A report released in December by the nation’s largest organization of pro-life college students showed more than 100 Christian colleges and universities in the United States have ties to abortion industry leader Planned Parenthood.
Students for Life of America’s (SFLA) Institute for Pro-Life Advancement investigated 784 schools of higher education affiliated with Christian churches in the United States. Faith affiliations included Roman Catholic and Protestant churches.
The study was part of SFLA’s Christian Schools Project, one that seeks to raise public awareness of how Christian colleges and universities maintain ties to the abortion business, and to urge the schools to restore their true Christian values.
The pro-life activists emailed and called those Christian schools with relationships to Planned Parenthood in September and October, prior to the report’s release, providing them with the opportunity to remove the references to the abortion provider.
According to the report, 103, or one in eight Christian schools, continued some form of relationship with Planned Parenthood, most often as a “student resource” or “internship opportunity.”
“Christians have always led the fight to dismantle abortion violence, but our efforts are compromised when institutions that lay claim to our faith undermine that faith by partnering with and lending credibility to the anti-Christian abortion industry,” Kristan Hawkins, president of Students for Life of America and Students for Life Action, said in a statement sent to Breitbart News.
“At the time of publication, the number of Christian schools maintaining relationships with Planned Parenthood has dropped to 69, or one in 11 schools, thanks to interventions and awareness facilitated by the Christian Schools Project,” the Institute for Pro-Life Advancement states.
According to the report, of those 69 infracted schools, 15 received a grade of F, with four or more infractions; 14 schools received a D, having three infractions; 13 received a C, with two infractions; and 27 garnered a B grade, with one infraction.
Appendix A of the pro-life report shows the full list of Christian schools with infractions.
Data show Lutheran, Presbyterian, and Methodist schools make up a large share of infracted schools.
According to the report, Catholic schools are “the most likely to cut ties with Planned Parenthood once the problem is flagged.”
While 22 Catholic colleges and universities were initially tied to Planned Parenthood, the number of infracted Catholic schools dropped to eight over the course of the project, with 14 such schools breaking off ties with Planned Parenthood.
The report noted:
SFLA researchers stated that making the case for cutting ties with Planned Parenthood to administrators of Catholic colleges and universities was relatively easy because Catholic doctrine plainly communicates that abortion violence is an affront to human dignity. Having the ability to cite a clearly documented teaching on the matter made it clear that partnering with the Planned Parenthood abortion vendor in any ay is in clear conflict with Catholic teaching.
National Catholic Register reported Monday that, among the Catholic schools that eliminated their website’s links to Planned Parenthood were Fordham University in New York and Georgetown University in Washington D.C.
In its most recent annual report, Planned Parenthood indicated it ended the lives of 354,871 unborn babies in year 2019-2020, nearly 9,200 more than the 345,672 terminated in the previous year.
“We will abolish abortion in our lifetime, and we expect every Christian school to either stand with us in that battle for life, or disassociate themselves with the Christian faith,” Hawkins said. “Either you follow Christ, or you don’t. There is no in-between.”