My Letter to the Editor on Abortion at Penn State
At Penn State this past week a national group called the Center for Bio-Ethical Reform visited campus. As a part of their “Genocide Awareness Project,” CBR staged a very large demonstration in front of the campus library with graphic images of aborted fetuses alongside images of dead children in Darfur.
The Daily Collegian’s staff editorial responded to the tactics as “defective” and criticized the efficacy of their project, calling their posters “legal” but distasteful. (I have a feeling CBR would respond similarly if asked their opinion on abortion.)
Anyway, CBR’s demonstration and the newspaper’s editorial prompted me to write a letter to the editor on the subject:
In response to The Daily Collegian’s editorial yesterday (Group’s shock tactic defective) on the Center for Bio-Ethical Reform’s (CBR) graphic abortion posters, I wanted to offer the following thoughts.
First, it was notable that the editorial specifically referred to “unborn babies” rather than “fetuses” (itself a Latin term for “little child”). In other words, the editorial conceded from the start that the being in the womb is a “baby” – a human being – and so CBR’s goal of promoting the view that the child, as a human being, deserves the protection of the law was achieved.
Second, the editorial asserted that the abortion-as-genocide connection is faulty. Regardless of whether one views abortion as murder per se, one can agree that abortion represents the termination of a baby-in-progress.
Today in Philadelphia, slightly more than 50 percent of pregnancies among African-American women are terminated. Whether the annual loss of half of the potential population among a specific group represents genocide – the loss of “cultural, racial, national or political” diversity – is a question I’ll leave to the reader.
Lastly, it’s significant that, for the first time ever, a majority of Americans, 51 percent, now identify as “pro-life” according to the latest national poll by Gallup, with 42 percent calling themselves “pro-choice”.
Whatever your thoughts on CBR’s graphic tactics – and I myself question their effectiveness – it seems that new winds are blowing.
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