As one of the organizers of last week’s Genocide Awareness Project at UNF, I wanted to respond to the Spinnaker editorial that commented on the project.

First of all, we are pleased to note that, despite all protestations to the contrary, the Spinnaker Editorial Board got our point! They were so overwhelmed by the primary fact we sought to convey, they forgot to deny it!

Here’s what I mean: The editorial referred to our photos of “bloody babies.” That’s the point. They are babies who have been violently destroyed. Had we not brought pictures, you can bet the editors would never have referred to the victims of abortion as “bloody babies.” Point made.

The editors seemed to be confused about the difference between teaching/learning about an injustice that society rejects and teaching/learning about an injustice that society has permitted to continue. The former is renounced in the classroom; the latter is ignored, trivialized, and even celebrated. That is why the editors have read books, seen movies, visited museums — and yes, even seen horrifying pictures — related to the Holocaust, racial injustice, etc. but had never seen abortion until we showed it to them.

The editors say we should give them facts, but the pictures are the facts. They were shocked by the pictures because abortion is an act of violence that kills a baby. How could they see violence of this magnitude and not be shocked, disgusted and repulsed?

We gave them facts; they just didn’t like the facts. They said they want logical discourse. But they want to base their discourse on the fallacious assumption that the unborn child is just a blob of tissue, parasite, mass of cells, etc. How convenient.

The pictures actually make rational discourse possible. We can’t have an intelligent discussion about abortion — is it right or wrong, is it moral or immoral, should it be legal or illegal — with people who deny the basic facts about the humanity of pre-born children and the brutality of abortion. To have a rational discussion of abortion with people who deny the facts is like discussing our solar system with members of the Flat Earth Society; it can’t be done.

They seemed to suggest our pictures were not abortions, but miscarriages. Please don’t take our word for anything. Go to www.abortionno.org, and read the statement from the photographer who took almost all of the photos. You can also read an affidavit from a former abortion doctor who attests to the accuracy of the photos and the ages attributed to those images, measured in weeks from fertilization.

By the way, we did not invent the comparison of abortion to genocide. Martin Luther King Jr. compared racial injustice to the Holocaust. Later, using the same rationale that we use, Rev. Jesse Jackson extended the comparison to abortion:

Those advocates of taking life prior to birth do not call it killing or murder, they call it abortion. They further never talk about aborting a baby because that would imply something human. Rather, they talk about aborting the fetus. Fetus sounds less than human, and therefore, abortion can be justified.

Others who compare abortion to the Holocaust include Orthodox Jewish Rabbi Yehuda Levin of Brooklyn:

Each form of genocide, whether Holocaust, lynching, abortion, etc., differs from all the others in the motives and methods of its perpetrators. But each form of genocide is identical to all the others in that it involves the systematic slaughter, as state-sanctioned “choice,” of innocent, defenseless victims — while denying their “personhood.”

Our purpose is never to condemn anyone who has had an abortion. Our purpose is to clarify the confusion so that people can make better decisions in the future, both individually and collectively. If you need healing from an abortion in your past or help with an unplanned pregnancy, visit www.OptionLine.org and search for a pregnancy help center near you.

Fletcher Armstrong
Director, Southeast Region
Center for Bio-Ethical Reform

Editor’s Note: Our reference to “bloody babies” made no link to abortion victims — just to the photos the GAP displayed. We don’t question that your photos are of actual abortions. But if people looked at photos of a miscarried fetus or one in the womb, they would find them markedly similar, if not indistinguishable.

It is incorrect to say we have “never seen abortion until [the GAP] showed it to [us].”

We did not describe a fetus as “just a blob of tissue” or even encourage readers to be pro- or anti-abortion.

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