A controversial national group stirred intense debate and incited protests at the University on Wednesday when it erected displays on campus with large photographs of mutilated bodies of genocide victims next to photos of mangled aborted fetuses.
Group members and signs equated abortion and genocide.
The Genocide Awareness Project, which routinely draws demonstrations and sometimes arrests, held displays in the EMU Amphitheater during the first day of its two-day University visit. It was the first time the project, sponsored by the Center for Bio-Ethical Reform, has visited the University in six years.
Protesters from various campus groups called the large public displays insensitive and offensive, and those interviewed said comparing abortion to genocide is bogus and trivializes actual instances of genocide.
But project organizers said the images are not intended to offend but are meant to show people the real results of abortion. The definition of genocide makes the crime comparable to practicing abortion, which kills innocent humans, they said.
A student at Western Washington University early last week was arrested by campus police on charges of jumping a fence and damaging six of the project’s signs, The Western Front newspaper reported. The Emerald reported in October 1999 that no incidents of violence occurred here that year, but that the previous year students at Ohio State University were arrested for attempting to kick down the displays and slash them with knives.
The project, which the College Republicans brought to campus, is so controversial that several members of that group protested it on Wednesday. The ASUO Women’s Center held a march and students held protest signs outside the EMU throughout the day.
Darius Hardwick, a co-organizer of the project, said the group insists on erecting large graphic displays in public places because it finds that method the most effective at getting the point across. Holding a forum in a room wouldn’t reach the general population, he said, adding that the images get the point across without requiring passers-by to talk with organizers.
“Our message isn’t targeted for pro-lifers. It’s targeted to people who don’t know what a first trimester baby looks like,” he said.
“We’re not here to create conflict, but there are people that oppose us harder than others. But we find that it works,” he added.
Martin Luther King Jr. used disturbing photos of blacks being beaten as they registered to vote to get his message across, Hardwick said, just like his group is using the abortion pictures to make its point.
Margarita Smith, the nontraditional student advocate for the ASUO Women’s Center and a senior ethnic studies major, said
comparing the images of people killed in the Holocaust and Rwandan and Cambodian genocides to abortion makes images of recognized genocides meaningless.
“It’s just – it’s sick,” she said. “These displays try to compare it with something that in so many ways is the opposite of that.”
She said the organizers neglected to think about students who may have firsthand experiences with some of the genocides photographed.
“It’s thoughtless. I think it’s just really inconsiderate,” she said.
Political science junior Daniel Rosove – who held a sign that read “HOLOCAUST=ABORTION?? SERIOUSLY … ?? !!WTF!!” – said his grandfather lost his family in the Holocaust.
He wasn’t picketing on a pro-abortion platform; he was protesting the display, which cheapened and perverted the word “genocide,” he said.
“No one’s denying that abortion is an unpleasant act; it’s not a fun Saturday afternoon act,” Rosove said.
But, he said, the project is “drawing moral equivalencies where there aren’t any.”
The images weren’t about starting a conversation, they were about shocking people, which further delegitimized the project, he said.
Project volunteer Matt Robie said people got upset with the photographs, but that’s expected because “it’s an upsetting subject.”
Robie said abortion could be likened to genocide because they are both products of dehumanization.
“More and more I hear that the unborn are not humans and they don’t deserve the rights we have,” he said.
Still, he said, most people leave the display believing in a woman’s right to have an abortion.
Project organizer Hardwick said several years ago he saw a video that inspired him, then a moderate pro-lifer, to become an activist.
Hardwick said people who have been affected by genocide, including a Cambodian woman he met who lived through the reign of the Khmer Rouge, aren’t offended by the genocide images if they agree that abortion is wrong.
Lynn Moracco, the co-director of Students for Choice and the campus organizer for Planned Parenthood, was not convinced.
She said the images were just a scare tactic. They disrupted her
well-being and her concentration as a student, she said.
“I’m all for free speech,” she said. “But I feel like the images portrayed here are a little graphic and bloody.”
Contact the news editor at [email protected]