Debora‘s thoughts:
Ever since the days of Roe v. Wade, the United States has been divided into pro-life and pro-choice camps, and both have mobilized to spread their respective views like the bubonic plague. Pro-life efforts typically get the most media coverage because they are the more radical of the two sides, and those of Created Equal, an organization who set up shop on Turlington Plaza on Tuesday, October 16, were no different.
I walked in the direction of Turlington with the same amount of apprehension I’m filled with each day while dragging myself to class. I expected to be greeted by an angry mob equipped with loudspeakers, Westboro Baptist Church-esque signs, and maybe pictures of Tim Tebow being cradled by the Lord Jesus Christ. All I got was a pathetic poster, resting on the bushes, that read “Warning: Graphic Images Ahead.”
Life-size photos of aborted fetuses were placed in various places around Turlington Plaza, one of UF’s free speech zones, and all of them turned my stomach but were otherwise anticlimactic. Standing by a poster with the image of a bloody fetus lying on a $1 dollar bill was a particularly tame-looking guy, who I later found out was Seth Drayer, Created Equal’s director of training.
Drayer was clearly the anti-abortion exhibit’s main attraction, speaking passionately to a group of students who stood in a circle around him. “If we know they are also human beings, the only difference between us and them is our age. So what we are trying to do is stop ageism,” Drayer said.
Ageism is one of Created Equal’s main arguments against abortion. “Abortion is ageism” appears in large font on their pamphlets and the phrase was repeated by Drayer a number of times. A pathetically weak point of debate, ageism is a term that refers to the “prejudice or discrimination against a particular age-group and especially the elderly.”
According to this definition, Created Equal is asserting that the little sea monkey swimming inside a pregnant woman has an age, which simply is not the case. When a pregnant woman says she’s 17 weeks along, for example, what she is saying is not that her baby is 17 weeks of age but instead, that it’s been 17 weeks since her partner shot a healthy load into her lady parts. She is further communicating that it’s been 17 weeks since she’s been puking like a college freshman, peeing every 15 minutes like a geriatric in an adult diaper, and eating chocolate uncontrollably like me on my period. A baby has an age when it plops out into the world onto a doctor’s waiting hands and not a second before. This is why people don’t go around saying “I’m 23 and 8 months,” or however many months they spent mutating inside a uterus.
Another point Created Equal argues is suggested by the organization’s name, that babies are created equal and all have the right to be born. Technically speaking, not all babies are created equal. Many are created with love by responsible, consenting adults who plan to raise it with the utmost care, but some are spawned by rapists and their victims, teenagers with raging libidos but no access to or knowledge of birth control, and couples who are just not ready to be parents yet.
My belief, and I imagine Dr. King would agree, is that all humans deserve to be treated equally — wouldn’t forcing a child to come into the world unwanted be the most unfair treatment of all?
Other arguments by Created Equal that get honorable mention:
Human self-awareness is completely subjective. (Do the words “brain waves” mean anything to you?)
Unwanted babies get adopted! (Unwanted babies sometimes get adopted. Other times, they are thrown into dumpsters or placed in underfunded and poorly administered foster homes.)
Economics? Psh. (Google the Donahue-Levitt hypothesis.)
Abortions are murder. (Don’t even get me started.)
The legality of abortion is like the legality of slavery. (Uh…no.)
To quote Daniel Patrick Moynihan, “Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not to his own facts.” How the realities mentioned above fail to penetrate the consciousness of anti-abortion crusaders is beyond me. Continuing to think about it will frustrate me to death, so if you’ll excuse me, I have to go to Turlington and burn my bra.
Hannah‘s thoughts:
I woke up this morning at 9:30 am, made a huge steaming mug of coffee, and had a nice chat with my roommates before heading off to class. It was a breezy, sunny Florida morning, and here I am at one of the best universities in the country. Life is wonderful.
It’s something that should be treasured and respected above all else.
It doesn’t matter how we got here, or who our parents are.
In southern California, this past year, doctors detected a heart condition in an unborn baby, a fetus that was only twenty-five weeks old. After practicing the operation using a tub of jello and a grape (jello serving as the body and grape as the heart) they went in with a wire the width of hair and needle measuring eleven centimeters exactly. The procedure went well, and the baby will be born with a healthy heart and a healthy mother.
In many situations, pregnancy is unexpected and unwanted. Whether it’s rape, teen pregnancy, or any case of unplanned pregnancy, having a baby can be a huge curveball that life is more than willing to throw at you. In all other aspects of life, we are forced to take responsibility for our actions, and even when we take the easy way out, there’s still the looming presence of consequences. It doesn’t seem fair that we should be offered this type of “easy way out” for something as large as the well being of another human. Not just any human, it’s your baby we’re talking about.
Via: ppl.org
Do you really think an individual with a rough home life really wishes they were never born? That they had never experienced the magical moments of life, no matter how few there might be? Maybe unwanted babies only sometimes get adopted, but is it worth aborting all of them on the off chance that some of them may not find a home?
I recently read a book titled “Saturday” by Ian McEwan (I highly recommend it). At one point, the main character learns that his daughter is pregnant and he asks if “termination” had been considered. He learns that his daughter loves the baby and then begins to think of himself as a grandfather. Did he become a grandfather because the baby was loved and wanted? Being loved and wanted did not change the reality of the baby. Does human life become real if it is wanted but when it is not it is not wanted it is not human life?
Though I was bored the majority of the time in psychology last year, I learned a few valuable points about conception. When sperm meets the egg, a baby is formed, called a “zygote” in this first stage of pregnancy. A zygote is made up of human DNA; therefore a zygote must be a human being. This DNA holds the template for early development and some hereditary traits such as hair, eye color, and personality. According to the Merriam-Webster dictionary, an organism is defined as an individual living thing. This means at that exact moment where the two meet, an individual organism, human being, baby, zygote, or whatever you want to call human life- is created. From that moment on, the baby is rapidly forming, and abortion gives us the sad, but real option of snuffing out this growth like a candle.
Perhaps Created Equal (a pro-life organization that hangs out in Turlington plaza) is a little annoyingly passionate about their cause, and chooses some of the weaker points to support their argument. But it presents a serious issue to us college kids, the future generation, to wake up and realize that we’re going to be the ones making these important decisions. As “in your face” as it might be to witness pictures of aborted fetuses on a casual weekday morning, it presents a counter argument that some people might not have truly considered. Life will never be perfect, it will always be full of crazy ups and downs and the world will continue to provide an endless amount of suffering. But we can still keep alive the beauty of pregnancy, the beauty of life that has only just begun, untainted, perfect, and special.
Photo courtesy of: WashingtonTimes
