Reflections as I Leave the RTL Board
This blog post is the last post that I am writing as a board member of Georgetown Right to Life. From Social Chair, to Vice President, to the OCC Board, I choose to be in leadership with RTL because I firmly believe life deserves dignity and respect from conception to natural death. Most importantly, I hope to share this truth with the whole world, especially fellow Georgetown students, my friends. This blog serves to identify some obstacles that RTL faces and some recommendations I have for our community to move past them.
First, the largest obstacles for RTL to overcome on campus are the misconceptions others have about our club. Students have told me that RTL does not care about women or human rights. They typically don’t know that RTL does regular diaper drives to support women in the DC area. They don’t know that we provide free babysitting services for parenting Geogetown undergrad and graduate students. They don’t know that we host panels that address the Uighur genocide, combat racism, and fight against ablism. It can be incredibly frustrating hearing these attacks from people who themselves don't care about providing supportive services for women in the way that RTL prioritizes it. My recommendations are that Right to Life’s publicity efforts, while not straying from our consistent platform that all life is valuable, must publicize more about what we actually do on top of what we believe. This will help to nullify misconceptions and negative connotations of our organization.
Second, moving past the pandemic has been extremely challenging for the Georgetown community and the state of free speech on campus remains a frustration for many members of RTL. The results of our chalking event in Fall 2021 were especially disheartening for many. We do not expect other students to agree with us, but we do expect them to respect our most basic human rights, the right to free speech. In truth, it is highly unlikely that any one person would change their mind from seeing chalk in red square or seeing RTL’s tabling. But, it is essential to our mission that we retain visibility, especially at a Catholic University. My recommendation to all pro-life students is to buy into our efforts to be visible on campus. It is a sacrifice worth making. However changing the hearts and minds of our community also requires developing strong relationships with people who think differently from us. I suggest inserting your pro-life ideas to pro-choice friends slowly and over time. Remember that we are all products of our environment, and people have been socialized and primed to think the same way over long periods of time. Everyone deserves love no matter their political backgrounds, so buy into the on-campus visibility efforts but change hearts and minds by engaging in meaningful conversations with others that you have already developed a relationship with.
Finally, we must make an effort to see the pro-life issue outside the framework of modern politics. Modern politics and its toxicity is a stain on the pro-life movement, which has inserted itself into modern conservatism. People don’t know that the prolife movement was actually started by liberal progressives. While RTL is proud to have both Republicans and Democrats represented, and the pro-life issue cannot and should not be divorced from politicsas protecting life cannot be allowed to be political. I strongly recommend that individuals in RTL continue to hyperfocus on the issue of life from conception to natural death as our platform denotes. Bleeding into moral, religious, and political frameworks about sexuality, contraceptives, and family—however strongly we feel about them—takes away from our larger mission that life, no matter its circumstance, deserves love and family. While this belief is clearly supported by RTL’s official stances, I am urging individuals in our community to prioritize protecting life as their first goal in these conversations. We can overcome the political roadblocks, by not letting our extraneous political beliefs bog down our efforts.
Through baby steps, we can change hearts and minds to make the death penalty, cruel treatment of immigrants, embroyic stem cell research, assisted suicide, police brutality, war, racism, human trafficking, abortion, and more unthinkable. RTL remains the only club at Georgetown dedicated to this consistent life ethic, and we should celebrate our successes while adjusting to our obstacles.
-Matteo Caulfield
