While one college student works to fund transportation costs for women seeking abortions in Texas, Texas Right to Life’s student Fellows stand in stark contrast to the message of death being proffered by the abortion-supporting minority in the state. Last month, the Texas Tribune ran a feature piece on Lenzi Sheible, a University of Texas student in Austin who founded Fund Texas Women, an organization that pays for the transportation costs of pregnant women to death sites for their children.
Fired up by the frenzied abortion supporters who bombarded the Capitol building in Austin during HB2 hearings last summer, Sheible says that she “got caught up in the spirit of fighting.” She admits, however, that, “while everyone was interested in fighting HB2 so that it didn’t pass, not a lot of people were prepared to accept the fact that it would.”
In reaction to the success of HB2, Sheible founded Fund Texas Women and grew determined to ensure that Texas law should not inhibit access to abortion. Sheible’s organization can be compared to trains that brought Jews to Auschwitz and or death camps during World War II. “Work will make you free,” reads the sign at the entrance to Auschwitz. The abortion mill destinations of the travels funded by Fund Texas Women could read “Abortion will make you free,” and they would be just as much a misnomer as Auschwitz’s infamous greeting. Sheible doesn’t just help to transport women to abortion mills; she helps to transport children to their death – a death that can have profound negative effects on their mothers for the rest of their lives.
What abortion supporters in Texas seem to miss about HB2 is that legislation is only a part of the massive Pro-Life vision, which reaches far beyond laws on paper. Hand-in-hand with Life-affirming legislation is a firm determination to further pro-woman, pro-child efforts across the board; these include compassionate alternatives to abortion and increased awareness of abortion’s true negative effects on women.
These integral pro-woman efforts are, in large part, kept alive by Texas’ Pro-Life youth. The premier example of youth activism in Texas can be found in the Dr. Joseph Graham Fellowship for College Pro-Life Leaders, going strong since its founding in 2008. The Culture of Life being developed and sustained by these Pro-Life leaders is changing hearts and minds about abortion on a personal level, and the Pro-Life fire is blazing. Although organizations like Fund Texas Women demonstrate a disturbing desire to tender death at any cost, and possibly at the expense of Texas law, they don’t represent the increasingly Pro-Life identity of young people in Texas.
On the contrary, Pro-Life Texas youth are developing pro-woman initiatives at a much more rapid rate than abortion-supporting youth, who are not even organized among themselves. For example, students at Stephen F. Austin University pioneered a scholarship program for pregnant and parenting students, and the movement has trickled out to other schools, including Texas A&M (which hosts a wildly successful 5k fundraiser for each of its scholarship funds). Pro-Life student groups gather resources for pregnant women and young moms in need, reach out to post-abortive women seeking healing from their tragic experiences, and host educational booths and talks to raise awareness of Life issues on their campuses, among many other endeavors.
Undeterred by anti-Life forces like Sheible’s death trafficking fund, Pro-Life students are taking a proactive approach to Life issues. Pro-Life students across the state have begun to transform their campuses, one heart at a time.
