Young Americans for Freedom hosted conservative speaker Seth Gruber on Tuesday in Kansas State’s Student Union, where he discussed abortion laws and ethics.
Gruber spent the day tabling and also delivered an hour-long speech in favor of the pro-life movement to about 150 people that evening.
After the Supreme Court overturned the federal right to an abortion through Dobbs v. Jackson’s Women’s Health Organization in 2022, Kansans rejected an amendment to remove the right to an abortion from the state’s constitution.
Over 19,000 abortions were performed in the state in 2023, and 78% of those abortions were performed on nonresident women.
Gruber said abortion must be banned at the state and federal levels.
“If you believe every human being has a right to life, then so does the unborn,” Gruber said. “But in the meantime, if that’s not going to work in this cultural moment, then states are moving towards abolishing abortion or codifying it into their state constitution.”
President of K-State’s Young Democrats club and junior in political science, Samantha Suchanek, said Kansas has already decided on the issue of abortion.
“We live in a democracy, and the people voted; they made their decision very clear that they wanted to protect the right to an abortion in Kansas,” Suchanek said. “The more time we spend going back and readdressing that issue, the less time that we spend working on policies that can actually help solve problems that the state is facing at a local and state level.”
Chairman of K-State’s YAF chapter and senior in history, Thomas Adcock, said the effort to bring Gruber to K-State began after their executive team heard Gruber speak in Washington, D.C. earlier this year.
“We knew right then and there we wanted to bring him,” Adcock said. “We were able to generously have YAF help cover most of the cost for this event. We did a lot of the material costs, but we didn’t have to request any funding from the school.”
YAF treasurer and senior in finance and accounting, Joe Ackerman, said other students erased or drew over YAF’s promotional chalk outside the Union.
“We are the only conservative group on campus at this point, besides Turning Point, and we have, over the past two years, brought a lot of ideas from the conservative ideology to campus,” Ackerman said. “We want there to be an expression of everybody’s views on campus, but the expression of a person applies to free speech, right? We want to bring this here and have the discussion, an open dialogue … and where there’s silence, there is destruction. Destruction of that would lead to the destruction of America as a country, and I certainly don’t want that.”
