Bioethics Center Takes Pro-Life Message to College Audiences
by Mary Rettig
October 26, 2005
(AgapePress) - Fletcher Armstrong, the Southeast Regional Director of the pro-life Center for Bioethical Reform (CBR), says the organization is making an effort to bring the realities of abortion to college campuses through the Genocide Awareness Project, or GAP. The most recent leg of the project is currently taking place in Kentucky. The GAP exhibit includes large murals comparing the tragedy of abortion to other historical instances of genocide, including the Jewish Holocaust and the lynching of blacks in America. "We point to those pictures and explain to people that we have decided, as a nation, that killing an unborn child is okay because it's not developed enough," Armstrong says.
"At its most basic level," the pro-life advocate explains, "we just want people to understand who the unborn child is and what abortion does to that child, because those are the two facts that are most important in informing people's decisions about abortion." And those same two facts, he adds, are the very truths "the abortion industry desperately tries to obscure and hide from the general population and from their potential customers."
From the Nazi death camps in Germany to the lynchings in Jim Crow America, Armstrong points out that supporters of genocidal violence have always justified their lethal acts, often with legislative and court-sanctioned rationalizations. And pro-abortion forces today are no exception, he notes, as a main argument of so-called "choice" advocates -- that an unborn child, especially prior to a certain stage of development, is not a person -- is a line of reasoning with some disturbing historical precedents.
"The Supreme Court said the same thing about the black man in 1857, again using a developmental criterion," the CBR spokesman points out. Also, he notes, "The Nazis held that Jews and Eastern Europeans were subhuman and, therefore, did not deserve the rights of personhood under the law."
The purpose of the Genocide Awareness Project, Armstrong says, is to make people question why abortion is acceptable in the U.S. while other acts of genocide, ultimately, were not. GAP has been traveling to American universities since 1998 and in that year alone, the regional program director notes, nine pregnant women decided not to abort their babies.
In the subsequent years since GAP's launch, Armstrong says the program with its strongly pro-life message and high-impact visuals has been successful in saving the lives of many children who might otherwise have been aborted.
Mary Rettig, a regular contributor to AgapePress, is a reporter for American Family Radio News, which can be heard online.
