(LifeSiteNews) — Legally protecting preborn babies from abortion could lead to a future of “cannibalism” and “forced breeding camps,” an Arizona State University (ASU) English professor recently claimed at a campus event inadvertently highlighting the extent to which academia is conditioning future generations to fear pro-life laws.
Jennifer Irish is an associated professor of English whose areas of expertise are identified as creative writing in fiction and poetry as well as community literacy. On August 28, she hosted a campus workshop on “a speculative future” for so-called “reproductive rights,” featuring registered nurse and “community advocate” Angela Lober, director of the Academy of Lactation Programs at ASU’s Edson College of Nursing & Health Innovation.
The event began with a reading from Irish’s collection of poems “trac[ing] the consciousness of an artificial womb that must confront the role she has played in the continuation of the dying of the human species,” which “engages with the most pressing concerns of this contemporary sociopolitical moment,” including so-called “reproductive rights, climate crises, and mass extinction; gender and racial bias in healthcare and technology; disinformation, conspiracy theories, and pseudoscience; and the possibilities and dangers of artificial intelligence.”
From there, the event transitioned to a conversation between Irish and Lober, to which audience members were invited to bring “questions and comments about the future of reproductive health [i.e., abortion] in the face of climate change, misinformation, and other problems facing our present and our future.”
The College Fix reports that Lober opened her remarks by claiming that “the United States hates women and everything the female body does,” citing parts of the country where maternity care providers are too far from patients. She expressed bewilderment that Roe v. Wade was actually overturned, contributing to “the balance between hope and despair [being] an everyday experience for me.”
Irish bemoaned “forcing women into motherhood,” telling audience members they should be “terrified” of any “external entity” controlling women. She claimed that “so much of our reality points toward” futures in which pro-life laws lead to “forced breeding camps” and having too few resources to go around leads to “cannibalism.” She also touched on what she characterized as an “all-out assault” on the so-called “trans community and people’s ability to self-identify,” which “is disgusting, immoral, and wrong.”
READ: ‘It almost killed me’: Ex-transgender teen slams ‘gender transitioning’ in powerful speech
To avert these ostensibly apocalyptic scenarios, Lober said Americans need to “dismantle capitalism” and “elect a female president.” She also shared that she tells her own children not to have kids, citing alleged overpopulation.
When Campus Reform reached out for comment on the event’s hyperbolic claims, an ASU spokesperson attempted to downplay them.
“Some of the phrases used in the event about forced breeding camps and cannibalism are motifs being cited from a work of fiction, not a prediction of where the United States is headed, and not opinions offered by ASU faculty,” the statement said.
Modern academia has long been dominated by left-wing activists who see their primary purpose as advancing their ideology, even at the expense of academic results. The ASU workshop is a particularly dramatic example of how the abortion lobby’s allies have spread fears about state pro-life laws that currently have Republicans divided as to how to respond.
ASU received $203.6 million in federal Pell grants in 2023, a one-time payment of $199 million from the federal Higher Education Emergency Relief Fund (HEERF) the year before, and on September 17 announced that it has been awarded almost $30 million for microelectronics research.