The Pitt News - 9-24-90

STUDENTS PROTEST PRO-CHOICE LEADER
 
by Mindy Boffemmyer
 
Stop the Molly Folly.
Equal rights for unborn women.
Molly Yard, you don't speak for me.
 
    Holding signs bearing these and other slogans, approximately
20 University of Pittsburgh and Carnegie Mellon University pro-
life students protested National Organization for Women President
Molly Yard's speech Thursday in the Law School Building.
    On one sign, Yard's name was written in dripping red paint to
simulate blood.
     Robert Chesnavich, a CMU student, was protesting "Molly's
crusades to stop [Supreme Court nominee David] Souter and
[making] abortion legal."
     Pitt Students for Life President Shelia Wusinich said, "We're
here to show that Molly Yard doesn't speak for all women."
     "We're here to speak for pre-born women and all the women who 
are exploited by abortion," she said.
     CMU student Jeff Mishler said that he and his friends Mark
Sanders and Joe Messina, also CMU students, came to Pitt to
protest Yard's speech because "We're basically just pro-lifer
Catholic guys."
     Yard's views are against their religious and moral principles,
he said.
     "I came down here because Molly is irrational," Messina said.
     "I don't see how these people can go around saying [abortion]
is right when it's not," Sanders said.
     "There are those who say that the baby is part of the 
woman", said Pitt student Paul Easler.  "A man in the Arctic climate
could not survive outside a building, but that doesn't make him
part of the building."
     "Likewise, a baby is not part of a woman," he said.
     Pitt alumna Kara Henry said that the protesters were
"advocating life all the way, where the other side is saying you 
have a choice of life or death."
     "The pro-choicer has taken away the issue by calling it 
'pro-choice,'" she said.
      "You made your choice when you decided to be involved with
the other person," Henry said.
     Wusinich said that "in many cases women are only given one
choice - to have an abortion [because of their economic
circumstances.]"
     Twelve percent of the women in the United States are black,
and 30 percent of the abortions performed are on black women, she
said.
     A NOW representative stood at the door of the Teplitz Memorial
Courtroom warning both pro-lifers and pro-choicers to leave their
signs outside and refrain from creating disturbances once inside.