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Dear Pro-Lifers,
[Name removed]'s apology on behalf of your club was greatly appreciated and absolutely necessary. But it didn't quite go far enough.
The display in the campus center was an offense to the Bryn Mawr community and to the Honor Code that ties us together. The Honor Code holds that we must make our community one of "mutual respect" in which "we take responsibility for our judgments, actions, and also for our student community." The GAP display in the campus center violated the basic respect that we all should have for each other and for our differences.
I am not admonishing you for your political beliefs, which are different from my own. Indeed, a democracy can only exist when people are allowed to hold conflicting views, and when these divergent views are discussed in open, respectful dialogue. The display in the campus center was anything but respectful. It was deeply disturbing, but not in the way that you intended.
You did not make me re-evaluate my pro-choice stance. Not for a moment. You think we don't already know what an aborted fetus looks like? You think I will look at that and say, "Oh! THAT'S what abortion is?! Nobody told me!" We're not stupid here. Personally, I think abortion is pretty awful, and I sincerely doubt whether I could ever have one myself. But that is probably where our similarities end, because what I have -- and what you so clearly lack -- is a respect for individual privacy. I will never understand how the so-called pro-lifers think that it is the job of the government to tell women what to do with their bodies. It's between a woman and her doctor. Once we let personal morality and religion legislate public health, there will be no turning back. What's next? No organ transplants or blood transfusions, because it's not how God intended it? But I digress. I'm sure I won't convince you to change your mind in this email.
Back to the campus center. If you are taking responsibility for the GAP display, and saying you agree with it, then I must say to you: You really have some nerve. You want to compare abortion to genocide? To the Holocaust? To Rwanda? These are some of the darkest moments in human history, when close-mindedness and hatred led to the attempted extermination of an entire people. Indeed, this is the very definition of genocide: "The systematic and planned extermination of an entire national, racial, political, or ethnic group." Maybe you had your terms confused, but I'm not quite sure how on earth you can construe abortion to be genocide. Just what national, racial, political, or ethnic group is being exterminated? "Systematic and planned"? I would say it is the opposite of that. It is something that should be a last resort, that, in most cases, is a last resort. And if the pro-life lobby in this country wasn't also pro-abstinence-only education and anti- equal access to contraceptives, then it COULD be a last resort instead of the only available option for some women. That fact is a travesty, and one that troubles me deeply. And of course you've heard this, but I'll say it again: Banning abortion won't make it go away. It will only make it dangerous, life-threatening, even. If you were actually pro-life, you wouldn't support something that would put the lives of women at risk.
Now that you understand what genocide actually is, how dare you make such an inaccurate parallel? How dare you equate the mass murder of an ethnic group with the choice of a woman to not have the fetus that is growing inside of her? I cannot explain to you my horror at seeing the GAP display. You belittle the most awful human tragedies, the deaths of entire peoples by trying to draw some sort of equivalency between that and the abortion of cells that are still part of the woman they are inside.
You demonstrated a blatant disregard for individual difference. "Warning: Photos of genocide ahead" should have said "Warning: Incredibly offensive propaganda ahead." I'm a vegetarian, but you don't see me waving pictures of slaughtered cows in your face right next to pictures of your dead ancestors, trying hopelessly to convince you that they are the same thing.
You can have your club, of course. You can have beliefs that are different from mine. What you cannot have, however, is a lack of respect for the rest of the Bryn Mawr community, or a lack of respect for the worst tragedies our world has ever known. You cannot have a display like the one you had in the campus center. You shatter any illusion of a community that fosters "mutual respect."
Such disrespect of this community is appalling, and should not be tolerated. Indeed, it should not happen at all, and it saddens me that it did.
Lauren Friedman