2 Students Tried to Talk About Abortion. It Spiraled Beyond Their Control.

One evening in the University of Chicago’s student union, as hundreds of angry eyes looked on and protesters chanted nearby, two students tried to talk about abortion.

At center stage were Jahné Brown and Brett Barbin, student lawmakers whose politics are miles apart. Under scrutiny was a bill that Barbin had proposed, a bill that was either a common-sense anti-abortion protection, or a grenade launched at poor students’ reproductive rights, depending on whom you asked.

Brown, a junior who had just been elected as the university’s first black female student body president, thought the bill had no shot. She started the day unsure if the discussion should even happen, questioning whether it’d do more harm than good. But she concluded, and convinced others, that Barbin deserved to be heard out. She could facilitate something rare: a forum where college students actually talked about an issue that’s so divisive.

Barbin, a senior and departing president of Chicago’s College Republicans, went in hopeful. He knew the campus leaned liberal, but he also knew his fellow College Council members. He was respected among them. His proposal, he thought, was a compromise.

But this was 2019.

Abortion restrictions were sailing through red-state legislatures. A “heartbeat bill” was rubber-stamped in Georgia; a near total ban was passed in Alabama. (Both laws face court challenges.) Headlines made reference to The Handmaid’s Tale, Margaret Atwood’s dystopian novel in which women are enslaved, raped, and forced to birth children.

And this was a college campus, a petri dish for protest. Though the University of Chicago is states away from most of the new laws, watching them pass was painful for progressive students. Barbin’s bill was catharsis, a chance to take a stand, however small. When word got out, hundreds showed up. They wielded signs that said “Defund College Republicans” and “Do You Hate Poor Students That Much.” Barbin had identified the third rail of campus politics, one student observed. With this bill, “he touched it.”

Even after the votes were cast, what happened that evening spilled over into campus life. Micromoments got memed. Barbin got flipped off, and Brown got mostly kudos. Then came national attention. Barbin appeared on the chatty morning TV show Fox & Friends, which spawned a cycle of conservative media coverage and brought a wave of comments, nearly all of them racist, to Brown’s virtual door.

That evening in May, neither Brown nor Barbin could have known where the discussion would lead. They just knew that students were eager to talk about what some adults can only shout about. Together, they faced their peers, cemented in their personal beliefs but tethered by a common goal: talk about abortion. Civilly.

A ‘Life of Dignity’

Brown had taken a stand on Facebook. She didn’t think it was a big deal. On May 16, she wrote: “Abortions are a good thing! The Emergency Fund supports and funds abortions proudly!”

The Emergency Fund exists for students in crisis, who can apply for money to help with pricey medical bills, for example. Each year, the committee that oversees the fund prioritizes an issue. This year, Brown said in an interview, committee members chose reproductive health. She wanted to remind people of that.

The money comes mostly from private donations, but a portion comes from student-life fees that every student at the university pays.

Brown has always supported abortion rights, but until college, she couldn’t really articulate why. Growing up in Louisville, Ky., she remembers when a close friend wrote an essay about why abortions are evil. Brown realized that the people she loves can hold different opinions from hers, but that does not mean that she backs down from her own.

In college, Brown became a pupil of reproductive justice. She devoured Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex and Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. She was struck by how Angelou, after she was raped as a child, felt robbed of her own body. Bodily autonomy is “the fundamental building block for a life of dignity,” Brown believes. Access to abortion, she learned, allows for such a life.

Barbin doesn’t see it that way.

Some anti-abortion students reached out to him after Brown’s Facebook post went live. So he drafted student-government legislation that would essentially ban the Emergency Fund from using student-life fees to pay for abortions, save for some exceptions. That way, students who oppose abortion would not be forced to violate their “sincerely-held moral beliefs,” the bill stated.

Like Brown, Barbin said his beliefs about abortion solidified in college, though he says his anti-abortion views are “kind of immaterial” to why he wrote the bill. He wanted to represent other students who oppose abortion, he said, lest student government give in to the “tyranny of the majority.”

Raised in the New Jersey suburbs, Barbin made his first foray into politics at his Quaker school, imitating Mitt Romney’s quirky rhetorical style as a freshman in a mock presidential primary. He joined the Ethics Bowl, where he debated the pros and cons of physician-assisted suicide. Then as well as now, he said, “I was willing to explore all sides of any issue.”

When he came across Brown’s Facebook post, Barbin wanted to have an open discussion. So did Brown. Not everyone agreed. Some student-government members wanted to kill Barbin’s bill. Essentially, Brown said, the question was: Is the anti-abortion movement “so extreme, so violent, and so antithetical to the things that we believe,” that it’s “too harmful to give them a platform at all?”

No, Brown argued. In this case, she owed her dissenters a space to air their grievances. And it was a chance to actually discuss a divisive issue. It’s unlikely anyone would change their minds, Brown remembered thinking. But maybe some good could come of it.

She also knew that people were energized, and that energy needed an outlet. Progressive students had watched abortion restrictions ratcheting up, state by state. Grace Bridges, a sophomore from Georgia, said she felt like she did not have control over what happened back home. “But I did have control, at least some level or ability, to protest what was happening on my own campus.”

‘It Did Not Move Me’

On May 21, at 7:30 p.m., 100 students filled a meeting room in the student union, and the latecomers, about 150 of them, clustered outside. Usually, no one showed up at these meetings. The parliamentarian laid out the rules of engagement. Be respectful. Be specific. If not, she told the seated audience, “I will gavel you down.”

Brown held the reins. Her job was to call on raised hands, and she wanted the people who would be most affected by the bill — women and people with uteruses — to be heard. Barbin was given about 15 minutes to make his case. Misinformation had spread through group texts, so Barbin said what his bill was not.

It’s not a campus ban on abortion, he said. Student government has no such power.

Barbin then asked the crowd to listen to a handful of their anti-abortion activist peers. A Roman Catholic said abortion went against her moral code. A sophomore raised in Bushwick, N.Y., said that abortion had tangible, destructive effects on his community’s culture. A junior, who disagreed with the strict laws that Georgia and Alabama had imposed, also said that allowing her student-life fees to pay for abortions would be like aborting a family member.

By the end, the room seemed restless. The students who opposed abortion “kind of tainted the audience” against Barbin, said Rachel Lindbergh, a student and friend of Barbin’s who watched the discussion on Facebook Live. “I don’t think you could ever really play off that ‘abortion is murder’ on a University of Chicago campus.” One anti-abortion student said she could not think of a more vulnerable group than unborn children, which provoked some laughs.

As discussion continued, students heard the chants of protesters but were focused on concrete questions. How many abortions have actually been funded? (None yet, Brown said.) Should the fund be entirely supported by private donations? (“We totally could, but I think abortions are a good thing,” Brown said, to cheers. “I think student government should be funding abortions.”)

Audience comments broadened, past the nuts and bolts of Barbin’s bill and into what it meant, symbolically, for a conservative man to be legislating about women’s bodies. A self-identified sexual-assault survivor addressed Barbin directly. If she could not prevent her tax dollars from buying Viagra — probably a reference to the millions spent on erectile-dysfunction prescriptions for the military — then “you can’t tell me that I have to have a child.” Because “if it’s God’s will to have a baby,” she said, “then it’s also God’s will for men to have limp penises.”

One student-government member who was staunchly against the bill said he likes to find a compromise whenever possible. “But not now and not today,” he said, “because I’m really mad right now.” Barbin thanked him for his passion.

Still, for each speaker opposing abortion, audience members clapped politely. No one was shouted down. “They have a lot of courage to come up here,” Raven Rainey, another student-government member, remembered thinking.

“I felt for them,” she added. “But it did not move me.”

Outside the room, there was no polite clapping. Chants of “My body, my choice!” and “F_ _ _ Brett Barbin!” bounced off the student union’s floors. At one point, someone threw an egg at an anti-abortion student.

As the protest unfolded, Christina Stebbins, a junior, worked up the courage to address her peers. Not one for public speaking, it took about 10 minutes and some cajoling from friends. Under an archway, she told her fellow protesters that Barbin’s bill was an encroachment of extremist views.

While Stebbins talked, a couple of counterprotesters milled about. A male student stood with his back to Stebbins, his arms crossed, a baseball cap pulled low, a cellphone video shows. As Stebbins walked off, the student booed at her back. Another male student stepped forward and yelled, “You’re a whore!” The crowd exploded. Stebbins raised her arms and turned to face the student.

“What did you call me?” she asked.

“You’re a whore,” the student said, his finger pointed, “and you murder children.”

“Keep it silent for a second so I can talk to him,” Stebbins told her peers. She then asked the student, loudly, first, why he chose to call her a whore, and second, why he thinks being a whore is a bad thing.

The student smirked and said nothing. He slipped through a throng of students, trailed by a couple of others while the protest roiled on. Another student ushered them out. “Go where you were the whole time women have been asking for help: Home,” he said. “You go home!”

Inside the meeting room, Brown called for the vote on Barbin’s bill, and it failed, 15 to 1. She questioned whether she had done the right thing. In the room, emotions felt raw, and people had shared their trauma.

But when she walked into the hallway, people were triumphant. Maybe that was somewhat deceptive, Brown later said, because “at the end of the day, it’s one little droplet in a huge thing that’s happened. But I think people felt like they had won.”

Story Becomes National News

For days, abortion-rights students took a victory lap. People donated to Planned Parenthood in Barbin’s name. Someone sold “Defund College Republicans” hats. The egg-throwing incident became a campus meme after the targeted student wrote on Twitter, “Tolerant Left threw eggs at me for my pro life advocacy. Fortunately the egg just bounced off and my stylish jacket was unharmed. I thank the Blessed Virgin Mary!”

He then wrote that he’d be enjoying a “delicious and refreshing” milkshake in a dining hall, “if any leftists want to stop by for constructive dialogue!”

Barbin, and his curly red hair, got memed, too. He was flipped off and cursed at, he said. He got death threats. He half expected to get booed at graduation. (He didn’t.) Some people trashed Barbin’s bill to score social capital, without really considering its content, said Lindbergh, Barbin’s friend. “There was kind of a picture painted that there’s this wild college Republican” who “wandered into a meeting and is trying to hijack everything,” she said.

Barbin brushed off most of it. People have a right to express their displeasure with him, especially because he’s an elected representative. Still, he said, it made him feel “not welcome, sometimes.”

Brown received mostly positive feedback from her peers. Barbin thanked her for her professionalism, which felt good, she said. As the semester wound down, so did the attention.

But then the story became national news.

Vice contacted Barbin and Brown, and published a story with the headline, “College Republicans Are Trying to Block Abortion Access on Campus.” Barbin says the bill was his initiative, not the group’s, and he did not think the story was fair. A few days later, the conservative news outlet Campus Reform picked up the story. (Barbin is listed on Campus Reform’s website as an “Illinois campus correspondent” but has not written any recent articles.)

Then, Fox & Friends approached Barbin. He agreed to appear, which annoyed some students. On the program, “he was almost seen as this conservative voice that was silenced by this campus,” said Bridges, the abortion-rights student from Georgia, “when I think, in fact, he was given a platform that a lot of students don’t get.” (Barbin said he spoke with any outlet that asked.)

The story quickly spread to Breitbart and other outlets. Readers were not exposed to what had actually happened in that room: a 50-minute clunky and imperfect exchange of ideas. They were fed a simpler narrative: A conservative voice had been beaten down. “Get a load of some of the backlash he received,” read one story. Atop the article was a stock photo of a roll of $100 bills and an anonymous black woman, pregnant and cradling her exposed belly.

Often included in these stories was Brown’s Facebook post saying that abortions are a good thing. All of a sudden, she started getting hateful emails and social-media posts, most of them, if not all, referring to her race, she said. A man called her campus workplace — which Brown did not want to name — and said that she should be against abortion because most of the babies who are “murdered” are black. The building amped up its security measures. Brown went “super incognito” on social media.

Barbin reached out to her, to see if she was all right. I’ve gotten some menacing emails and phone calls, Brown wrote back, “but I’m doing OK and trying not to take it too personally.”

The whole experience was scary and hurtful, Brown said. Still, she doesn’t regret writing the Facebook post. She said what she believed.

On Fox & Friends, Barbin, too, said what he believed. During the three-minute spot, he stuck to his main talking points, things he’d said at the May meeting, even as the program’s hosts prodded him to make more inflammatory comments.

One of the hosts said, inaccurately, that in New York, people would be able to get abortion “all the way up until the very end, after the baby is born.” She then asked Barbin — because abortion laws are stricter in the South — if he’d considered transferring.

No, I’m graduating, Barbin told her. And actually, he added, he’d considered his legislation a compromise.

Barbin watched the spot afterward, and he thought he had done well. Every media outlet wants to sensationalize, he said. The best he could do was to give his side.

Emma Pettit is a staff reporter at The Chronicle. Follow her on Twitter @EmmaJanePettit, or email her at emma.pettit@chronicle.com.