College students spilled onto the garden at East Excessive Faculty throughout a walkout Thursday, holding indicators, chanting and cheering in assist of speeches about abortion rights.
They had been joined by lots of of different college students throughout Salt Lake Metropolis, who additionally walked out of Highland and West excessive colleges shortly after 10 a.m. Thursday. There have been additionally walkouts at different colleges within the Salt Lake Valley, together with Olympus, Taylorsville and Skyline excessive colleges, in addition to colleges in different states, similar to Kentucky and Texas, in line with information studies.
“Children our age care about our rights,” mentioned a a 17-year-old junior at Highland Excessive Faculty. “Even at 14, as much as 18, 19 years previous, we don’t wish to sit again and simply watch this occur.”
A leaked draft opinion was revealed earlier this month indicating that the U.S. Supreme Courtroom might overturn Roe v. Wade, the 1973 landmark abortion case. The college walkouts Thursday are the newest in a collection of rallies that Utahns have held in response to the information.
(Francisco Kjolseth | The Salt Lake Tribune) East Excessive College students stroll out to protest the Supreme Courtroom’s leaked resolution to overturn Roe v Wade and provides states the facility to ban abortions on Thursday, Might 12, 2022. .
Greater than 100 college students stood within the courtyard at East Excessive Faculty with indicators, with two studying, “My arms are uninterested in holding this signal because the Sixties” and “If you happen to don’t like being compelled to put on a masks, think about being compelled to have a child.” They chanted, “Not the church, not the state, ladies should determine their destiny,” and “Professional-life is a lie, they don’t care if folks die.”
Throughout the courtyard, one other group of scholars, principally boys, shaped on the north entrance to the college. They jeered and shouted on the protesters. Another male college students milled across the crowd making feedback to undermine audio system.
A number of women requested one younger man to depart the demonstration, and after a number of refusals, one woman dumped her water bottle over his head. The entire fliers posted in boys’ bogs at East Excessive saying the walkout had been torn down, organizers mentioned.
“I don’t perceive why males, who won’t ever expertise the ache of giving start, the ache of interval cramps, nor the ache of breastfeeding, suppose they will select the end result of essentially the most tough resolution a lady could make,” 17-year-old East scholar Grace Russell advised the group.
At Highland Excessive Faculty, audio system used a megaphone to offer quick speeches close to the flagpole out entrance, earlier than shifting off faculty property over to Sugar Home Park. They talked in regards to the want for bodily autonomy and for teenagers to get engaged and register to vote, if they will.
“That is completely a highschool subject,” one speaker mentioned. “… It’s about everyone.”
Like at East Excessive, college students carried indicators that learn, “Highland helps ladies’s proper to decide on,” and “Shield secure authorized abortion.”
(Trent Nelson | The Salt Lake Tribune) College students at Highland Excessive Faculty stroll out in assist of abortion rights, in Salt Lake Metropolis on Thursday, Might 12, 2022.
When one of many Highland Excessive organizers went to the rally on the Capitol on Might 5 — which over 1,000 folks attended in assist of abortion rights — she seen a woman who was “completely sobbing.”
“I ran up and hugged her,” she mentioned, and it morphed into a much bigger group hug.
She and the woman linked on social media, and so they began speaking and planning the walkouts at Salt Lake Metropolis excessive colleges.
Whether or not folks agree with the scholars protesting in assist of Roe v. Wade or not, the Highland scholar mentioned, “I believe they need to respect that every one of us children are coming collectively and preventing for what we imagine in.”
The Supreme Courtroom will quickly rule in Dobbs v. Jackson Girls’s Well being Group, a case that stems from a 2018 Mississippi regulation banning abortions after 15 weeks of being pregnant, with some exceptions. The excessive courtroom’s resolution wasn’t anticipated to be launched till June, or probably July, earlier than its session ends.
Relying on how the Supreme Courtroom formally guidelines, both Utah’s set off regulation — which outlaws most abortions within the state — or a ban on the process after 18 weeks of being pregnant are possible to enter impact within the Beehive State.
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Becky Jacobs is a Report for America corps member and writes in regards to the standing of girls in Utah for The Salt Lake Tribune. Your donation to match our RFA grant helps preserve her writing tales like this one; please contemplate making a tax-deductible reward of any quantity at the moment by clicking right here.