Thoughts On Viewing an Anti-Choice Display

A large truck showed up on the main quad of my university campus today.  Some people got out and set up an impressively large display.  Tall photographs and tall signs tacked to tall folding diorama walls.  The group, numbering maybe six people, set up perimeter signs at the edges of the quad, warning folks that graphic images were ahead.  If students prefered not to see the graphic images, they should choose an alternate route to their next class. 

“Warning: Graphic Images”.  “Warning: Images of Genocide”. 

The warning signs were not terribly effective.  The photographs in the center of the quad were large enough — 5×5 feet, thereabouts, and high in the air — that one could see them from beyond the established perimeter.

The display itself and its proprietors were fenced-off.  There were (I assume university security) security personell stationed outside the fence to prevent fights.

The photos were various.  There was a tall black-and-white photo of a lynching.  Images from the Holocaust — a yellow Star of David was posted to assist in identifying the origin of these.  Images, I think, from Cambodia.

Alongside them, images of aborted fetuses.  Dismembered fetuses, in images three-feet tall, with dimes in the photos for scale.  A photograph of a fetus head in a pair of surgical pincers, over a petri dish — mouth open wide, as if screaming. 

“Can You Connect the Dots?” one panel read.  “Abortion = Genocide”.  Prominently displayed was a dictionary definition of “genocide” from, I forget, Merriam Webster or something: “the deliberate and systematic extermination of a national, racial, political, cultural or other group.”  The words “or other” were printed in red.

“Genocide,” the signs said.

I have no problem with folks using the quad of a public university to make political statements; I assume this group had permits.  Just last week the college Democrats had set up 3,800-plus little American flags on the same quad to represent troops killed in Iraq.

And I have no problem with the “graphic” nature of the photographs.  Photographs meant to shock are often used to wake people up to political realities or world events.  In this case, the photographs were made more “graphic”, you can be sure, by the surrounding signs, warning us that they would be “graphic”.  This was fairly clever; rather like mood music in a horror film.  It actually took me a minute to realize the perimeter warning signs were part of the show, and not set up by the university itself.

I might, might, have a problem with posting (I assume university) security guards in orange reflective harnesses about the display.  They were acting as props, extras, visually suggesting by their presence that this “genocide display” was serious business — another element of the mood music. 

But really, that was no big deal.  Certainly I don’t blame the security personell themselves.  Everyone needs a job; and it was no worse, I suppose, than being asked by the boss to put on a chicken costume and strut in front of a KFC.

I guess I thought it was fine. 

I was too busy laughing to put much thought into it.  It was like a scene out of Family Guy; all that was missing was the Prom Night Dumpster Baby Review.  A friend of mine, standing next to me, was sure it would lead more women to get abortions.  “Get that disgusting shit out of me!” he said, looking at the zoom-shots of fetal bits next to dimes.

The kitsch-value was pretty high, that it to say.  Anyone working that hard to generate a disgust reaction (lynchings, Holocaust, big red letters, illusorily screaming skulls) is playing from behind, decades behind, the ball. 

One of the guys behind the fence, an older guy, a pro, was giving responses to students who had pro-choice talking points.  I didn’t hear the questions but I heard snippets of his answers.  “And some people think rape is not wrong, so should that be made legal to suit their worldview?”  He’d heard all the pro-choice catch-lines, and responded to them, before.  A hundred times before, I’m sure. 

I didn’t bother.  How do you argue with a person this deeply committed to tawdriness?  Who doesn’t even know that his attempt at shock is just a kind-of-sad misfire?  I think of “Watchtower” pamphlets soaking in a puddle.  I think of bobble-head Jesuses and a Mary appearing in a oil spill.  I think of the good, in fact, this is doing, in desensitizing people to images of abortion.

Ah.  Desensitizing people to the images.  If I thought there was half-a-chance that anyone would go away from that display desensitized to images of actual genocide, having seen them here cheapened and whored-out, I might have been angry.  But I don’t really think that is likely to have happened.  (Perhaps sometimes I overestimate people-in-general; I’ve been accused of it.)

My point, had I wanted to make it — had I thought it was worth making in the face of such, how can I put it, zaniness — was that no one “chooses to have an abortion.”  And it’s there where — even if we grant the man behind the fence his idea that a fetus is human — the analogy to murder, much less genocide, breaks down.  No one who goes to an abortion clinic has chosen to engage in an action charactizable as the decision to destroy anything at all.

What people do is “decline to be pregnant” . . . and having an abortion is the only way, and has been the only way, time immemorial, of doing that.  The idea that people, not God, not society, just people, one at a time, might have the power to decline such a thing — to decide when to bring life into the world, and when not — is terrifying to some people.  That, of all people, women ultimately have this power to decline, is all the worse, perhaps.

Photographs of dismembered fetuses are photographs of the results of women declining to be pregnant.  The idea that women could be so powerful, that their decisions could be so dread and so weighty, simply does not fit into the worldview of certain folks who still live — no.  I was going to say “still live in the past”, but that’s not right.  There never was a time in the past when women did not have the ability to decline.  It’s not a matter of progress.  It’s a matter of unending, unbeginning, hate and fear of the truth.  To be born into this world you must pass through a womb, and that womb is a woman’s, and she may decline to allow it.  On a whim, if she wants.

A frightening thought, that.

But there it is: women got stuck with the primary burden of reproduction.  They didn’t ask for it, but they have it.  No good trying to harness it for your own use, guys; as god-like and terrible as you might find it, it’s theirs.  And will be, no matter how many anti-choice laws are passed, or signs put up, or pictures displayed.  No matter how much one insists that the thought of women declining is a thought too terrible to be borne.

11 comments

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  1. Big Orange.

    • KrisC on October 23, 2007 at 02:40

    “…And some people think rape is not wrong”

    Until it happens to his daughter…of course!

    May I please be excused, I need to go vomit!

  2. Since you are presently on campus I must assume you’re young.  I, on the other hand am old and find it hard to believe that this same battle is STILL being fought.  Back in the 60s (pre legal and safe abortion) we were standing at the bottom of the mountain looking up.  After all of these years it seems we’re only a third of the way up.  To my dying day I will continue to fight for your choice.  My dream is I’ll live long enough for all people to view choice as you do.  Please carry this fight on.  Women’s lives depend on it.
    Again, thank you for sharing your experience.

  3. I drove by just such a display sited like billboards on the property of a church. As I recall, this arrangement was up for a week or so, and periodically supportive picketers appeared there. I haven’t seen it since. I suppose I’m grateful for others’ complaints. My reaction mixed anger and resignation — 1st Am and all that civic irony. 

    The road is an extremely busy 6-lane parkway. At the time, my child was my constant passenger, as this parkway was the primary route to her school. Until I chose a detour, I was hard pressed to explain the signifficance of the event on the one occasion she inquired about it. I can’t recall the details. I’m sure I was brief though. My child often complains if I offer too much detail.

    I hope that I said: “Some people are upset that women need to end their pregnancies. Doctors help them abort, stop, their pregnancy. So these people are showing pictures of stuff the doctor takes out of a uterus where babies grow.”

    On the upside, my child has shown no desire to attend any church, although she sometimes receives invitations from family and friends.

    • snud on October 24, 2007 at 02:41

    are for government-forced child-bearing.

  4. You might have been able to pass it by and dismiss it as tawdry, but I had a guy in a class who was practically in tears because it was making him feel bad about his girlfriend’s abortion.

    At the State university where I was adjuncting, a campus group had to sponsor it. Well, it turned out that there was a very well-funded right wing mole posing as a student, and he set it up so they could seem to have gotten invited by a student group that supposedly thought of it all by themselves.

    They posted their display at the campus center entrance. Students were screaming at them all day, which they loved. It was a nightmare. EVERY single university administrator went into hiding, and not one of them was available to answer the question of whether they had anybody at the counseling center available for students upset by this.

    Free speech arguments were thrown to the wind when I found out that the administration had refused to allow the Vagina Monologues – a real student group that gets together every year to perform them — to put a paper machier vagina outside in the same spot because it would be “disruptive” This had occurred just a month prior to this lovely group of lowlifes authoritarian assholes posting themselves on the campus.

    “Disruptive” my ass. This group is very aggressive about suing any university that doesn’t let them do their thing on campus.
    The University was afraid it would get sued. They knew Eve Ensler was too busy and pacifist for that kind of thing.

    I will never ever give one red cent to that school for that fiasco.

    Fast forward to 2007 and a freshman is gang raped by 4 guys in her dorm. The University tries to sweep it under the rug and is roundly chastized by the local paper.

    Academics can be such gutless wonders.

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