Genocide Awareness Project Visits Carolina
The Earth is Heating Up. Now What?
Fitz E. Barringer
April 2005
View Photographs from the Genocide Awareness Project's 2005 Visit
Walking through the quad in early April, it was nearly impossible to miss the disturbing photographs of aborted children displayed next to victims from the Nazi Holocaust and other historical genocides.
While many students may have had trouble connecting the sets of photographs, the point of juxtaposing these graphic images was quite simple for Carolina Students for Life. CSFL, the group that staged the Genocide Awareness Project, hoped to raise awareness for the true atrocities committed in the name of the pro-choice movement.
Both sets of images showed mutilated bodies, helpless victims, and, as pro-life supporters would argue, some of the worst acts committed by humanity. Tiny human arms, complete with miniature fingers but severed at the shoulder, appeared like they had been chopped in blenders. Other pictures revealed tiny bodies covered in blood in the palm of a gloved hand.
CSFL hopes that the disturbing photographs and the informational pamphlet will get students at the University thinking about abortion.
“We want to open a dialogue on campus,” said Mary McPherson, a student volunteer involved with CSFL.
“We don’t expect people to fall down and become pro-life, but we do want to get people thinking [about abortion],” she said.
The Genocide Awareness Project is part of a national campaign to raise public awareness about abortion on college campuses. Sponsored by the Center for Bio-Ethical Reform, the project travels to college campuses across the United States with its display of photographs and informational pamphlets.
Although its photographs make a bold statement, its “Why Abortion is Genocide” pamphlet contains the most important arguments of the Genocide Awareness Project.
Throughout the information booklet, abortion is systematically compared to such atrocities as the Nazi Holocaust, lynchings in the American South, and the Rwandan Genocide of the mid-1990s. Moreover, the pamphlet describes the ways that the pro-choice culture is working to strip abortion of its meaning. One example, for instance, discusses how abortion supporters in Los Angeles prevented the burial of 16,000 fetuses, saying the aborted babies were medical waste, not human lives. This behavior, however, stands in stark contrast to medical facts showing that a baby develops a heartbeat and brain activity within days of conception.
As the Genocide Awareness Project points out, describing fetuses with heartbeats and brain activity as “sub-human” has disturbing parallels with other genocide atrocities. Classifying any group of humanity as “less human” than another class of people sets a dangerous precedent. Hitler, after all, was famous for describing Jews as a lower form of life than Aryans.
Just as Jews, Rwandans, and Cambodians were portrayed as unwanted—and unneeded—by society, human fetuses have now become the objects of contempt. And contempt, the Genocide Awareness Project argues, leads to genocide. The Cambodian genocide in which one out of four Cambodians was killed pales in comparison to abortion in which one out of three fetuses is aborted. America alone has killed 38 million unborn children since 1973; that figure dwarfs the 6 million Jews slaughtered during the Holocaust.
Some may argue that the Genocide Awareness Project uses showmanship to create disturbing images in our minds. But the pictures make abstract concepts of abortion into concrete images. They force people to look at tortured, starved, or shredded human bodies and confront the realities of abortion and genocide.
Just because the Holocaust unfolded in death camps miles away from German cities does not mean that millions of Jews were not murdered. Just because abortion takes place behind closed doors does not mean that babies are not being killed.
The Genocide Awareness Project forces people to confront what they would prefer to ignore. But ignoring the images does not make them go away. When society chooses ignorance over reality, genocide is free to reign.