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Pro-life social media influencer Lydia Taylor Davis visited App State Tuesday to speak about her stance on abortion with students. She partnered with App State’s Students for Life club as a stop on her university and college campus tour, “Abortion is Violence.”

Davis spent the afternoon on Sanford Mall tabling with App State’s Students for Life club where she set up cameras and microphones for students to approach and debate her. In the evening she held a speech and Q-and-A in the IG Greer Hall’s auditorium.

Prior to the event, Davis said her main goal for being at App State was to educate her generation, Gen Z, on abortion as an industry. She said Gen Z is specifically targeted by the abortion industry. She said that abortion is not healthcare, abortion is not pro-women and abortion is violence.

The table set up on Sanford Mall Tuesday afternoon had pamphlets denouncing Planned Parenthood and offering alternative resources to survivors of sexual assault in place of abortion. She also provided pins and stickers that were aimed toward men and people of color who support the pro-life movement.

Alongside a team from Students for Life’s national organization, Davis welcomed students to discuss their own stances on abortion. Both pro-life and pro-choice students stopped to speak with her.

“I think that college students tend to get used to only listening to ideas that they agree with,” said junior social work major Trinity Cortor. “This is obviously something that a lot of people on our campus don’t agree with. And I think the whole point of college is to hear ideas that you don’t agree with.” 

While some students saw Davis’ presence on campus as positive, others opposed her views and shared their own stances on abortion rights.

App State’s College Democrats club organized a peaceful counter-protest during Davis’ evening speech. Students made posters and took turns speaking about the harm the pro-life movement can bring to women’s rights.

Anderson Clayton, the current chair of the North Carolina Democratic Party and App State alum came to speak at her alma mater. Clayton is the youngest elected chair of a state political party in U.S. history.

“I think that App State students have a history of student activism that has propelled people to find their voices in ways that maybe they didn’t anticipate,” Clayton said. “When you have people that are trying to say, ‘well we don’t believe that you deserve rights,’ it’s like, well, how do we create spaces that are saying, ‘no, we do, and we want to make you feel protected.’”

Following a half-hour debate with Davis, freshman public health major Hazel Grine said Davis used a tactic called a straw man. A straw man is when somebody oversimplifies another person’s stance in an attempt to weaken their true stance and therefore make it easier to attack.

“Not only did she attend to put words in my mouth, not only did she jump to extreme conclusions, but she repeated over and over and over her main argument was that she believed in equal rights for human beings and I did not,” Grine said.

Grine said their debate came from a place of including fetuses in the topic of human rights abuse. Grine argued that comparing living human beings who experience pain, thoughts and feelings to clumps of cells that do not experience those sensations is disrespectful to the experience of people who have encountered oppression.

“She tried to get me over and over to admit that biologically speaking at the basis of biology, there is a human life. And, yes, it has human DNA. It is a clump of cells with human DNA. I will not deny that,” Grine said. “What I will deny is that it experiences the same sensations, the same humanity, the same experience as the person carrying it.”

Davis said she had some great civil conversations with people who disagreed with her during the debate portion of the event. Davis said she is usually yelled over and threatened rather than spoken to, which constituted App State as one of the more “civil environments” she has had discussions on abortion. 

“I did have a conversation with one guy who was kind of there with a friend who kind of said that my arguments maybe helped shift his mind,” Davis said. “Maybe not a complete mind change, but definitely shifted the way he was voting and shifted his stance a little bit. So, I think that was definitely really productive.”

During the latter half of Davis’ event on campus, she gave a speech where she explained her reasoning for being pro-life. She said she used to be pro-choice, but her perspective shifted when she was told by a pro-choice activist that her foster sister should have been aborted.

“I felt sick to my stomach in that moment and I froze, I didn’t know what to do,” Davis said. “Because in that moment, I had to imagine a world without my sister– without her smile, without the joy she brings to this world.”

Since then, she has dedicated her life to being a pro-life activist. She runs the Students for Life Instagram page, with content varying from posting about their chapter’s involvement with the pro-life movement to commentating videos of people sharing their experience with abortion.

Davis’ largest platform is her TikTok account, with 14,000 followers. In one video, she shares the moment Roe v. Wade was overturned, where she is surrounded by her fellow pro-life activists celebrating the overturning. During her speech at App State, she recounted the memory of Roe v. Wade’s reversal in a narrative retelling.

“At 10:10 a.m., I stood beside my mentor, Kristen Hawkins, as she read, ‘The Constitution does not confer a right to abortion. Roe and Casey are overruled,’” Davis said. “Everyone burst into tears of joy as the television and media cameras surrounded us in that historic moment.”

After giving her personal stance on abortion, Davis played five pro-choice TikToks on a projector and individually debunked them one by one. One TikTok featured a transgender individual speaking about pro-life activists’ attempts at keeping abortion rights away from women. When the video concluded, some spectators of Davis’ speech laughed along with her.

“Besides needing help with his makeup, he also needs a biology lesson because abortion rights are actually anti-human rights,” Davis said. 

Despite her hard stance that life begins at conception and abortion is killing a human being, Davis said multiple times she supports terminating pregnancy during medical emergencies. She also said she does not support punishing women who choose to get abortions.

“I think it’s more difficult because I don’t support criminalizing women,” Davis said. “I think it’s a little bit different in that aspect because the intent is not to kill a baby for most women, but I would say that abortion is killing a human being.”

In the instance of sexual assault, Davis said the pro-life movement never wants a woman to be sexually assaulted and those situations are “terrible.” But she said she knows the solution to that circumstance “is not to end that child’s life.” Instead, she encourages women to seek out people like her for support and resources. 

Sophomore English major Charlotte Isenberg said she has a personal experience with abortion and the pro-life movement. She said after being raped and impregnated at 15 years old, “anti-choice” leaders used her story to promote their political policies. 

Isenberg said she was followed by activists to her appointment for an abortion as they attempted to convince her to change her mind. The authorities were falsely told she was suicidal, which resulted in an involuntary 72-hour hold in a mental facility. 

Isenburg told law enforcement that the people who reported her were “zealots” whose intention was to stop her from having an abortion. She clarified to authorities that she was not at risk for suicide as they were informed.

Isenberg said instead of using the term “pro-life” she instead uses the term “anti-choice.” She said anti-choice people refuse to recognize the mother’s life and want to criminalize them for deciding to have an abortion.

“You cannot call these people pro-life if they’re allowing women to die because they don’t receive abortion care in states where it’s banned. And then, they don’t want women to have a choice. They’re anti-choice,” Isenberg said.

Davis wrapped up her speech with a Q-and-A where she allowed students to ask her questions. 

The topic of Planned Parenthood was prompted by a student and Davis strongly opposed the organization. She said despite offering other healthcare services, providing abortions discredits their intentions over all else. 

Davis also said that at her recent wedding, she had a “Defund Planned Parenthood Cake.”

Correction: A previous caption in this story incorrectly said signs pictured were advocating for College Democrats. This has been changed in the story.