Volume 26, Issue 34, april 22, 2004

opinion

A right to choose, a right to offend

Joel Tagert
Columnist

Let me tell you, there's nothing to convert people to your cause like a dripping-red, twenty-foot-tall display of pictures of aborted fetuses, plunked right down in the middle of campus for three days.

As if the towering gore wasn't enough, the Kansas-based group, "Justice For All," further amped up their invasion by shipping in busloads of anti-choice youth from out-of-state to surround and intimidate anyone with the gall to argue with them. These fundamentalists-in-training also served to make it appear as if there were far more anti-choice students on campus than there actually are.

Fortunately, their sick party was crashed when Creative Resistance and the Feminist Alliance, with incredible alacrity, teamed up to create an eighteen-foot tall installation in support of a woman's right to choose, which we set up across the way from JFA's installation.

I spent much of the next few days in the shadow of those beautiful figures, debating about abortion with a crowd of the aforementioned bused-in youth.

Invariably, they would try to steer the conversation toward the question: "When does a human become a human?"

There's an obvious tautology here, which became more obvious as I realized that the question meant something very different to them than it did to me.

What they really meant was: "When does God give you a soul?" A soul, in their view, being the defining characteristic of a human, and the answer being, at conception.

Whereas I thought the question meant, "When does a mass of cells become complex enough and independent enough to be recognizable as a complete human being?" Answer being-to me-at birth or near it, when a fetus becomes capable of surviving outside the body of its mother.

Our differing interpretations of the question were inevitable, because it is ultimately the question of what makes us human.

But these young people didn't seem to have an answer to that question. Maybe it's our DNA, or maybe it's our big brains, or maybe it's some fuzzy thing called "potential." Whatever it is, though, they were positive it was there at conception.

Whereas I have the rather awkward belief that what makes us human isn't to be found in any set of factors, but in the totality of our beings. Nor do I believe in the soul, or in some higher power that can kindly reduce complex moral issues to black-and-white positions for me.

Of course, anti-abortion activists don't really care about science. Rather, they attempt to use science as a prop to support their religious beliefs. If you think I'm mistaken, just ask these same fundamentalists their views on evolution.

By dividing life into two distinct and separate categories-human and non-human-JFA attempts to make abortion a black-and-white issue.

When a sperm penetrates an ovum, they say, it's a human.

This is plain silly. A zygote is clearly not a human being; it's smaller than the head of a pin. In fact, until the tenth week of development, an embryo is less than an inch long-considerably smaller than, say, a mouse, and with far less ability to function. Yet how many abortion opponents would hesitate to kill a mouse if it was bothering them?

Not many, it turns out. I actually asked a crowd of JFA kids if they ate meat-cows, specifically. They universally replied that they did.

This is bizarre. These people decry killing a three-week old blastocyst-a tiny mass of cells barely beginning to develop structure-and yet they will casually slaughter a six-hundred pound cow because they like the taste.

I, on the other hand, don't eat cows, because I don't need to. This reflects my overall position on killing: don't, unless you need to.

Don't kill animals unless you need to. Don't kill plants unless you need to. Don't slap a fly unless you need to. And don't terminate a pregnancy-unless you need to.

Is that clear?

Maybe not. The truth is, abortion is a morally complex issue, filled with uncertainties and heavily influenced by religious and personal beliefs. What our courts wisely recognize is that the decision to abort is so complex that ultimately it is the woman, together with her doctor, who must face these issues and make that choice for herself.

It's too bad the religious right is too arrogant and self-righteous to trust women in the same way.

Some students have suggested that JFA's display should have been banned from campus because it was "obscene."

I disagree. While their pictures were certainly gruesome, I support JFA's right to display them, just as I would support a peace group's right to display photos of war casualties.

However, what made JFA's exhibit so objectionable was not only its content, but its invasive scale.

JFA clearly intended to force students to look at their gorefest and thereby provoke confrontations.

JFA claimed they merely wished to "educate" students. But if this had been the case, a smaller display would have sufficed. Then students could have chosen whether or not to look.

Fortunately, there is a simple way to avoid such invasions in the future: The school could limit the size of signs on campus to no larger than 10' high by 20' long, or 200 square feet.

That's still a sizable display, but it would prevent gross excesses like JFA's.

Copyright © 2004, Metropolitan State College of Denver.

The Met Online is a student-produced online version of the weekly student-run The Metropolitan newspaper, both operating under the direction of the Metropolitan State College of Denver Office of Student Publications.

All Rights reserved, The Metropolitan. ~ For feedback and questions