How are college campuses preparing for a post-Roe world?

The Hechinger Report 

Olivia Sanchez

June 22, 2022

The end of Yael Benvenuto Ladin’s senior year at Oberlin College in Ohio was in sight. After more than two years of pandemic learning, she wanted to finish her classes and her thesis, graduate and go. Her campus activism days were over, the rising leaders behind her readying to take the baton.

All that changed a month before graduation, when Benvenuto Ladin read about the leaked draft of a Supreme Court opinion that would overturn Roe v. Wade, effectively removing guaranteed federal protection for a legal abortion. She immediately organized last-minute abortion support training for Oberlin students and began trying to figure out what would happen to students in the 13 states where abortion will become illegal automatically if the draft opinion is adopted as the court’s final decision.

And, like students, college officials and abortion access advocates in states with so-called trigger laws, she’s bracing for what may come in the fraught and uncertain months ahead. She knows a great deal of training would be needed to sustain abortion access in a post-Roe world.

Reproductive rights advocates like Benvenuto Ladin, who was a leader in the Oberlin Doula Collective, rallied immediately, thinking of new ways to help students seeking abortions if they become illegal. If colleges are doing the same thinking, it is almost impossible to find out: Dozens could not answer questions about what they will do to guide students if the court decides to overturn Roe v. Wade.

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