Two anti-abortion activists from the New York State right for Life (NYSRTL) organization staged a demonstration in front of the Marano Campus Center on Wednesday afternoon, causing a buzz among students on campus.

The two members of the group, who are not SUNY Oswego students, appeared on campus for about four hours, debating a large group of students over the controversial issue with four spread out, graphic, folding signs of aborted fetuses in the background. 

One member of the group, who did not name herself and was distant from the other, who faced a large group of students around her and,  conveyed that the two members travel around college campuses trying to educate students about abortion.

“We believe that it’s the greatest human rights injustice of all time, and we believe it should be illegal,” the member said. “Our mission is to change the hearts and minds on the issue of abortion.”

NYRSTL was founded in 1967 but emerged greatly after New York State Gov. Nelson A. Rockefeller (R) signed the state’s abortion-on-demand law in 1970, three years before the landmark U.S. Supreme Court decision Roe v. Wade, which was later overturned by the high court’s 2022 decision in Dobbs vs. Jackson Women’s Health Organization. 

While NYRSTL has donated to mostly Republican candidates, they have vehemently declined to support the GOP candidate for governor, Bruce Blakeman, who has indicated his willingness to part from the traditional anti-abortion Republican platform. Blakeman is looking to unseat the highly unpopular incumbent Kathy Hochul (D) this November.

NYSRTL operates as a (501(c)(4)) non-profit social welfare and political advocacy organization, but also has a separate educational outreach branch registered as a (501(c)(3)). They also operated as the New York State Right to Life Committee, Inc., political action committee (PAC), but the PAC was terminated in August of 2024, after a period of inactivity,  and failing to send disclosure reports to the Federal Elections Commission (FEC) for the first two quarters of 2024, the PAC was in debt at the time it was terminated.

The last high-profile candidate the PAC contributed to was Republican congresswoman Elise Stefanik in the 2014 election cycle.

A plethora of Oswego students surrounded the two demonstrators, some passionately debating while some yelled over each other, with a lone person silently holding a make-shift sign saying “My body my choice.,” while Aa SUNY Oswego university police officer quietly watched over the discourse a short distance away.

Many students voiced their frustration with the two women from NYSTRL, with one student remarking that it was more of a play on emotions than a debate setting.

“I think that she’s arguing in bad faith,.” Oswego student Gabrielle Blake said., “She knows that she’s getting the rise out of the crowd that she wants. There are ethical ways to go about your argument. Going for shock value is not the way to go.”

While one felt that it was a play on emotions, another believed the demonstrators’ platform was an unusual way of stripping themselves of their own rights.

“All women protesting basically, sad that these women are fighting to strip themselves of their bodily autonomy,” another Oswego student, Molly Johnson, said. “It’s the idea of taking real issues and real historical events and very generational traumatic points and using them as talking points. It’s odd behavior.”

While a larger number of students and some faculty assembled in front of the Marano Campus Center to engage in the discourse, the demonstrators did notdidn’t back down from the lack of numbers on their side.

“Abortion has been perpetuated because of the use of euphemisms,” one of the anonymous NYSRTL members said, “What is abortion? It’s ending a life. It doesn’t sound as nice to say that, so we use abortion or women’s healthcare. A rose by any other name, whatever you call it, doesn’t matter; it doesn’t change what something is.” 

But for one male student who wished to remain anonymous, the message from the two demonstrators was out of touch.

“I wish my mom had an abortion. My mom had 10 kids, and I had a hard life. The kid doesn’t end up having a good life either,” he said.

In New York State, abortion is enshrined in law by the aforementioned 1970 on-demand law, but also by an updated 2019 law called the Reproductive Health Act, which protects abortions up to the 24th week of a pregnancy, one of the most far-reaching laws in the country. New York voters went to the polls in 2024 and passed a state constitutional amendment that prohibits discrimination based on sex, pregnancy, pregnancy outcomes, and reproductive healthcare and autonomy.

As the demonstration came to a close, SUNY Oswego University police had concerns over the possibility of some students knocking over signs, leading to violence, but no such incident happened, with Officer McIntyre, who was at the scene, calling it a “calm dialogue.”

Although the debate outside the Marano Campus Center ended peacefully, the larger debate over abortion remains contentious nationwide.

According to a Pew Research Center poll, which was released in March of this year, 60% of Americans believe abortion should be legal in almost all or most cases; in contrast, 38% wish it were illegal. 84% of Democrats support abortion, while 63% of Republicans oppose its legality.

 In Oswego County, outside of the SUNY Oswego student population that leans heavily Democratic, Republicans outnumber Democrats by almost a two-to-one ratio countywide, in addition the county has only voted for a democratic president just four times since 1856.

Despite the differences between the county population and the on-campus population, the scene on SUNY Oswego’s campus illustrated how a national debate over abortion can quickly become a local campus issue.