If you look at past social injustices, including slavery and the Holocaust, graphic images were used to convey the humanity of the victims as well as the injustice of the crime. In the same way, Bama Student’s For Life used images from past genocides to parallel the current genocide, abortion, in our country.
The complaints students have about the gruesome images of abortion are understandable. These pictures are bloody and unsettling to look at, which is why we must look at them. These pictures show the truth – the truth that abortion is the legal murder of an innocent preborn person. At the moment of conception, a genetically unique person comes into existence. Denying the right to life to preborn humans is simply discrimination based on their size, level of development, environment and degree of dependency.
A person, regardless if he or she is wanted or unwanted, rich or poor, or conceived in love or through violence, is still a person – their value is independent of these factors.
Since Roe v. Wade, over 55 million babies have been aborted in the U.S. What does 55 million even look like? How many future Albert Einsteins, Mother Teresas or Ludwig van Beethovens have been killed as a result of legal abortion? I also find myself asking, what kind of culture would drive women to kill their babies?
I do not see women as murderers but as victims who are often coerced by their family or boyfriend or spouse to terminate the pregnancy. The pro-life movement is not about hurting women, but it is about protecting the dignity and rights of all humans.
The most important and fundamental issue of abortion is that denying preborn people the right to life is morally wrong in the same way that murder is wrong. In killing a person, one is denying that person of their future life. In the same way, killing a preborn child is denying that child of his or her future life outside the womb.
Until our culture comes to recognize the sanctity of human life from womb to tomb, the pro-life movement will not stop defending the vulnerable and voiceless. We will be vilified for our convictions just as past social justice reformers like Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr. were.
It is not enough for pro-lifers to be indifferent; we must take immediate action to speak out against the largest humanitarian crisis in history. As Martin Luther King Jr. famously said, “There comes a time when silence is betrayal.”
Ruth Bishop is a freshman majoring in biology and Spanish.
