College Boots Pregnant Woman Off Campus… for Being Pregnant

Last year, senior honors student Kamaria Downs found out she was pregnant.

Downs lived on campus at Claflin University, and had already paid for her dorm room and meal plan. Because she was pregnant, though, she was kicked off of campus, and if a professor had not taken her in, she would have been homeless.

Downs was not refunded the money she had paid for her dorm room, either. Things were not better for her on campus, either. She said the university made her feel ashamed to be pregnant, and she was forced to hide her pregnancy. Claflin does not allow pregnant students to live on campus after the first trimester, and they are also forced to provide medical documentation other students aren’t required to give.

Downs decided to fight back, and with the help of Public Justice, a legal non-profit that took on her case, she got Claflin to change their policy.

What happened to Downs was a violation of Title IX. Enacted in 1972, Title IX bans discrimination in education on the basis of sex… and this includes pregnancy and parenting status. Yet even though it is illegal to discriminate against students because they are pregnant, according to the Pregnant Scholar, an organization devoted to providing Title IX resources,  it happens all the time.

There are millions of students who are either pregnant or are raising children, at a whopping 26% of all undergraduate students, yet they frequently are discriminated against, and the issues that they face are overlooked.

Today’s so-called feminists should be fighting for these women. Instead, they just encourage women to have abortions. Jessica Valenti, one of modern feminism’s most well-known leaders, has openly talked about how abortion is the solution for women in college facing crisis pregnancies.

Carly Manes, a pro-choice millennial feminist, wrote in Rewire, a pro-choice online publication, about how women could not accomplish anything without abortion. It’s clear that today’s feminist movement is not interested in empowering women or helping support them through pregnancy. They are only concerned with ending pregnancy.

This week, one of feminism’s biggest icons, Gloria Steinem, spoke at a Planned Parenthood gala in Memphis, Tennessee. She began her 20-minute speech with the importance of abortion for women, saying,

“Nothing but nothing is more important than ensuring our fundamental right to reproductive freedom.”

Steinem and her fellow feminists, however, rarely speak up for women like Kamaria Downs. Their answer to everything is abortion, and in a way, it certainly solves the problem. Had Downs simply had an abortion, Claflin University would never have known that she was pregnant, and she would not have been kicked off of campus.

Should women be forced to choose between a college education and keeping their baby?

Feminists claim to be pro-choice, yet they aren’t working to ensure that women are not put in such an untenable situation. Instead, they work to promote abortion above all else, while claiming to be fighting for women. Abortion is their priority, not a woman’s right to an education even if she is pregnant or raising a child, yet they still call themselves feminists.

The reality is, there is nothing feminist about leaving millions of women behind because they chose to keep their baby instead of kill it.