Teresa Donnelan, a senior at Georgetown, said that while both Richards' talk and the pro-life panel were co-sponsored by the Lecture Fund, she does not think the events were of comparable prominence or promotion on campus. "I think it's conciliatory," she said of the group's support for a pro-life event.
Donnelan told CNA that while she believe in the importance of free speech and discourse, the event "could have been more creatively handled."
She suggested that Richards could have spoken alongside a pro-life speaker, or that a panel debating Richards' position could have immediately followed her talk. "There really is more that could have been done to make this more of a dialogue."
Sophomore Michael Khan, president of Georgetown Right to Life, said that while he was "encouraged by the pro-life students themselves," he wished that Georgetown would do more to emphasize life issues and support pro-life students as part of the university's emphasis on Catholic Social Teaching.
Kahn also suggested that the university could better enforce existing policies where events "gravely contrary to Catholic moral tradition and teaching" are denied funding. "She was paid have a platform on our campus, to speak unchallenged about her pro-abortion views," he said of Richards' talk.
Flashner commented that Richards "wasn't prepared for people to disagree with her," and presented the lecture as if Georgetown University and all young people at the talk agreed with her positions. When she did receive a challenge from the audience, Richards resorted to insults and "talking down to" the student who asked the question, she said.
Julie Reiter, a junior, asked one of the four questions permitted after Richards' talk. She pointed to a report from the Guttmacher Institute – formerly a semi-autonomous division of the Planned Parenthood that is now an independent organization – which found that 94 percent of Planned Parenthood's "pregnancy services" are abortion-related, and less than 1 percent are adoption-related.
"How can you say that when a woman walks into your clinic, she has a choice?" she asked. "From the outside, it would not appear that this is complete health care if one choice is so favored over the other."
Richards told Reiter, "The Guttmacher is not Planned Parenthood, but I appreciate whatever statistics you've come up with," prompting crowd members to applaud and laugh at Reiter.
She then encouraged Reiter to visit a Planned Parenthood clinic and stressed that women are "best suited to make their decisions about pregnancy."
Reiter told CNA that she was shaken by Richards' answer: "Her response was a chuckle and a laugh." Reiter also observed that while her statistics from the Guttmacher Institute were questioned and mocked, Richards herself had cited the Guttmacher Institute as a source earlier in the lecture.
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"She got her first challenge and she laughed at it," Reiter said of the experience. "I don't think she took it seriously or that there was a dialogue."
Adelaide Mena was the DC Correspondent for Catholic News Agency until 2017 and is a 2012 graduate of Princeton University.