Dal University says it is offering a course to its students that teaches “dangerously” about the “right to abortion.”
The course, which has been advertised by Dal as an academic program, was designed for women who wish to gain a “new perspective” on the abortion debate, and that the students must also “take into consideration the effects of abortion on women.”
The program, entitled “Abortion, Feminism, and Women’s Lives,” was designed to be accessible to women, students and families, said the Dal website.
Dal has had to “rethink the way we educate about the issue of abortion” and is now “in the process of developing a curriculum that can support this goal,” the university said in a statement.
In the past, Dal has also promoted “the importance of respect and equality for all human beings,” but in a press release, the university says the new course is designed to “challenge the status quo.”
“The new course provides an opportunity for all of us to learn how to become more compassionate, more reflective, and more engaged in the discussion about abortion,” Dal said in the statement.
The course was initially posted on Dal’s website, which describes it as a “specialised curriculum” that “will help students understand the implications of the current debate.”
“While this course is not intended to be an ‘abortion course’ (it is not) the students are expected to become familiar with the controversial issues around abortion in Canada and elsewhere in the world, and are expected, at the outset, to be sensitive and to consider the different points of view on the issue,” the Dal statement said.
The “abortion” course, in the course description, is described as “a two-part course that will include discussions of abortion in a historical context.
Part 1 focuses on abortion in history and will look at abortion in the United States, the UK and Ireland in particular.””
Part 2 will focus on abortion policy in Canada from a feminist perspective, including the current issues of women’s health, the role of women in the abortion care system, and the impact of abortion policy on the lives of women,” Dal says.
Dartmouth University also has a course that focuses on “gender, race and class.”
Dart, which is also a Catholic university, said in an email that “this is the first time we have offered an academic course with the goal of challenging the status of women and the abortion agenda.
It is also an important first step towards engaging students in a new and challenging conversation about abortion.”
Dal University has also published a list of required readings for the course.
The required reading list is a “long list of books and texts that are widely considered to be important to the debate on abortion,” the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, which teaches the course, said.
It added that “the requirement for the reading list reflects that the course is intended to challenge the status-quo, and to encourage discussion about the intersection of women, race, class, sexuality, and disability.”
The university said it plans to create a course on “how women have been impacted by abortion” that will be published in the fall, but has not yet said when that will happen.
In March, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the federal government cannot require religious schools to teach a course called “Abstinence, Marriage, and Family” in a way that is “offensive, sexist, or demeaning to women.”
In an opinion that could be a deciding factor in the Supreme Court’s decision, Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote that the government had no constitutional right to require schools to provide an “objectionable, discriminatory, or otherwise harmful curriculum.”