Eastern Michigan University students received a chance to glimpse the Genocide Awareness Project, a traveling photo exhibit that compares abortion to the horrors of genocide, outside King Hall and the Marshall Building Thursday and Friday.
Students for Life, a pro-life student organization at EMU, received permission from the university to have the exhibit on campus.
With graphic photos of holocaust and genocide victims placed side-by-side with images of abused children and aborted babies, the GAP exhibit received mixed reactions.
Darius Hardwick, regional director of the Center for Bio-Ethical Reform (a privately funded nonprofit corporation), was in charge of organizing and bringing the GAP display to campus. He said the project’s purpose is to raise awareness about prenatal development.
“It’s a common misconception that babies are just blobs of tissue,” Hardwick said. “We use the terms embryo and fetus as an abstraction to take away from the humanity of the child. So we need to show people visually the development of the baby, and also, at the same time, what happens to that child when an abortion happens.”
EMU women’s and gender studies major, Maggie Martin, said she found the exhibit offensive and not a good tactic to use for such an intense issue.
“It causes a lot of problems for people who have to deal with this kind of stuff and they don’t [expletive] get that,” Martin said. “The focus needs to be on women no matter where they are in their life instead of taking away their right just because it’s not comfortable for somebody else.”
CBR volunteer Laurice Baddour said most students don’t know what an abortion really entails so that is a main purpose of the images.
“Many of them don’t realize that it is truly a baby that they’re aborting,” Baddour said. “We believe that all human life is important. We’re not here to make any of the students feel awful or uncomfortable. We are here to educate and to help. We have an interest in women because there are many, many, many risks with abortion.”
Jess Lohmann, a graduate student in the women’s and gender studies department and intern for Planned Parenthood, was on-hand to organize a protest against the exhibit and Students for Life.
“They are an anti-choice, anti-woman organization that displays billboard sized pictures of fetal remains paired next to holocaust victims, comparing abortion to an American genocide,” she said. “It is completely outrageous.”
The GAP is also the subject of an ongoing lawsuit brought against EMU in March. The Alliance Defending Freedom group filed the suit on behalf of the Students for Life organization citing that EMU’s Student Government denied Students for Life funding from mandatory student activity fees.
