Last year, Townhall covered how a Catholic university would offer its students a course in “transgender” medicine, including treatment of “trans children.” “Gender-affirming” care encompasses hormone therapy treatment, puberty blockers, and sex reassignment surgery. And, another Catholic university announced that the student healthcare plan for the 2023-2024 school year will cover 100 percent of the costs of students’ abortions and transgender care.
Now, one professor at a Catholic school faced repercussions for inviting a pro-abortion speaker to campus.
The Catholic University of America dismissed one of its professors for inviting an "abortion doula" to speak to students.
An email from the school’s president, Peter Kilpatrick, stated that the school began an investigation last week after learning that an abortion advocate was invited to speak to a class, according to Catholic News Agency. In addition, the school president had reportedly obtained an audio recording of the speaker.
“Now that we have clear evidence that the content of the class did not align with our mission and identity, we have now terminated our contract with the professor who invited the speaker,” Kilpatrick wrote on Tuesday. “As a Catholic institution, we are committed to promoting the full truth of the human person and to protecting human life from conception to natural death. In our rigorous pursuit of truth and justice, we engage at times with arguments or ideologies contrary to reason or to the Gospel.”
The recording, shared by The Daily Signal, identified the psychology professor as Melissa Goldberg. She invited Rachel Carbonneau to one of her classes on Jan. 23. Reportedly, Carbonneau is the founder and CEO of the doula company Family Ways. She reportedly spoke to students about working with women who have abortions (via CNA):
Discussing abortions, Carbonneau in the recording said that the “goal for a lot of providers is to try to perform the abortion before the baby’s nerve endings are formed. So the goal is to do it at a time when the baby is not going to feel any pain.”
Carbonneau also discussed what she called “the risk to the birthing person” including “a risk of hemorrhage and a risk of [a] baby that’s not going to survive, and the conversation to have with her older children about why she’s been pregnant and now there’s no baby.”
“There are a lot of pieces to these puzzles, emotionally and socially,” she said.
When asked by a student to expand on her use of the term “birthing persons,” Carbonneau said that she works with clients who identify as transgender. “Birthing person” is a term transgender advocates often use to avoid gendered language such as “woman” or “mother.”
Transgender lingo like "birthing person" is just one component of the left's attempt to erase women entirely. Last year, Villanova University, which is a Catholic school in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, rolled out the new guidelines for faculty and staff to follow to create a “gender inclusive” campus in the upcoming school year.
“This guide introduces Villanova faculty and staff to best practices for being gender inclusive in our work spaces, laboratories, and classrooms—especially for those who identify within transgender, nonbinary, gender nonconforming, and/or gender questioning communities,” the guidance said. It added that the suggestions are not comprehensive, but a starting point. The school’s website states that “gender inclusivity” is a crucial element to the school’s diversity mission.