Speakers and organizers emphasized feminist arguments against abortion at Yale’s St. Thomas More Catholic Chapel.
Ari Shtein
Staff Writer, The Buckley Beacon
This weekend, more than 100 students gathered in the St. Thomas More Catholic Chapel (STM) for the eleventh annual “Vita et Veritas” conference.
The event was run by Choose Life at Yale (CLAY), a pro-life student group headed by Kylyn Smith (YC ‘26). This year’s conference promised a “Pro-Life, Pro-Woman” agenda. “The existence and presence of the woman … is often overlooked in surface-level pro-life arguments,” Smith told The Buckley Beacon.
CLAY invited several pro-life converts to speak about their dual ideological commitments to woman and baby. “A lot of them were in the medical field,” Smith said. “They were initially under the pro-choice mentality because of their care for the woman … until they realized that being pro-life does not mean you can’t care for a woman as well.”
Dr. John Bruchalski, a former abortion doctor and presently a pro-life OB/GYN, spoke at the event about what he considers “Being Truly Pro-Woman.”
A former communist and self-described “rebel” against his conservative Catholic upbringing, Bruchalski spoke of a desire “to liberate women from the chains of their fertility” early in his career. Dr. Bruchalski told The Beacon that pro-abortion dogmatism, in feminist and medical circles, were what first made him skeptical.
“I was listening to my patients, [and] they would say, ‘I feel like sh– on the pill,’” he recalled.
According to Bruchalski, his discomfort over this incongruence grew for years, while he trained as an OB/GYN and abortionist. “Your heart gets hardened,” he said, reflecting on one patient who joked about getting a “two for one” deal when he aborted her twins. After attempting the late-term abortion of what turned out to be a legally-viable infant, Bruchalski was scolded by an attending physician, for neglecting the baby’s life. One revelatory vision from Our Lady of Medjugorje later, Bruchalski explained, he began a new career as a pro-life practitioner in Northern Virginia.
Another speaker, Ramona Treviño, described her path “From Planned Parenthood to the Pro-Life Movement.” Years spent managing a Planned Parenthood abortion-referral center had soured her view of the pro-choice healthcare organization. “Nothing about Planned Parenthood is healthcare,” she charged. “It is about money.”
When a 40 Days for Life group held a vigil outside her clinic, Treviño claimed to feel the Holy Spirit moving her to change careers. Today, she serves as Outreach Director for 40 Days for Life.
Other speakers took a more analytical perspective on the pro-life cause. Steven Aden, Chief Legal Officer & General Counsel at Americans United for Life (AUL), described himself jokingly as “a charter member of the vast right-wing conspiracy.”
“The very concept that pro-life laws should protect women and children … came from Americans United for Life,” Aden said, pointing to AUL’s early and outsized role in overturning the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision which legalized pre-viability abortion in the United States.
Describing the present pro-life legal landscape, Aden emphasized “the promise of Dobbs,” which turned abortion regulation over to the states, and the largest threat to that new doctrine. “Chemical abortion became a profound challenge,” he said, referencing initiatives in Democrat-controlled states which facilitate the shipment of abortion medications to states where their prescription is illegal.
Aden pointed to a new report from the Ethics & Public Policy Center, a religious conservative thinktank. Using insurance data from nearly one million American women, it found that more than one in ten “experience sepsis, infection, hemorrhaging, or another serious adverse event within 45 days following a mifepristone abortion.”
Clinical studies tend to find adverse-effect rates of chemical abortion nearer to 0.5 percent, and the methodology of the non-peer-reviewed EPPC report has been subject to criticism by the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG). At Vita et Veritas, Aden described the results as “real-world data about what real people are experiencing.” In 2023, chemical abortions accounted for 63 percent of all terminated pregnancies.
CLAY hosts monthly tabling events on Cross Campus as a way of bringing “an alternative viewpoint to an overwhelmingly pro-abortion community.”