Notre Dame’s gender studies department will be hosting an “abortion doula” next week.

This is disgusting and goes against Catholic teaching but few in the administration care. Some prize academic freedom over fidelity, others just despise Catholic teaching outright.

The College Fix: The speaker is part of a series called “Reproductive Justice: Scholarship for Solidarity and Social Change.”

This specific event is titled “Trans Care + Abortion Care: Intersections and Questions,” and includes the abortion activist, Ash Williams, a self-proclaimed “Abortion Doula,” as a speaker.

The College Fix reached out to Williams via Sister Song Network, where the activist works. The organization has not responded to multiple emailed requests for comment in the past week. She is “a Black trans abortion doula, public intellectual, and abolitionist community organizer from Fayetteville, NC,” according to an event bio…

The leader of an alumni group that seeks to ensure Notre Dame maintains its Catholic identity criticized the event and series in emailed comments to The Fix.

Sycamore Trust President Bill Dempsey told The Fix that Notre Dame has given “scandal of the first order through its promotion of abortion through two pro-abortion panels, with more on the way.”

“This flouting of the commitment of the university to ‘uphold the sanctity of human life from conception to natural death’ illustrates the fault lines that have opened at Notre Dame in the wake of the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision turning the abortion issue back to the state legislatures,” Dempsey said.

Dempsey said he believes the gender studies department “took advantage of the university’s academic freedom policy under which departments are free to sponsor discussions of issues in which panelists may oppose Church teaching.”

Notre Dame, of course, did not respond to requests for comment from the College Fix. That’s their go to maneuver. Silence.

As Nadezhda Mandelstam wrote about Soviet oppression, “Silence is the real crime against humanity.”

#FACTS