Pro-Life Banners Removed from USC; ‘Approved in Error’

USC Students for Life (Facebook)
USC Students for Life (Facebook)

A series of pro-life banners of images of 11-week-old fetuses in the womb saw mere hours of daylight at the University of Southern California on Tuesday prior to being removed by the same university organization that had initially approved them. The light poles instead featured hand-written signs posted on them reading, “Women deserve the right to choose.”

“It is unbelievable that USC removed all the posters that were put up around the school,” USC College Republicans member Jacob Ellenhorn told The College Fix. He noted that the banners went through the proper channels to obtain approval. “It seems as though not even USC can stand for intellectual diversity. Why stop an authentic conversation about abortion? What is so offensive about the facts of life?”

Monique Allard, USC’s assistant provost for student engagement, responded to The College Fix about the incident in an email:

Trojan Events and Services, a unit of Student Affairs, approved the request in error. Banners may only be mounted along Trousdale if they identify an academic program, department, or event as specified by university policy. The banners did not identify an academic event but instead advertised the services of an external organization.

Yet the school’s reasoning did not explain why rainbow banners for Gay Pride were reportedly hung up last semester without advertising an event or organization and that Black History Month saw banners for that very cause, Ellenhorn said.

This is reportedly the second consecutive year a pro-life display at USC has been targeted. All 12 pro-life banners from the USC Students for Life were removed from six light posts. Images of them can be seen here.

The banners were part of the club’s final event of the semester, in which pro-life students tried “to show pregnant women that abortion is not their only option,” the club’s former president and USC grad student Lisa Ebiner Gavit conveyed.

This past November, students at UC Riverside voted to issue a “warning” to students on campus about “offensive” pro-life demonstrations and displays. A professor at UC Santa Barbara was sentenced to three years’ probation in 2014 for tearing down a pro-life display and assaulting a student after she claimed that the pro-life protest had “triggered” her response.

Follow Adelle Nazarian on Twitter @AdelleNaz

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