Year-Round Pro-Life Activities a Vital Part of Student Life at WCC
Tabling provides the opportunity to not only touch the hearts and minds of those who are not pro-life, but it also allows you to further develop and solidify your own arguments. We essentially became God’s ambassadors on behalf of the unborn.—Ethan Boord, ’25
Forty-nine years ago today, the Supreme Court issued one of the most infamous rulings in its history, Roe v. Wade, prohibiting many state and federal restrictions on abortion. That ruling has devastated the lives of millions and millions of Americans—born and unborn alike—and has been the driving force behind so much of the political activity of the past half-century.
God willing, we are closer to the ruling being overturned than we are to it being handed down—we pray daily to be released from this scourge upon our nation—yet as a college founded nearly twenty-five years after the decision was handed down, it has been edifying to see our young men and women work so tirelessly in defense of the unborn. As the College has long held, “it is important for our students to engage with the public and political spheres on this issue of abortion, since it is an issue that fundamentally affects the moral health of our society. While our curriculum is not designed to promote a level of political activism, this is a case where we cannot sit idly by while such grave injustice is done. All life is sacred, from conception to natural death. We are proud to be a Pro-Life college.”
The 2022 Spring Semester starts on Monday, meaning that this year’s March and Walk are both being held before school is back in session. But our students’ desire to defend life manifests itself in numerous ways throughout the year (and throughout the years): from founding our own Students for Life chapter (known as “Cowboys for Life”) to participating in the peaceful 40 Days protests held at the corner of Main Street and Second each year for Respect Life Month, from raising funds in support of Abba’s House (our local crisis pregnancy center) to spreading the length of Main Street with posters (and smiles) as part of the annual Life Chain event, and helping to organize the first-ever Lander Walk-for-Life. (This year’s Lander Walk will be held on Sunday, and will feature a strong contingent of students, returning for classes next week.)
Another way in which our students have witnessed to life in the past few years is by traveling to the Laramie campus of the University of Wyoming for “tabling events,” described here by Jill Cook, current president of “Cowboys for Life:”
We were in the Student Union of the University of Wyoming standing at a table with a fetal development timeline. We would all take shifts in groups of 2-3 standing at the table and get the attention of people walking by. We would ask them to put a sticky note on the place along the fetal development timeline where they believed human rights should begin. Then we would ask why they put it there, and have a conversation about it. If the sticky note was not at conception in the beginning, our goal was to get it as close to conception as we could by the end.
Out of the 94 total votes for when human rights should begin, University of Wyoming students overwhelmingly voted for conception! Between the votes which were initially put at conception and those which were put there by the end of a conversation, conception had 62 votes! And at least we planted some seeds for the remaining 32.
This past week, Dr. Jim Tonkowich hosted Jill on the latest episode of The After Dinner Scholar. Take a listen (below) to better understand why we are so proud of Jill and her fellow students, and why we are so filled with hope for the future:
