By Erin Black
It’s no secret that Western Washington University is a liberal institution. Really, any college on the Left Coast in the 21st Century is bound to be extremely left-leaning in its ideas and practices. And in the past few decades, a subscription to that ideology has required an unyieldingly pro-abortion stance from all its adherents, lest they be either pressured to convert, or ousted from the political arena. Which means Western didn’t exactly welcome a pro-life club with open arms when Students for Life of America started a WWU chapter in 2014.
I wasn’t there to see that. I transferred to Western in 2016. But I didn’t get involved with Students for Life until my second year. I had been pro-life since I became a Christian in my senior year of high school, but, aside from attempting to educate strangers on the internet, I hadn’t really been involved in any kind of pro-life activism until then. My newly pro-life self in high school never would have imagined that I would one day be listening to a pink-and-white-haired woman curse at me and my friends as she used an orange traffic cone to dump water on our chalk messages. Nor would I have thought I’d be helping to host a campus event deemed so controversial that an arsonist would burn our banner on the wall.
But I’m afraid these things are only the beginning of the intolerance and outright violence that will continue to come from abortion advocates as we continue to work to make abortion not only illegal but also unthinkable. When you think about it, it really shouldn’t come as a surprise that people who advocate for the dismemberment of babies would be more than happy to see us exterminated as well.
My active involvement with the pro-life movement started when I joined Students for Life in the Fall of 2017. I am not an outgoing person, and it was not my thing to just show up at club meetings I had never been to before. I might not have gone at all if I hadn’t known that my friend Molly from my Bellingham church was the Vice President of the club. But the WWU Students for Life club in the 2017-2018 school year was a small, close-knit group of really sweet, smart girls who were fun to be around. Some of them were relatives (the President Karlie’s older sister had started the chapter when she went to Western and now worked for the national organization as our Regional Coordinator, and their cousin Amy was the Secretary), some were roommates, and most of them went to the same church, so there was a wonderful camaraderie between them that I wanted to be a part of.
My first controversial experience with pro-life activism on campus happened in Spring Quarter of 2018 when I chalked with the club in Red Square for the first time. We’d had an informal last meeting of the year outside. They asked me to be Secretary for the next year, which I gladly accepted. And the rest of our meeting was just chalking pro-life messages and resources.
Someone did: “Love Them Both.” I wrote a very big: “Human Rights for All: Born and Preborn.” Other messages directed people in need to our resources, like: “Pregnant? Need Help? pregnantoncampus.org,” and “Hurting from Abortion? silentnomoreawareness.org.”
We were just getting done with our chalking when we noticed a few people grabbing tall orange traffic cones, filling them with water from the fountain, and pouring the water on our messages. Apparently, this had never happened before. “Should we go talk to them?” one of the girls asked. We decided to go over there. I was nervous because I’m very non-confrontational, but going over as a group made me feel a lot better, and I knew I could learn a lot from watching the way the others talked to them.
We approached the rather masculine-looking pink-haired woman. “Is your plan to erase all of our messages?” Molly asked. She passive-aggressively responded, “Just the really shitty ones.” So Molly rather graciously asked for constructive criticism: “May I ask what part of our messages do you have a problem with? Because we would like to know how to reach people better.” Pink-Haired Woman apparently decided we weren’t worth the time of day, because at that point she ignored us. Then a guy with blue hair showed up to help her. She explained that we were “writing anti-choice shit all over.” We tried to explain that we’re not anti-choice: we believe women should have all kinds of choices—as long as they aren’t violent choices. But Pink-Haired Woman was no longer interested in conversing (if she ever had been).
Once she left to go erase a different message, however, Blue-Haired Guy started talking to us. He actually listened to Karlie when she pointed to a Silent No More web address on the ground and explained that it was to help “people who have had abortions and are hurting from them.” He most likely didn’t agree with our pro-life stance, but he was actually receptive to what we were saying once Pink Hair was gone. He even came with us as a group when we went over to talk to her again. And when she said, “You can keep talking; I’m not going to listen to anything you say,” he actually defended us, saying, “Hey, you need to listen to them.” It was really nice to have someone who was probably not pro-life to stand up for us and at least attempt to foster a civil and productive conversation. Thankfully, these types of pro-choice people do exist.
Pink Hair still wasn’t cool with us by the end of that lovely conversation, but we weren’t ready to give up on our chalking for the day. We all went home and came back at about 10 or 11 at night. And instead of just chalking Red Square, we chalked the entire school, starting by the Academic West building and working our way over to Red Square. It was kind of fun to be out at night, doing a group activity on our dark, deserted campus. Someone even brought glow-sticks to add a little whimsy to our night. But this was right before Finals Week, and some of us had exams to study for and projects to work on and papers to write. As some supportive passers-by pointed out, we shouldn’t have to do this under cover of darkness in order for our voices to be heard.
Unfortunately, our voices weren’t heard for very long, because the next morning, Karlie found Western maintenance crews pressure-washing off all the chalk. She asked one man why Western was having them do this. Western apparently hadn’t told them. “I don’t know,” the man answered, “Provocative, I guess?” He informed her that he was just told there was “chalk graffiti” and they had to go “take care of it.”
Chalk graffiti? Isn’t chalk supposed to be used to write on the ground? And aren’t students at Western allowed to write their messages on school walkways, as clubs and individuals do all the time, without anyone attempting to erase them, let alone school officials ordering Maintenance to remove them?
It’s interesting that the vegan club’s chalk messages appeared around the same time ours did, and yet they were left alone, and remained there until the rain eventually washed them away. We mentioned this in one of our many emails to Western personnel. The WWU Club Activities Coordinator speculated that it might have been part of an already-scheduled maintenance (which, Karlie pointed out, couldn’t be the case based on what one of the workers told her). We tried to work out this issue with Western, but nothing really came of their discriminatory treatment of us.
Pink Hair et al. erasing our messages sucked. It was rude and intolerant, and worst of all, it took away resources that others no doubt needed and could have been helped by. But as students, Pink Hair et al. were technically within their right to destroy others’ messages. Western, however, was not within its right. Western allows its students to chalk in designated areas of the school, and allows the messages to remain there for three days (although I have never, ever, seen or heard of them erasing messages that have been there for longer periods of time…ever…much less messages that have only been there a few hours).
I recently attended a WWU Associated Clubs presentation on Free Expression. According to the presenter, Western’s “free speech areas” (the areas we can chalk) are considered “Designated Public Forums.” These types of forums are used in the same way as what are called “Traditional Public Forums,” such as sidewalks, street corners, or public parks. Western erasing its own students’ messages in its supposed “free speech areas” would be like government officials telling peaceful protestors they can’t hold their signs on public street corners because the messages weren’t government-approved.
From talking to the guy who gave the Free Expression presentation, it was clear that he disagreed with the views of Students for Life and Young Americans for Freedom. But he felt very strongly that the solution to free speech one disagrees with isn’t to limit free speech but to add more free speech: If you don’t like someone’s message, write your own message. This gets diverse ideas out there, and doesn’t trample anyone’s Constitutional rights.
Rights aren’t really rights unless everyone has them, regardless of who likes or dislikes the way you exercise your rights. If government institutions, like public universities, can pick and choose who gets to speak and what they’re allowed to say, then none of us really have freedom of speech. Because if the government can choose to silence certain groups, it could choose to silence any groups, including yours. We need to stand up for not only our own rights, but also the rights of our fellow citizens, in order to ensure that our country remains just and free.
