College Outreach Program
In 1994, Foster began to visit college campuses to deliver her speech "The Feminist Case Against Abortion". Originally designed to educate students about the history of pro-life feminism, the speech evolved to identify difficulties faced by pregnant and parenting women in the workplace and higher education, proposing "creative, life-affirming, women-centered solutions." Given that data from sources such as the Guttmacher Institute have identified college women as the group at greatest risk of abortion, FFL determined to address these women's unmet needs, excluding contraception but including the coercive factors that drive them to choose between their education and bearing children. In 1996, the College Outreach was established.
For a college audience, FFL designed a promotion campaign that challenged traditional abortion views and provided practical information for pregnant women, not including how to obtain an abortion. FFL members created several kits for student activists, a kit for residential advisers and psychological counselors, a feminist history kit for libraries, and more challenging ads for college audiences, in addition to the resources available through FFL's website. Two of the eight "Question Abortion" posters offered in 2000 touched upon political issues, one of these saying "No law can make the wrong choice right." One poster used an image of Susan B. Anthony and an out-of-context quote of hers determined two years earlier by FFL historian Mary Krane Derr to be about estate law, not abortion. Other posters recast choice as the "imperative to have an abortion", or implied that life was better before abortion rights, back when abortion was illegal. FFL reports that its College Outreach Program has reached more than 5 million students since 1994 and that the rate of abortion among college-educated women has dropped by 30%.
In 1997, Planned Parenthood Federation of America's INsider called FFL's growing College Outreach Program the "newest and most challenging concept in anti-choice organizing" and predicted it could "have a profound impact" on college campuses.
Read more about this topic: Feminists For Life
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