University Votes to Ban Pro-Life Club, Says Pro-Life Students are “an Embarrassment”

International   |   Micaiah Bilger   |   Aug 28, 2017   |   2:42PM   |   Auckland, New Zealand

A New Zealand university student body voted this week to reject a pro-life club on campus.

Aukland City Harbour News reports pro-abortion students have been trying to abolish the pro-life club ever since it began in 2010. This week, they succeeded.

Pending legal review, the Aukland University Student’s Association said it will no longer recognize the club. In a referendum vote this week, about 1,600 students voted to ban the pro-life club, while about 1,100 voted to keep it, according to the report.

ProLife Aukland co-president Jelena Middleton said she was “dismayed” by the vote. She said their club always has been peaceful, and their goals are to help women and children.

“[Abortion] is not a positive thing, it just seems to be an accepted stance here,” Middleton told the local news. “We don’t think that it is in the mother’s best interest, and obviously not in the child’s. We believe that we need to always keep in mind both the mother and the child, not just one or the other.”

Student abortion activist Justine Rose, a leader of Aukland Students for Choice, claimed the pro-life club is an “embarrassment” to the university because it wants to take away women’s “right” to abortion.

Here’s more from the report:

The referendum also questioned whether clubs with a “similar ideology” should be banned from affiliating in the future.

Results of referenda which did not directly affect AUSA’s financial or administrative processes were automatically binding.

However, the decision would be finalised after AUSA had sought legal advice regarding concerns raised by members over specifics.

AUSA affiliation was largely a symbolic acknowledgement from the student community that it wishes to be associated with that particular organisation.

Technically, the club still can exist on campus and receive funding. But Middleton said the vote means it will be much harder to plan activities and get university funding.

Pro-life students across the world face discrimination for trying to protect unborn babies and moms from abortion.

In March, a pro-life student club sought legal help after Kutztown University officials in Pennsylvania scrubbed their chalked pro-life messages from the campus sidewalks. The college permitted other groups to write chalk messages on the sidewalk.

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In January, pro-life students filed a lawsuit against Queens College in New York after it denied their Students for Life club official recognition.

Then in April, a student Republicans club at Hood College in Maryland found out that it may be punished for setting up a display with pro-life messages. The display included a poster of a black toddler and the words, “… abortion is the number one killer of black lives in the United States.”

Pro-lifers frequently deal with vandalism on campus, too. In April, in two separate incidents, students tried to destroy pro-life displays at Texas State University and Washington State University. And in March, a pro-life student display at the University of Colorado at Boulder was vandalized.

In May, another group of pro-life students at Fresno State University filed a lawsuit against a professor after he was caught on video instructing his students to deface and erase the pro-life group’s sidewalk chalk messages.

University students in the United Kingdom face similar discrimination.

In March, pro-abortion students in Scotland petitioned Aberdeen University leaders to take down a pro-life poster in the Catholic chaplaincy, a building on campus that the university does not even own. The pro-abortion students claimed the poster advertising a 40 Days for Life prayer vigil was “actively harmful” to women.

Late last year, the British group Alliance of Pro-Life Students reported its students are under “constant attack” at universities in the UK.

According to the APS blog, students at the University of Newcastle also recently tried to de-ratify the campus pro-life club, claiming it “is a discriminatory group that alienates and will make many young women feel unwelcome on campus and therefore this society is against union policy.”