In early September, I got the opening email from Princeton Pro-Life, which was signed “for love and life,” and “for the sake of our missing classmates.” I read it twice, wondering why an email introducing and advertising student opposition to abortion on campus would speak so vaguely about their own mission and why they wouldn’t even allude to their topic — abortion.
At Princeton, there are many conversations about abortion. But both those that start in the anti-abortion space and those that occur in the academic sphere — even among people who aren’t against abortion — too often happen in philosophical frames that avoid the real consequences that abortion bans have on people across the country.
Those who don’t conceive themselves as being directly affected by abortion politics are less likely to engage: In The Daily Princetonian’s 2028 Frosh Survey, the percentages of male and female identifying students who described accessible abortion as “strongly unfavorable” were identical: 3.4 percent. Though small percentages, the number of male students who were neutral about abortion is twice as large as the percentage of neutral women: 9.9 percent vs 5.3 percent.
However, while 5.3 percent of women were neutral on the issue and 1.3 percent reported not having enough information to formulate an opinion, those numbers spiked in men, 9.9 percent of whom were neutral and 5.2 percent of whom chose “not enough information”.
Impersonal vagueness and hypothetical treatment is a dangerous way to treat an important issue. If Princeton students — even those who may need abortions in the future themselves — view abortion as impersonal or distant from their realities, we risk increasing neutrality about a major issue that is impacting the lives of millions of Americans.
All students can understand the urgency and prevalence of abortion access if we work to ground our discourse in direct, fact-focused confrontation of abortion bans and restrictions and the physical danger to which they subject people with uteruses.
Abortion bans and restrictions indicate a state of emergency for women’s prenatal survival. Since 2022, 100 pregnant women in acute medical distress have been rejected from emergency rooms. Pregnant women in Florida and Texas miscarried in public restrooms, and an Arkansas woman went into septic shock and lost her fetus after being sent home from the emergency room. Kyleigh Thurman was handed a pamphlet by her Texas hospital telling her to “let nature take its course,” ultimately losing her fallopian tube after being denied treatment.
Princeton is, on the whole, an electorally active community. In last October’s ‘Prince’ poll on the 2024 election, 95.58 percent of respondents were registered to vote. Slightly under a third of respondents selected abortion as an issue of most importance to them. Abortion is on our minds.
But how? We too often risk falling into conversations about abortion that are theoretical, instead of real. Many of our conversations about abortion take place in such forums as PHI 202: Introduction to Moral Philosophy and the Human Values Forum, whose discussion last February with Professor Elizabeth Harman addressed abortion through philosophical examination of “the moral statuses of early fetuses.”
PHI 202 examines abortion through Don Marquis’ “Why Abortion is Immoral” and Judith Jarvis Thomson’s “A Defense of Abortion.” The class explores varied stances on the issue, but again through a theoretical lens that analyzes abortion through philosophical debate detached from issues of healthcare. Allowing discussion of abortion to drift into moral questions or theoretical political debate distances us from reality and makes our conversations less productive.
This detachment also appears in the language we use to address abortion. Groups across America and on Princeton’s campus identify themselves as “pro-life,” taking a stance on abortion without naming the issue at all — separating the discussion from the women themselves and their healthcare. Language matters: one study on the impact of rhetoric in abortion debates found that participants’ stance on abortion changed depending on whether their topical readings used the word “fetus” or “child.”
When we don’t question disengaged language like this at Princeton, we excuse anti-abortion advocates from being present in the facts. We excuse them from talking about Amber Nicole Thurman, Josseli Barnica, Nevaeh Crain, Candi Miller, and countless other women who have lost their lives as a direct result of abortion bans and restrictions.
Conflict inevitably arises when confronting an issue like abortion. However, if our abortion discourse at Princeton is reluctant to even name the topic we are discussing and its impacts, our community will become deaf to the world beyond its walls, and our political discourse will be detached from real events, unable to generate change or progress.
As we enter the Trump presidency, staring at the uncensored facts becomes even more important: which demographics are the most impacted, how a state’s policies influence its neighbors, and how and which health consequences arise from restrictions. On Princeton’s campus and in the state of New Jersey — where abortion is legal — it’s easy to look at the dangers of abortion restrictions as hypothetical issues, physically and politically distant from our own lives and the communities we live in.
That’s why, at Princeton, we need to focus our education on the facts of women’s health, not poke hesitantly at the topic from a distance. We have incredible educational resources at our fingertips to reach fact-based understandings about our society and abortion’s role in it. It’s a matter of grasping the necessity to use these resources, of understanding abortion as essential healthcare, no matter your gender or home state.
Grounding abortion conversations in fact by confronting avoidant or distracting language like “pro-life” is what will engage us in the world we live in and create genuine impact from Princeton’s political discourse. Call anti-abortion advocates “anti-abortion,” because that is what they are. Hold them to the same standards to which we hold Princeton’s research. Demand that we talk about abortion as non-negotiably scientific, a factual matter of life and death for women. It is.
Lily Halbert-Alexander is a first-year prospective English major from San Francisco. She can be reached by email at lh1157[at]princeton.edu.
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