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Gap. Overpriced clothing made by sweatshop laborers in India? Try again.
A space between two things? Getting warmer.
Gap between neuronal firings? Gap between critical thought and unquestioning subservience of the mind? Almost there.
Gap between respecting the rights of women and presenting grossly inappropriate, sexist and skewed images of “genocide”?
Cher monsieur, I think we have a winner.
Enter the Genocide Awareness Project, or GAP, the anti-choice group headquartered in Lake Forest, Calif., that graced the University of Maine with its presence this past week, a presence sponsored by UMaine’s very own student group Life Support.
GAP is now remembered on campus as the few males — you know, the sex devoid of any semblance of female genitalia — who forced up billboard-sized graphic images of bloody fetuses draped over dimes for all to see.
So as not to forget a valuable member of their group, I must mention their token “I’ve-had-an-abortion” anti-choice woman, who declared to a captive student audience that she has actually had four abortions.
I think she and I can both agree that there’s certainly an issue, but one that doesn’t exactly work in her favor.
Now, for those who were fortunate enough to miss the exposé, allow me to recreate the setting.
Darius Hardwick, the frontman of this appalling exhibit, stood atop a pedestal in front of the crowd, assuming only a slight demeanor of elitism. Ah, mon cher, at such height the fall was inevitable.
As a female passerby, I felt only moderately judged as I looked up into the eyes of the one without a uterus. And the laughter in the background was of the very faintest nature.
Furthermore, Hardwick’s eyes sparkled with a loving condemnation, so I considered the colossal images of dismembered fetuses looming over me to be only slightly offensive to my sex and pro-choice stance.
Isn’t it interesting how the male can do whatever he pleases, but the female must live with the consequence? Only the female is left with the decision between “right and wrong.” How convenient, and how fortunate that all of these Mary Magdalenes have men to guide them along their moral path. May we wash your feet, Darius?
Furthermore, I find it incredibly confounding that groups such as GAP expend an inordinate amount of time and energy fighting against women’s rights for a fetus the size of a dime.
GAP, if you’re unequivocally pro-life, why don’t you shift your focus to that of post-birth abortions, instead? — When the fetus is significantly larger than a coin hosting FDR’s shrunken head, and the effects are considerably more alarming?
You forget the soldier abroad with a family, with a fiancé, with a future. Instead, you liken pro-choicers to Hutu extremists, massacring Tutsi civilians. You liken your crusade to that of Martin Luther King Jr.’s. Can I get a holler for hyperbole?
GAP, you are delusional. You not only mislead the public, but you also show blatant disregard for the millions who have actually witnessed genocide. Real genocide.
When a 16-year-old girl has unprotected sex and opts for an abortion because she knows she can’t be a mother — as she’s barely surviving being a child, and she doesn’t want a child to end up in the system — this doesn’t equate to Hitler’s extermination of over 6 million Jews or Stalin’s Soviet Famine, when one-sixth of the entire population of Ukraine starved to death.
This doesn’t compare to racial oppression, war, rebel armies shooting mothers execution-style and then snatching their orphaned boys and teaching them the ways of the machine gun.
Nice try.
So, GAP, in your hyperbolic attempts to liken a woman’s right to choose to a massacre of humankind, after holding a magnifying glass to our eyes until you locate some semblance of a supposed speck, it’s time to get down from your pedestal of distorted cubist morality and locate your own plank. As the laughter continues to haunt you all the way down.
Erin McCann is a fourth-year biology student. Her columns will appear every Monday.
