was impressed with their initiative in planning that as well. The student group even plans to have Jordan give a pro-life training at every group meeting for the rest of the semester!
Does your Students for Life group, youth group, or other community pro-life effort need some training? Click here to see the pro-life training Students for Life offers!
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