Students may have noticed the blue and pink flags that took up a perfectly good sunbathing area on the Quad last Thursday. These flags were part of the "Cemetery of the Innocents" that was sponsored by AU Students for Life. Each flag signified one of the 4,000 lives that are lost each day through abortion. The cemetery opened the AU community's eyes to the actual size of the loss that occurs. Yet even though this is a fact, many were quite hostile because it was a "Pro-Life" event and thus somehow inherently an evil thing to be attacked and discounted.
The Cemetery of the Innocents comes down to one thing, numbers. And although anyone who has ever sat through a statistics class will tell you that it is easy to manipulate these numbers, Students for Life didn't. In fact, we went straight to the source, the research arm of Planned Parenthood known as the Alan Guttemacher Institute. If any institute in the world was going to give abortion a fair shake, it would most likely be an abortion provider's research institute.
The institute reported that there were around 1,365,700 abortions performed per year. I will save you the calculator time and say that is roughly 3,700 abortions per day. What you do not get from that number is that a little over 10 percent of all abortion providers in the United States do not actually report the number they have provided. The number is therefore higher, and estimates have it at about 1,500,000 a year, or 4,109 a day. Other credible estimates place the number much higher, but this is the number used for the sake of argument.
While the cemetery was on the Quad, a tiny protest was held off to the side. While I was handing out information sheets, the question occurred to me: "What exactly were they protesting?" As I looked at my sheets I noted that the number given was indeed accurate. There was nothing about that number that was inherently protest-worthy. In light of this, it is clear that the protest was simply protesting against our right to disseminate accurate information that is not popular. Yes, this number of abortions occur per day but you do not need to bring this number up. Although I do not believe that was the true intent of the protest, that is what it boils down to.
There is nothing inherently pro-life or pro-choice about a number. Four thousand abortions occur daily. That is a simple but painful fact that can be agreed upon by both sides of the issue. Abortion advocates have stated for years that the choice of abortion is a hard one and causes pain. So if both sides admit that abortions cause pain and it is proven that a large number occur daily, then it follows that there is a lot of unheard pain in our society that needs to be addressed. And it was interesting that only one of the protesters, as far as I know, actually came over and asked us where we obtained our information.
Of course, it is more likely that they protested the fact that we think each lost life was an actual person who deserved a chance and not just an intrusive glob of tissue. Here are some interesting facts about a fetus: "Fetus" is the Latin term for offspring and not an inherently different term from infant or baby. However, the fetus is actually a verifiably different entity from the mother. It has different DNA, a different blood type and different fingerprints. Oh yes, 10 fingers and toes are perfectly formed before the ninth week. What about when it is only a zygote? Surely it is not anything of value or importance at that stage. The zygote is one cell that has 46 chromosomes and therefore every code it needs to walk, talk, grow, age, get a job and save enough money to buy a condo in Florida to retire in.
Everything said so far are facts that are undeniable. Just go to the Allan Guttemacher Web site or read an up-to-date biology book. The Cemetery of the Innocents was a display of a fact, nothing more. When people begin to protest facts because they are unpopular, we need to ask ourselves why this occurs in an open society. The answer is we do not address the issue of abortion in a reflective way but on instinct.We are either pro-life or pro-choice, and when someone tells you he or she is of opposite view, you simply write off what he or she is saying.
Abortion kills an individual, yet there are elements of our society's thinking that make it hard for women to have children in certain instances. Both problems need to be addressed, because only then will there not be a need to stick flags in perfectly good sunbathing space on university quads around the world.
