A More Serious Affair...

Pro-Life or Pro-Choice?

Are you willing to have your opinion changed?

About a year ago my Father came up for a visit. As we were walking on campus he asked me something that has stuck with me ever since. "What are the students passionate about here?" He said, "When I was in college there were demonstrations and students would picket, for various reasons." I thought about it and realized that our campus is a pretty sleepy one for the Northwest. In the last two years since I have been here I have only seen one Demonstration that involved "picketers" carrying signs and chanting anything, and it wasn't actually the students it was the professors who wanted a pay raise and were threatening to strike.

Well all that changed a few weeks ago and there was another demonstration carried out by mostly students carrying signs and chanting their mantra of choice of which at the moment I can't remember, and it was all because of something "we" did.

A month or so before Malachi was born, Von was approached by a man named Darius Hardwick who works for a Non-Profit Non-Religious Pro-Life organization called the Center for Bioethical reform. He wanted to know if our Student organization would host the "Genocide Awareness Project on Campus at the end of May. The Genocide Awareness Project (GAP) is a traveling photo-mural exhibit which compares the contemporary genocide of abortion to historically recognized forms of genocide. It visits university campuses around the country to show as many students as possible what abortion actually does to unborn children and get them to think about abortion in a broader historical context.

My first response was ummmmm no...I am definately pro-life but I don't want to offend people or ruin our organizations position on campus. So Darius asked if he could come and give us a small group presentation about what the GAP project was all about. Let me tell you this was one of the hardest things I have ever seen. The first thing he said was, "I'm not here to judge anyone who has had an abortion, I'm only here to give people the facts about abortion." He then proceeded to play a video that showed the development of a baby and it showed exactly when they developed a heart beat and brain waves etc. Much earlier than most people know. This video also had some extremely graphic pictures of aborted babies that made me want to be sick. This may sound weird but I felt that I owed it to all the "People" those little babies would have become if it weren't for being aborted to watch it. It was aweful, but afterwards I knew that the only thing to do was to put my vote in for bringing the GAP project to campus. We took a vote from our students and it was almost unanimous that we should support this. Not only did our students support bringing it but they also stood by and handed out literature and talked to their peers and professors as they walked by the exhibit. It was a definate symbol of their commitment because they faced many harsh words in the two days that they were there. It was amazing to see how many people reacted harshly to having to look at the gruesome photos, but still thought that abortion was ok and it should be a womans choice to take the life of an unborn child. But it gives you an idea of what most people thought of the exhibit. I am excited to say that the next day we heard from one of the nurses on campus that a young woman had come in saying that she had planned on having an abortion but changed her mind after seeing the exhibit. We had a post abortion support table set up and crisis pregnancy hotline numbers posted all around the exhibit so that people had an opportunity to seek help if they needed to . There is so much to say about the experience but my fingers are tired so if you have any questions or would like to know more facts about abortion in the U.S. or world wide please ask, I've found out more than I ever thought I wanted to know.

ok so the photos and article that follow are from the local paper. It wasn't totally negative so I guess that is a good thing. My own thoughts are interjected in red print.

Campus rally raises hackles
Story by: Craig Coleman
Date Published to Web: 6/6/2007
MONMOUTH -- Taken from the Polk County Itemizer Observer

Dominique DeWeese had been driving down Monmouth Avenue when the exhibit in front of the Humanities and Human Sciences Building caught his eye. So piqued was the Western Oregon University's senior's curiosity that he parked his car and headed back to get a better look. Hanging from a 10-foot-high display were dozens of posters showing aborted fetuses, juxtaposed with images of death and carnage from bleak scenes in history, such as the Oklahoma City bombing and mass killings in Rwanda. A caption beneath graphic Holocaust and race lynching scenes read "Final Solution, Separate but Equal, Pro-Choice." "Lynching and abortion ... there's not a correlation there," "Both seem to be the discarding of unwated human beings" said DeWeese, who is African-American. "They're trying to make it the same thing. "I don't think these should be here," he continued. "There are other ways to get your message across." Shock and revulsion is what coordinators of the "Genocide Awareness Project" hoped for when they brought the controversial mural exhibit to campus on May 29-30. Sponsored by the Center for Bioethical Reform, a national anti-abortion organization, the initiative seeks to expand the context in which people view abortion by placing it alongside traditionally recognized forms of genocide, said Darius Hardwick, a regional coordinator for the group. "We're upsetting the status quo," Hardwick said. "On a college campus, the default opinion on abortion is pro-choice. "We're not making a subjective that abortion is wrong for some people," he continued. "We're equating it with killing - and killing is wrong." For several hours on both days, project volunteers handed out flyers and engaged pedestrians in conversations about abortion, even as the photos drew dirty looks and a few harsh words. "How is your fascism rally going?" yelled one driver from a passing car. In a letter posted on the college's web site a few days before the event, Western President John Minahan notified students that the display would be on campus and that it complied with university and City of Monmouth scheduling requirements. Minahan wrote that the presence of the project "represents an opportunity to test our commitment to respect the (free speech) rights of others and the challenge to use that respect to temper our individual response to potentially controversial material." Tiffani McCoy, a member of Western's student government, said she and some like-minded classmates decided to hold an informal demonstration against the project after first seeing the display the day before. About a dozen protestors stood a few feet away from the mural, brandishing signs criticizing the genocide comparison and pro-choice slogans. "First amendment rights are important," she said. "But I think what they have up there is misleading." Student Meagan Lamb said she felt the display was a form of harassment. "When I'm at school I shouldn't be bombarded by images meant to change my opinion on how I feel about things,""OK so I thought that was what higher education was all about" she said. "Abortion is a choice." The event went mostly without incident, although campus security did respond after some protestors tried to obscure the display by marching in front of it with a large white banner. Protesters complained about CBR volunteers videotaping them during the incident. Hardwick said his group videotapes as a security measure, as murals have been defaced and destroyed by bystanders in the past. Some Western students and even campus employees volunteered on behalf of the exhibit. David Perry, president of the Western's chapter of Northwest Collegiate Ministries, said he has always been against abortion, but never to the degree of actively demonstrating against it until learning of the awareness project. "Seeing the pictures of aborted babies," he said, "is a burden on the heart." Karissa Coleman, who works as a sign language interpreter on campus, used her lunch break to pass out flyers for CBR. "People have come up and talked to us and if they are pro-life or pro-choice, they're leaving the same way," she said. "But they have been open to the display and to talking with us." DeWeese described himself as "in the middle" when it comes to the issue of abortion. He said the exhibit alienates those who are undecided. "This turns me off, definitely," he said. "You see this on TV, and what do you do? You turn it off." "Why is it that abortion is so ugly that we don't want to look at it, why is it acceptable and why is it a woman's choice"?

(Ashley) - So the most compeling picture I saw through this whole thing was a photo of two 24 week old fetus's. One was an aborted fetus and one was 24 week premie that was in intensive care. The only difference was that one was wanted and one wasn't.........why is this a choice that is allowed. Which of these babies didn't deserve life? Which one wasn't really a human. If they where both human beings why isn't this considered murder?