By Jamilah Hoffman
Last Friday afternoon, the Dean of Students at the University of Houston sent an email letting the university community know that a group calling itself the Center for Bioethical Reform was “using its First Amendment rights” to present something called the “Genocide Awareness Project” (GAP) at the campus for three days. I read the email thinking Darfur, Rwanda or Serbia, places where real genocides have occurred.
But actually, this group makes the outrageous and infuriating comparison between abortion and actual genocide, and is going to campuses around the country showing enlarged and graphic photos of alleged aborted fetuses, trying to mobilize opposition to a woman’s right to abortion among college students.
I was pissed off and figured I had to do something. But what was that going to be? The U of H campus is not known for its radicalism or even activism. It would be difficult to corral a bunch of students to protest this outrageous display, but I knew these people couldn’t go unopposed. That’s when I thought of Norma Rae.
Norma Rae is the name of a movie and the character in it played by Sally Field. She is part of a group that is trying to create a union at the plant where she works and has come under heavy repression by her bosses. As she’s being fired and led out of the plant, she jumps on a table, with a sign she just made that says “UNION.” This is considered an iconic moment in movie history, and it is powerful moment in the movie. What happens is that the rest of the employees start to shut off their machines, refusing to work and joining Norma Rae in the fight to unionize. It’s a good movie, but the symbolic act of taking a stand, even if you are the only one, can actually inspire others who feel the same way, but are afraid to show it, to stand with you. I decided that I would make a poster and have my “Norma Rae” moment.
So on Monday, when these people put up their display, I walked up, nervous, shaking, but determined and I got right in front of them and raised my sign that said, “Abortion is NOT Murder.”
People were looking at my sign but nothing was happening so I started shouting, “Abortion is NOT Murder. A Fetus is NOT a Baby. Women are NOT Incubators.” This got things going. Debate was flowing back and forth. One guy was in my face, talking about the child and the baby, the child and the baby on and on and I asked him, “What about the woman?” He looked at me incredulously and asked back, “What about the woman?” I told him that’s exactly what I’m talking about, that’s exactly why I’m protesting, you’ve said the woman doesn’t matter and she’s a pretty big part of this.
Some students who were just walking by took pages of notebook paper and made their own signs because they didn’t want me to be out there by myself. We defiantly and definitely shifted the political initiative from the Christian Fascists of GAP.
A lot of the controversy was based on the use of the term genocide to describe abortion. Students found it deeply offensive that the woman haters of the GAP compare the Nazi Holocaust of European Jews and racist Jim Crow terror against Black people to an abortion. People were also angered at the comparison the GAP people made of the SS, Nazi storm troopers, and KKK, Klu Klux Klan, to Planned Parenthood. Many said these comparisons are wrong, and while they may not “like abortion” or think it should be a “last resort”, they did not agree to these comparisons being made and said that they angered people and alienated them from the anti-abortion cause. Some others had a clearer understanding that the attacks on abortion are all about, as a homemade sign one young woman brought, “trying to put women back in ‘their place’”.
We kept at this for the 3 days the GAP people were there. The debate grew more intense and the opposition to GAP more determined each day. One young woman I spoke with on Monday, came back and told me on Wednesday that our protests made her think about this subject really hard and she came to the conclusion that murder is when you kill someone that’s alive, like through lethal injection as the state of Texas does so often. That those are real people with heartbeats and lives, and that abortion is not murder. A clump of cells shouldn’t have more rights than the woman. She felt that the woman should be able to live her life.
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The counter protests we waged opened up ferment that has not been see on this campus in a long time and it did change the political climate on campus. People intensely debated issues like morality and religion. One theme that came up a lot among people opposing GAP was that abortion is this tragic choice. They felt like women don’t want abortions and that it’s a horrible, horrible thing to happen. I responded no, that isn’t necessarily so. There are plenty of women who have abortions and don’t feel guilty. Most of the time it’s society and other people who are making them feel guilty.
I told them that abortion isn’t a bad thing, it’s a medical procedure. People who at first were calling this a tragic choice began nodding their heads in agreement with me. By the last day, I brought out more fully that this really is about women’s role in society and whether women were going to be enslaved to their biology or full and equal participants in society. That changed the tone of the protest on the last day.
These protests weren’t planned in any traditional way. I took a stand out there on a crucial question, and people spontaneously joined me. Then a newly formed feminist group on campus that I had never heard of came out to the protests as well. By Wednesday, we were all connected and this was the talk around campus.
Jamilah, you rock!
A Fetus is not a baby til it comes out. That is what birthdays are all about! None of those people actually provide scientific evidence of a fetus being equivelent to that of a human being.
\\\”First, the reality of abortion is that close to 90 percent are done in the first trimester of pregnancy. But it is important to understand why abortion at any stage must be available to women, why it is morally right to support that, and why it is not “partial-birth” abortion, much less “baby killing.”
it is not some mysterious event guided by outside forces. It is part of the normal processes of the woman’s body…. The egg changes and develops into a fetus and keeps on changing for nine months, only because the woman’s physiology (the way her body works) is making these changes happen.” This is why the woman—not the man, not the church or the government or anyone else—must have the choice whether or not to continue her pregnancy and the means to realize that choice.
To briefly summarize, the fetus develops from literally a clump of cells (the embryo) that may develop a few days after fertilization. Three weeks into the pregnancy, the whole embryo is still only about 2 mm (2 millimeters) long, or about the size of the letter “o.” By the third month of pregnancy, the embryo, now called a fetus, starts to look a little more “human,” but inside, its internal organs, muscles, skeleton and nervous system are still very undeveloped. The whole thing is still only about an inch long.
Again, it is during these first three months, or first trimester, of pregnancy, that almost 90 percent of abortions are done.
Another 10 percent of abortions are done from 13 to 20 weeks of pregnancy. Even at the end of this period, the fetus is still very undeveloped and unable to survive outside the woman’s uterus without special medical measures. Only a little more than 1 percent of all abortions are done at 21 weeks or more, late in the second trimester and third trimester of pregnancy.
But even at this stage of its development, a fetus only has the potential to become a human being. Until it is born, it has no life of its own separate from the life of the woman whose body it is a part of. It does not float in a disembodied bubble (as the antiabortionists would have you believe from the pictures they hold up outside clinics), but is totally dependent on the woman’s bodily processes at every stage until it is born—for example, it gets oxygen from the woman’s blood and takes in nourishment and passes waste through her biologic functions—and cannot survive apart from her. And this is true until a woman gives birth, and a baby takes its first breath, at which point it becomes a human being.
No matter how tiny the fertilized egg or how developed the fetus, so long as it is in the woman’s uterus, it is a part of her body, dependent on and subordinate to the woman’s life. It is not a human being until it is born and takes its first breath, becoming a separate human being.
From Revolution Newspaper The Outrageous Murder of Dr. George Tiller and the Real Truth About “Late-Term” Abortions by Mary Lou Greenberg
I admire your courage in standing up for what you believe in, but I have to support the other side. Being a woman, yes, I believe we have rights just as any other human being does. But, to label a fetus as not human is wrong. Even the longest reigning president of Planned Parenthood (the largest abortion provider in the US) stated
“I think we have deluded ourselves into believing that people don’t know that abortion is killing. So any pretense that abortion is not killing is a signal of our ambivalence, a signal that we cannot say yes, it kills a fetus.” -Faye Wattleton
Naomi Wolf, a feminist author and abortion supporter also wrote,
“Clinging to a rhetoric about abortion in which there is no life and no death, we entangle our beliefs in a series of self-delusions, fibs and evasions. And we risk becoming precisely what our critics charge us with being: callous, selfish and casually destructive men and women who share a cheapened view of human life…we need to contextualize the fight to defend abortion rights within a moral framework that admits that the death of a fetus is a real death.”
And, science agrees as well that life begins at conception. Please check out some of these books for proof:
Keith L. Moore, The Developing Human: Clinically Oriented Embryology, 7th edition
T.W. Sadler, Langman’s Medical Embryology, 10th edition. Philadelphia, PA: Lippincott Williams & Wilkins, 2006. p. 11.
Keith L. Moore, Before We Are Born: Essentials of Embryology, 7th edition. Philadelphia, PA: Saunders, 2008. p. 2.
Again, like I said, I admire you for being courageous. I’d rather people say something I disagree with than be silent about the issue.
I hate to break it, but…
…the attack on women’s “reproductive rights” has NOTHING to do with trying to put women back in their “place” and EVERYTHING to do with life.
I am disgusted by the growing maliciousness of the anti abortion fanatics. But, I’m thrilled that people are standing up to them.
Love this story! Thanks for taking a stand against these extremists and defending a woman’s right to choose.
Way to go Jamilah! This is inspiring.
http://www.abortionno.org/About_Us/lawsuits/authenticity.html