Georgetown University — a private Catholic college in Washington, D.C. — will offer a class that requires students to assist “the regulatory advocacy efforts” of the National Women’s Law Center, a pro-abortion legal group.
The class is titled “Regulatory Advocacy: Women and the Affordable Care Act,” and will be offered next semester by the Georgetown Law Center. According to the course description, students will analyze aspects of Obamacare and how they impact women’s health policies and legal rights.
But the course also has a practical component in which students will work with the NWLC, an advocacy organization that fights for abortion rights. At a minimum, students will join conference calls with the organization and its partners, and help formulate advocacy strategies, according to the course description.
NWLC supports Obamacare and its requirement that religious institutions cover birth control and abortions in their health plans, according to The College Fix.
Kelly Garcia, senior counsel for NWLC, will teach the course. She told The Daily Caller that the combination of real-world experience and academic analysis of Obamacare will be worthwhile for students.
“The Affordable Care Act is major piece of legislation that has introduced significant change to the regulatory landscape and is important for anyone interested in health law or administrative law,” she wrote in an email to TheDC. “The course provides students with substantive knowledge of the ACA and of the real world regulatory process.”
But given that Georgetown is a Catholic college, some question whether the institution should offer a course that turns students into lobbyists for causes that run counter to the church’s teaching.
“We have long warned about Georgetown scandals that undermine the Church’s strong defense of innocent life, but here students are being required to work for a pro-abortion lobby, making America’s oldest Catholic university an active agent of the culture of death,” said Patrick Reilly, president of the Cardinal Newman Society, a Catholic education and advocacy organization. “If allowed to continue, this puts Georgetown in direct opposition to the Church.”
The Cardinal Newman Society described Garcia as a “radical pro-abortion rights lawyer,” who supports abortion so fervently that she even wrote a poem in 2011 titled “Planned Parenthood, Why Do I Love Thee?”
Georgetown denied that any class assignments would pertain to the abortion issue.
“While reproductive health and technologies are a part of the discourse surrounding the ACA, and thus relevant to this class’s curriculum, there are no assignments pertaining to abortion, and certainly no requirement that students adhere to a particular set of beliefs,” the university wrote in a statement. “The issues discussed in this class, or any class, do not imply any institutional endorsement of a particular course of action.”