After last week’s widely-reported student backlash over an anti-abortion society at the University of Exeter, YouGov released a poll that shows 47% of Britons in fact support allowing pro-life societies, compared to 29% having the opposite view.
The youngest age group of 18-24 year olds showed the most opposition to such societies, with 37% saying they should be allowed compared to 39% saying they shouldn’t.
The poll comes after student protests that followed a post by Exeter’s Students For Life student society trying to recruit freshers to their “soon-to-be thriving community”.
A petition was quickly created that has since been signed by over 9,000 people calling for the university to “strike down the society and stand up for women”.
In response to the backlash, the University of Exeter’s Students’ Guild issued a statement that acknowledged the opposition but said that it would support “freedom of speech”.
A similar row has broken out among students at Oxford, after outrage at the presence of an anti-abortion stall at the Freshers’ Fair. The university’s Student Union (SU) made it clear that the stall only represented the views of those individual students and not of the SU, and pointed out that the Oxford SU had to “… adhere to the University Freedom of Speech regulations which [they] are mandated to follow”.
After the row broke out in Exeter, many students and others who support abortion rights took to Twitter to express their concern. The post below is from a student who confirmed the Exeter Students’ Guild’s stance on free speech.
The thread then goes on to show how the dispute may have only just broken in the news, but has been going on for some time: “(This all happened over a year ago, and the society still exists)”.
Another user, below, pointed out that Students For Life is headed up mainly by men.
As with all polarising topics, it has not all been opposition. The Twitter user below expressed concern that pro-life students were being threatened, and worried that Exeter University might be unsafe for people with socially conservative views.
This is not the first time universities in the UK have come under fire from those who think they are facilitating and funding “harmful” anti-abortion/pro-life societies. In 2019 The Independent reported on similar resistance at a time when pro-life university societies had begun to “mushroom” – from 8 in the previous year to 14 in 2019 – according to data from the Alliance of Pro-Life Students (APS).
Fow now it seems the pro-life societies will stay, with Exeter Students For Life for example continuing to promote themselves on on social media. But the protests are unlikley to go away either.
Cover photo via Decon LIve: https://www.devonlive.com/news/devon-news/crowds-condemn-exeter-anti-abortion-6054467