By: Jordan Harirchi, Assistant Sport Editor
UNF has its share of morally-charged passersby on campus. You have famous student-damning preachers, everything-loving Hare Krishnas, gay rights activists and plenty more, but no other group gets as much criticism as the Center for Bio-Ethical Reform and their graphic abortion photographs.
Why is it criticized for showing photos that are filled with facts?
In all honesty, the photos are absolutely disgusting and nauseate most people. But the photographs don’t tell any lies and aren’t misleading. The showing of these photos is an attempt to emotionally move viewers, but what group trying to inspire change doesn’t use these motives?
Nobody complains when two gay men passionately make out in front of the damning preacher. Nobody ever complains when brochures with pictures of mistreated animals or ravaged forests are passed out. While the former is just an act to piss off the preachers, is the latter not an appeal to emotions in order to inspire change?
Since when did plants and animals pass human beings on the intrinsic value scale?
Learned from facts about the Holocaust by reading? Sure, that is completely plausible, but there are graphic photographs that further substantiate the horrors of the Holocaust. Are these photographs an abuse of free speech?
Even today, other genocide awareness groups do the same thing. Go look at invisiblechildren.com, and you’ll find a picture of sad Ugandan children on the home page.
The photographs for these various issues aren’t seen as a desperate attempt to inspire change based on the appeal to emotion. They are instead seen as real, tangible facts relayed in visible form.
There is no difference between that and the pictures of mutilated fetuses. Whether they make abortion synonymous with other forms of genocide or not, you can’t discount these facts just because they push a feminist issue back into the ethical light.
There will never be a compilation of articles with first-hand accounts of various fetuses that have been aborted. You can’t read or hear any facts from a being that has been exterminated before he or she has had a chance to protest. But it seems as if that is the only way this “delivery” will become “content” worthy of shock.
The CBR’s bottom line of showing pictures as long as abortion continues being blackmail is similar to gay activists’ bottom line. I’m positive they will continue their march for change until it happens.
So go ahead and infringe on the rights to life of the unborn. Go ahead and mark CBR’s tactics as blackmail, shock-inducing and over-the-top. It’s only different from other groups’ identical tactics because you don’t agree with it.
It’s unfortunate that a cage stuffed full of chickens inspires more ethical reform than the blood of dismembered babies. The shock value to this issue is not in the delivery– the dead baby is flushed down the toilet or thrown in the garbage long before there ever is a chance for that.
Email Jordan Harirchi at asst.sports@unfspinnaker.com.
