Personal stories like those of Feminists for Life speakers are echoed across the country. Pregnant professors on the tenure track often fare no better.  In fact, little has changed since my father graduated with me in his arms.

When Feminists for Life’s Board of Directors was determining the best way for us to serve women and children, a board member shared her story. After a bad break up with her boyfriend, Jeannie discovered that she was pregnant. As a graduate student deep in debt, she looked around her Washington, D.C., campus for the basics and found nothing. She attributes her miscarriage to the stress of feeling she had no choice but to seek an abortion. “Without housing, child care and maternity coverage, it doesn’t feel like you have much of a choice,” she said.

As I traveled across the country giving lectures on pro-life feminist history, I realized that I had never seen a visibly pregnant student. FFL moved into action.

In January 1997, I moderated the first-ever FFL Pregnancy Resource Forum at Georgetown University, where administrators, staff and students together inventoried the resources for pregnant and parenting students on and off campus and determined priorities. Since then, Georgetown has dedicated housing for student mothers in nearby townhouses and built a childcare center adjacent to campus. Most important, the university designated a central place on campus to coordinate services including financial aid, counseling and health care. Today, Georgetown has monthly “safety net” meetings of various departments and an annual Forum to fine-tune their efforts to support pregnant students and parents.

Our initial Forum became a model for the country; since then, FFL has moderated similar panel discussions from Harvard to Berkeley, Notre Dame to Pepperdine. FFL lectures and Forums have also sparked creative solutions by students—both pro-life and pro-choice. Berkeley students collected money to install dozens of diaper decks on a campus that has housing for 1,000 families. University of Virginia students took CPR courses and offered free babysitting services. Pro-life and pro-choice students at Wellesley held a rummage sale to provide funds for a pro-choice student who lost her housing grant when she had her child. That student later started a campus group called Sisters’ Keepers to build support for women like her.

Student-organized change is effective but, in most cases, impermanent. Without the basics—including institutional changes that support women and men who choose marital/partnered/single parenting or various adoption options, a central place on campus to coordinate services, and communication of available services during orientation and on the university website—women will continue to feel they don’t have much of a choice.  

Research by the Guttmacher Institute has found that the primary reasons women have abortions are lack of resources and support. Feminists for Life works to systematically eliminate the reasons that drive women to abortion.

FFL, like Guttmacher, has been listening to women about their unmet needs. College-age women have almost half of the abortions in the U.S. In 2007, FFL asked student activists at campuses across the country to try to find basic services for pregnant and parenting students. The results were dismal but no surprise. As one student put it, “If you do get pregnant, your college experience here is over.”

As both sides look for ways to work together, FFL proposes an abortion-neutral bill, the Elizabeth Cady Stanton Pregnant and Parenting Student Services Act. If passed, this legislation would provide funds to start a central place on campus to coordinate services for pregnant and parenting students, to identify available services and recommend next steps at an annual Pregnancy Resource Forum, and to give information to staff and students. The bill is named for the mother of the women’s movement, who was also the mother of seven children.

Being pregnant or parenting shouldn’t terminate an education, and the lack of resources and support shouldn’t make a woman feel coerced into terminating her pregnancy. But it happens regularly and goes unnoticed at campuses across the country.

Let’s replicate success by working together again to pass the Elizabeth Cady Stanton Act. Pregnant and parenting college students deserve better.