Adding to the growing list of embarrassing post-Dobbs abortion meltdowns, multiple college athletics coaches told the Washington Post that they worry state abortion restrictions will dissuade top female athletes from attending their schools or, even worse, persuade them to give up a sport for their baby.
The Post article notes that a disproportionate number of elite women’s sports programs and events, such as the Women’s College World Series, are located in states with abortion restrictions. Half of the top NCAA gymnastic programs are in such states. This is, as the article characterizes it, nothing less than a disaster. NCAA’s “model decision flow chart” currently tells athletes they can “elect to carry” and return 6-8 weeks after birth or “elect to abort” and return immediately. Without abortion, some coaches apparently are worried about what may come next.
Joanna Wright, a Boies Schiller Flexner law firm partner who filed an amicus brief in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization on behalf of female athletes, told the Post that women will be affected because “athletic prowess is their ticket to higher education.”
“Athletic success is dependent on bodily integrity and the ability to hone and control your own body,” she said.
If women’s sports are truly doomed to failure without abortion, it only indicates a bigger problem. For years, female athletes have spoken out about the pressure they are placed under to abort their babies in order to continue playing. Five-time Olympic medalist Sanya Richards-Ross told Sports Illustrated that she didn’t feel like she had a choice at all. College women face similar pressures despite the fact that Title IX supposedly protects them from losing their scholarships due to pregnancy.
Many female athletes simply aren’t aware of Title IX’s protections. An ESPN investigation once found that at least seven Clemson University athletes were pressured into aborting their babies out of a concern for their scholarships.
A child is worth infinitely more than any athletic award or championship. In a 2019 New York Times op-ed, nine-time Olympic medal-winning runner Allyson Felix detailed the pressure she felt negotiating her Nike contract while trying to start a family. Pregnancy, she argued, “is not messing up.”
It should instead be “part of a thriving professional athletic career, as my teammates have shown and I hope to show too,” Felix wrote.
And athletes are not the only ones being pressured into aborting. A variety of circumstances make women feel they have no options — from unsupportive family members and boyfriends to difficulties at work. Women in these circumstances need support, not abortion.
That’s what one Michigan football coach, Jim Harbaugh, is hoping to offer. He has promised to adopt any baby his athletes feel they can’t care for.
“Let that unborn child be born, and if at that time, you don’t feel like you can care for it, you don’t have the means or the wherewithal, then [wife] Sarah and I will take that baby,” he said.
College athletics departments could take this opportunity, like Harbaugh, to provide genuine support to pregnant students, especially if they’re worried about losing top athletes. Instead, they’re continuing to perpetuate the lie that has harmed female athletes and other women for years — that abortion is the only way to move forward.
Rather than ruining these students’ lives, these abortion bans will protect them from being pressured into a decision they regret.
