It is probably safe to assume that a majority of Ann Arbor’s residents are socially liberal, and as such, support legalized abortion. On Monday and Tuesday, September 25th and 26th, a group of idealists from the Center for Bio-Ethical Reform (“the Center”) visited this comfortable little town and challenged this pro-abortion consensus with a traveling visual display called the Genocide Awareness Project (“the Project”) set up on the Diag. Thousands of Ann Arborites were confronted with stark and graphic images of the effects of abortion. Picture after picture showed the small, but recognizably human bodies.

No doubt the issue of abortion is controversial enough, but the display adds a new twist to the debate by portraying in images what pro-life activists have been saying and writing for years: the abortion situation in the United States has significant features in common with various episodes of genocide and ethnic violence from the past.

Gregg Cunningham of the Center claims that “educators invariably use shocking imagery to teach about genocide and we insist on the right to do the same.” And not only does the display use the “shocking imagery” to educate people about the realities of abortion and genocide, but it also draws what it argues to be a clear correlation between the two.

The display does this by juxtaposing pictures of aborted babies with images of the Nazi Holocaust, the Rwandan massacres, and enslaved and lynched American blacks. One panel featured a picture of emaciated victims of the Holocaust lying in rows with the caption “The Final Solution.” Immediately to the right was a picture of two lynched blacks hanging from a tree. Its caption read “Separate but Equal.” The final picture on the panel showed the severed head of an aborted fetus. The caption reads “Pro-Choice.” The Center’s point, obviously enough, is that soothing, low-key words can be used to cloak grim realities.

Another panel had a picture of a monkey, apparently the subject of a cruel experiment, with its head immobilized by a vise-like mechanism. To the right was an aborted baby’s head impaled on a surgical tool. If animal cruelty is unacceptable, asks the display by implication, why is abortion acceptable?

A third panel showed a picture of a live, healthy baby between two pictures of aborted fetuses. According to Fletcher Armstrong, of Nashville, Tennessee and Director of the Center’s Southeast Region, the baby in the middle picture “was born to a woman who decided not to have an abortion because of the Project’s display in Knoxville, Tennessee.”

It can be no surprise that abortion opponents see a common element of violence and brutality in abortion and in genocide. But beyond that, abortion and genocide have “conceptual similarities,” according to the Center’s literature.

Just what does the Center mean by “conceptual similarities?” Armstrong explains that “perpetrators of genocide always redefine personhood to exclude the intended victims.” He goes on to illustrate this with two examples: the Nazis “said that Jews and East Europeans were not really human, so it was okay to kill them. In this country, slavers said African-Americans were not really human, so it was okay to enslave, brutalize, and kill them.” Similarly, according to the Center’s literature, “unborn children have gotten in the way of ‘women’s liberation’ so society says (unborn children) are subhuman to justify taking their lives.” In other words, society has normalized the semantics of the political Left, and has therefore rationalized a seemingly well prepared argument—unborn fetuses (although at times, viable) do not possess certain unalienable rights given their attachment and dependency on the pregnant mother.

However, it is this very notion that the Project attempts to debunk. Gregg Cunningham goes on to note that “those who murdered Jews and blacks . . . denied the personhood of their victims just as vehemently as practitioners of abortion deny the personhood of the unborn.” What the Project suggests with its photographs and their correlation to cultural genocide, is that what the critics call property of mother, is actually human life. And what better way, asks the Center, than to display photographs of cultural genocide and aborted fetuses adjacent to one another?

To those critics who deplore the Center’s methods—confronting viewers with intense, visceral images of abortion and other atrocities—Armstrong has this to say: “Most Americans are nominally pro-choice with respect to first trimester abortion because they do not understand who the baby really is, and what abortion does to the baby. To change their attitudes, and ultimately their behaviors, we have to use pictures to teach these two facts.” Armstrong adds, “people would never try to teach about the Holocaust without pictures.”
What about the motivations of ordinary volunteers at the Project? Robert Stewart, an African-American from New Jersey, acknowledged the obvious—that slavery and abortion were not identical phenomena—but added “I feel that the comparison of slavery to abortion is good because both victims defined as non-persons. Abortion also victimizes lots of black children.”

Suzie Smith traveled with her mother from Columbus, Ohio on Monday morning. She believes “that women are victimized by abortion” and while “it seems right at the time, after going through with it, there’s a lifetime of emotional and physical problems.”

Another volunteer, Jane Bullington, emphasized that, “of the one and a half million abortions a year (in the United States), less than two percent of abortions are for serious health problems, rape, or incest.”
Adam Dandy, a first-year student, heard the commotion and protesters at the display while in class in Mason Hall and came to investigate. When he realized what was going on, he ran to Michigan Book and Supply, bought poster board, and made a sign reading “Choose Life.” Dandy found the Project’s display “graphic but valid—doesn’t let them forget what their choice is.”

There were, of course, protesters present chanting slogans such as “Racist bigots, shut it down,” and “Hey, hey, ho, ho, this right-wing bull sh*t has got to go.” A more responsible critic was Wayne Parks, who described himself as a supporter of Students for Choice and was standing holding a sign protesting the display. “These people are trying to limit choice and coerce women into making an uninformed choice. They believe that if you’re not pro-life then you’re pro-abortion.”

When asked about the Project’s comparison between genocide and abortion, Parks replied that the “Jews had no choice about dying.” But what about the argument that the baby is denied the choice to live? “The baby is still attached to the mother, the mother is feeding it nutrients and her oxygen. It should be her choice whether to have an abortion.”

Regardless of one’s stance on the issue, the Project forced people to think about abortions in a critical manner. Rory Diamond, former Chairman of the University of Michigan College Republicans, said that the Project was a “terrifically polemical way of forcing students to deal with the issue of abortion.” Indeed it was. From the protestors’ signs reading “Keep Your Laws Off My Body” to the Project’s mantra of “Different Motives, Different Methods, SAME RESULTS,” the end-result of the two day, abortion rights / wrongs extravaganza was an intentionally healthy debate sparked by both intellect and shock.

The scene on the Diag may not have been pretty, and the screaming back and forth between the Project’s volunteers and the protesters may have disturbed quite a few uninterested persons, but the reality of the abortion hit the University of Michigan campus with a force few expected—except, of course, the Center for Bio-Ethical Reform and the Genocide Awareness Project.