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.