Cemetery of Innocents

The Display
Yesterday morning, two of my fellow College Republicans and I joined a handful of dedicated members of the Students for Life of America in setting up their third annual display called the "Cemetery of Innocents."
For anyone who passed by the lawn in front of Coffman and saw rows of black balloons attached to a variety of baby toys, diapers, shampoos, wet wipes, story books, outfits, burp cloths, etc, but did not see the sign in front of it, the 138 black balloons in this display were put out to represent the 138 babies who die every hour in the U.S. alone through abortions.
Members of the group spent the day handing out pamphlets to raise awareness of the issue and to protect the display from pro-choice students, who have tried each year to ruin the display. Actually, I was shocked and disappointed to hear that pro-choice last year students had actually rushed in with scissors to cut the strings off of the balloons. One of the SFLA members joked that it was ironic, since that wasn't very eco-friendly behavior, letting balloons loose like that. Unfortunately, after looking into it, I found out that this has happened quite a bit. This last January, at George Washington University, the College Democrats vandalized a pro-life display that the Young America's Foundation group had erected with crosses in memory of babies killed in abortions. The College Republicans, who shared a joint office with the College Democrats, came in to find that the crosses had been pinned around the office upside down with anti-Christian messages written on them and even condoms pulled over some of them. The crosses had been donated to the group for awareness purposes by a New York-based church, and this vandalism was a blatant act of assault on public property and disrespect against the pro-life students. There have been a list of incidents, ranging from tearing down and destroying or burning displays to slashing the tires of pro-life student group leaders. I was extremely disappointed to hear all of this. It's really unfortunate to see such an affront to free speech, especially on college campuses, which were meant to be forums for students to learn to open their minds to or at least respect the ideas of their peers.
Today was a beautiful day, though. Not too windy and to my knowledge things went smoothly.
The group, Students for Life of America, is a national non-profit organization, originally founded in 1988 as the American Collegians for Life. It has evolved and expanded and is now run by a board of directors, in order to create a more stable representation on campuses in order to raise awareness and promote activism on the issue. The group works with student groups on campuses across 43 states in order to educate the public about abortion, euthanasia and infanticide.
And not to worry. All of the items that were bought for the display were saved (and in some cases protected in Ziploc baggies) so that they could be donated after. The message was concise but powerful, with a shocking stat and an attention-grabbing visual that combined to spread awareness about the sheer numbers of lives lost to abortions every hour in our country.

Abortion
And, in order to do the Conservative Awareness Week's awareness topic of the day justice, I went online to the SFLA website, where they have information and facts about abortions. I know we all know that an abortion is a method used to end a pregnancy, but beyond that, most people don't know too much. According to the SFLA website's fact sheet from the Alan Guttmacher Institute, 1.31 million abortions occur every year in the United States. The U.S. abortion rate is unfortunately one of the highest among developed countries. In addition, if you go onto the Planned Parenthood website, it reassures readers that, "Abortions are very common. In fact, more than 1 out of 3 women in the U.S. have an abortion by the time they are 45 years old."
So what do abortions actually entail? I won't go into highly descriptive detail here, for those of you who are squeamish, but I am going to be honest, so if this is going to disturb you as much as it disturbs me, you need only know that there are various methods, including curettage, evacuation, extraction, injection, drugs and suction. There's a list of medical complications which come along with abortions. According to the SFLA site, these include heavy bleeding, infection, incomplete abortion, sepsis, anesthesia, damage to the cervix, scarring of the uterine lining, damage to internal organs and in severe cases, death. In addition, there are emotional complications such as eating disorders, relationship issues, guilt, depression, flashbacks to the abortion, suicidal thoughts, sexual dysfunction and alcohol or substance abuse. 52% of abortions are performed on women under 25 years old as well, so we are seeing more and more young women making this decision and then suffering the consequences of it.

While I believe strongly that abortions are morally wrong, however, my goal is to spread awareness so that when women make the decision to abort a baby, they realize that they aren't simply clicking the edit-undo keys on their computer. They really are having a baby medically murdered. The baby is extremely young and has not yet seen the world, but it is still a human life. I sincerely wish that women didn't have to pay the heavier price for unprotected or insufficiently protected sex more so than men, because it obviously took two to conceive. And, in the cases of rape and sexual assault, the woman may not have had any choice in conception. This is why I am hesitant to advocate for a law prohibiting all abortions. It's a difficult issue. On the one hand, the government does have the responsibility to enforce the protection of our right to life, and abortion is an obvious attack on that. In addition, in the case of abortions, the victim is hidden from the world, within the one who will be permitting the kill. I do feel that we owe it to these children to speak up for them in at least some way, seeing as they still have life and are still human beings. The fact that they are so heavily dependent and fragile still, and that they require further gestation and nurturing before they can speak for themselves should not provide reasoning against their right to live, but provide us an extra incentive to protect them. This is why I support raising awareness and educating women (and men) about the abortion issue. Perhaps if they realized the true nature of the procedures and the harsh reality of the choice they are making, they would decide not to go through with the abortion.

It is important that we stop letting society see murder as a solution.

Here is the link to the page where these procedures are described, and to where more information can be found:
http://www.studentsforlife.org/index.php/getthefacts/facts-and-talking-points/

I encourage everyone to familiarize themselves as much as possible with the harsh reality of abortion, and to do what you can to help those around you to understand exactly what such a thing means when they are considering getting one. The information is difficult to read and disturbing and painful to imagine, but if we don't become more aware of it, we will continue to death tolls in the millions every year, and it will be those innocent lives paying for society's ignorance.