Less than a month after the start of the academic year, the Texas state legislature passed SB-8, a ban on abortion past six weeks, before many women even know they are pregnant. Joanna Grossman, professor of women and the law at Southern Methodist University’s Dedman School of Law in Dallas, Texas, noticed the climate among students shift in her reproductive rights course.
“I have a room full of students who are interested in these issues anyways. In that context, I’m seeing a lot of fear and confusion about what the future holds for them,” said Grossman. “I think the students want reassurance that this isn’t really happening or that it really doesn’t mean what they think it means. And obviously, I can’t really provide them that reassurance.”
With the U.S. Supreme Court poised to potentially overturn Roe v. Wade, the right of women to end pregnancies has gripped the national conversation—and higher education.
SB-8 effectively allows any person to sue someone else for providing an abortion or helping to do so in the state (with “help” vaguely defined, legal experts point out). This summer before the bill passed, some conservative legislators in Texas were already turning their attention to the role of college campuses, calling to defund public universities that offer abortions to students.
“College campuses have always been at the epicenter of some form of reproductive rights organizing,” said Mary Ziegler, professor of law at Florida State University. She studies the legal history of abortion in the U.S. “That also goes for anti-abortion student groups working with the GOP. So, in both cases, younger people have helped set the terms of the debate. That makes sense because they are the people most likely to be affected. Because they are of reproductive age—and will be for a long time.” 
The Guttmacher Institute, a nonprofit research organization centered on reproductive justice, found that nearly 40% of people who seek an abortion say they do so at least partially because having a child could derail their education. In 2014, according to Guttmacher, women aged 20-24 made up the largest proportion of people in the U.S. who had abortions. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, an undergraduate student is on average under the age of 25.
“There’s never enough attention paid to how reproduction affects education, and that extends to a lot of issues,” said Grossman. “Like the lack of contraceptive access for many students or the lack of bodily autonomy to not be sexually assaulted. On top of that is the significant impact of abortion rights, which shape the course of students’ lives. We already know that many students will drop out of school due to an unwanted pregnancy.”
