It is necessary, even if it is sometimes horrifying
It an almost-too-perfect illustration of the manufactured fragility of campus liberalism, officials at the University of Oregon have declared that they will offer counseling to students who experience “emotional traumatization” due to a pro-life group’s demonstrations on that campus. The pro-life group plans to erect a “twenty-foot tower covered in graphic images comparing abortion to the Holocaust.” Counselors will be on-hand to soothe any students who happen to be distressed by such images.
In truth, such images are supposed to distress the people who look upon them. Of course, it is wholly unlikely that such discomfort rises to the level of “emotional traumatization,” but such posturing has become the knee-jerk response for campus progressive politics, an ideology that flips out when someone dresses up in Arabian garb for a Halloween costume.
College campuses are among the best and most opportune landscapes for pro-life activism. Pro-choice politics are ubiquitous on most campuses, but the possibility of reaching young people with a pro-life message is still very much present. There are surely more than a few students at every college who have their doubts about pro-abortionism—who sense, on a deeper level, that something is not quite right about our regime of legalized murder—but who nevertheless keep their mouths shut for fear of disturbing the herd. A vigorous pro-life campus outreach effort can spur such students into action, and may even change a few more minds to boot; it is difficult, in any case, to look upon a wall of abortion victims and not be deeply disturbed by it.
There are those who believe that this type of pro-life activism—the kind that unabashedly shows the end result of abortion, which is a dead human being—is counter-productive due to its shock value. It is not clear why this should be the case. American abolitionists, after all, knew full well the power of brutal photography to change minds and shape debate. Pro-lifers should be no different. There are times, of course, when “twenty-foot towers” of photographs are probably inappropriate and a different kind of rhetorical device is necessary. But in general it seems like a perfectly reasonable approach to spreading the pro-life message. This is what abortion does. There is no need to be “emotionally traumatized” by it. But there is great need to see it, to know, and to understand just what it is abortion does.
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