In a perfect fundamentalist Christian world, the Earth is a few thousand years old, water turns to wine, Charles Darwin was a charlatan and the art of persuasion consists of ramming your views down everyone’s throats. Unfortunately for the members of that charming clan, we live in a rational world that advocates choice and freedom. Unfortunately for the rest of us, these aggressive bible thumpers have chosen to abuse these tools of self-expression in the worst possible way: to completely insult and disgrace the very core values of life and its esteem. It baffles me how year after year, the Center for Bio-Ethical Reform feels that it is appropriate to push their beliefs upon unsuspecting first year students and wary returning students by providing Campus Pro-Life with a campaign that blazons nauseating photographs of cruel and humiliating human suffering.
Where exactly in their gruesome posters is the value of “life” placed? The correct answer is nowhere. Seeing the whole fiasco for the first time, I was flabbergasted: I decided to pass the story on to a personal mentor, who is also a local psychologist, and whose mother survived the concentration camps of the Second World War. I am now completely convinced that the Campus Pro-Life display is mostly degrading life by calumniating an inhumane communal trauma that was exercised on a specific race of conscious human beings, who were much more than growing organisms with a pulse. Perhaps a more effective approach would have been publicizing documentation that focused on the successes of mothers who despite tumultuous and complicated circumstances, had made the brave decision to keep their unborn. Instead of aiming for revulsion they could perhaps have funded programs for single teen parents who’s babies they are so intent on keeping alive. In fact, rather than wasting time and money defending their asininity in court this November, they would have been wiser to donate to orphanages or poverty-stricken households who are not able to pay for or feed the children they have so duly chosen to bear.
When it really comes down to it, only the truly immoral and apathetic would disregard the gross divergence between infanticide and genocide for the sake of shock, attention and extorting a reaction. Abortion is a multi-factorial issue, and a very personal one at that. There is always so much more to consider than the physiological survival of a fetus and there is always more than one life to protect. In essence, the message that true pro-life proponents advocate speaks of upholding respect, a principle which the CBR and administration of the CPL campaign sadly have no intention of implementing. The invasive, guerrilla approach of the display mutes the issue altogether by drawing focus to the stupidity of its argument. If the CPL group were aspiring to change minds, they only succeeded at embarrassing and disappointing the university community and they owe everybody an apology, especially those who have endured and survived discrimination, hate, torture and death of loved ones because of their ethnicity or heredity.