Right to Life increased its presence this week with a series of events to celebrate life and bring awareness to the various threats it faces in the 21st century.

Life Week began with a display of 3,300 flags on Copley Lawn Monday to display the number of abortions that take place in the United States every day.

Right to Life has expanded its campaign from previous years to include programming on the death penalty.

“This is a more comprehensive Life Week than past Life Weeks,” Right to Life Vice President Evelyn Flashner (COL’15) said. “We’ve done Flag Day for many years, but this year we really are trying to do the week bigger.”

The group screened the film “Dead Man Walking” as part their discussion of the death penalty Wednesday.

“We try to be all-encompassing, so [Wednesday] we [focused] on death penalty,” Right to Life Development Chair Kelly Thomas (SFS ’15) said. “Our big thing is that we are consistently pro-life: we are anti-euthanasia, anti-death penalty. ‘Womb to tomb,’ as we call it.”

However, abortion prevention remains at the core of Right to Life’s mission. On Tuesday night, Right to Life brought four prominent panelists to discuss the legal, ethical, and medical dimensions of abortion.

Marguerite Duane, an associate professor in the Department of Family Medicine, discussed her decision as a physician to refuse to prescribe patients contraceptives or assist them with abortions.

“It’s not only a conscience thing but a health thing,” Duane said. “If you look at the harms of contraception, unfortunately the pill is promoted as the panacea for all women’s health problems — what’s frequently ignored is that the World Health Organization categorizes birth control as a group one carcinogen, which is the same category as tobacco.”

Duane said her pro-life views stem from religion.

“If you read the Bible, if you look in Genesis, the very first words God ever said to man in Genesis 1:27 were, ‘Be fertile and multiply,’” Duane said. “To destroy that gift is to say to God, ‘What You gave us is not important.’”

Georgette Forney, who spoke on the same panel as Duane, is the founder of the Silent No More campaign, through which women who have had abortions can share their experiences.

“When I was 16 years old, I had an abortion,” Forney said. “That’s not something I’m proud of to share. For 19 years, I worked really hard to make it OK, and no one knew how much pain I was in, until the day that I came face to face with the fact that I didn’t just have an abortion — I aborted a child.”

Right to Life maintains its presence on campus throughout the year, tabling in Red Square twice each week. In January, the group brought students to the annual Right to Life March on the anniversary of Roe v. Wade and attended the Cardinal O’Connor Conference on Life, the largest student run pro-life conference in the nation.

H*yas for Choice, which held Choice Week in March, recognized the importance discourse between the two groups.

“In an institution like Georgetown, we should encourage all sides to express their views,” H*yas for Choice President Laura Narefsky (COL ’14) said.

However, Nerafsky said that the prominent flag display on Copley Lawn and the signs that read, “Women Do Regret Abortion,” did not promote open conversation.

“My main concern is the demonstration on Copley Lawn, instead of engaging the issue in a positive way, … some of the signs and flags have the effect of traumatizing women who have had to deal with these experiences in their lives,” Narefsky said.