Abortion activists display an intent to provoke, not debate

Mike Spahn

Pray for Rain

Warning: If you haven't already been to the Diag today, don't go. And try to avoid it tomorrow, too.

In a gross display of First Amendment rights, the Center for Bioethical Reform, at the request of the Chi Alpha Christian Fellowship and the campus Students for Life, brought its Genocide Awareness Project to Ann Arbor. The display, for those lucky enough to have avoided it, attempts to draw correlations between the Jewish Holocaust, the lynchings in the black community and the current climate surrounding abortions in the United States by placing pictures of the three on six-foot tall, 13-foot wide signs.

I guarantee that by the time this column is strewn about lecture halls around campus, this pro-life display will already be the talk of the town. And that's exactly what they want.

Gregg Cunningham, director of the Center for Bioethical Reform, told a reporter working on a preview of the event that, "The real power of this is that everybody gets to debate."

LSA junior Andrew Shirvell, head of Students for Life, echoed Cunnigham. "We want to spark debate on the topic of abortion on campus."

Laudable goal.

Disgusting tactic.

The trouble with this means of "sparking debate" is that the word debate assumes intelligent, logical discussion of an issue in an attempt to prove a point.

There can be no intelligent, logical discussion when GAP attempts to manipulate the emotions of onlookers with inflammatory photos and forced reactions.

And that doesn't even take into account the fact that giving women the right to control their own body cannot rightfully be compared to the extermination of millions, an event that shouldn't be compared to any other in documented history.

If the Students for Life want a debate, they should call the Students for Choice and set up a time. Each side can make their case and the onlookers can make their decision. If the Students for Life are so convinced of their position, they shouldn't need to resort to such tactics.

They should be able to take anyone on, confident that no one will be able to see the issue any other way after they present their argument.

There's no question that if you believe a fetus is a person at conception, abortion is the single most abhorrent act imaginable. State sponsored murder cannot be tolerated. And if I believed that was true, I would probably grope to find any possible means to change the law that I could find.

But even this attempt is overboard.

While photos are certainly powerful in attempts to convey a message, these are tasteless.

Shirvell said yesterday that his group has made plenty of attempts to get their message across, adding that people just don't come to their mass meetings, so maybe this would do the trick.

Certainly mass meetings are not the best form of expressing an opinion and gaining supporters. And neither is this display. This is meant to provoke, not convince.

The GAP Website includes a 12-page dissertation on how these tactics can be justified - quoting newspaper articles, statistics and even Martin Luther King, Jr.

King is quoted, in his letter from a Birmingham Jail, as saying that "Nonviolent direct action seeks to create such a crisis and establish such a creative tension that a community ... is forced to confront the issue. It seeks to so dramatize the issue that it can no longer be ignored."

If GAP and other pro-life individuals want to emulate King, they should lock arms and participate in sit-ins and marches, just as King supported. That would force the community to confront the issue in a rational, intelligent manor - not the in the emotional, knee-jerk way that this exhibit will surely evoke.

There's no doubt that this display is legal, the groups sponsoring it definitely have the right to show express their beliefs in this manor. What's so abhorrent about the display is not that it exists, but rather that it is meant to cause such a stir. By placing the exhibit in the most traveled part of campus, GAP precludes any chance of a student missing the exhibit.

And the best means of protesting this display is to avoid it and not give organizers the thrill of inflamed argument, or debate, in their terms.

Shirvell said that debate needs to be sparked, and this is one of the best ways to do it, adding that the group debated the matter extensively before deciding that GAP should be invited to campus.

"If now is not the time, then when?" he said.

This may be the time, but this is certainly not the method.

- Mike Spahn can be reached via

e-mail at mspahn@umich.edu.