A week and a half ago, the U of North Florida (UNF) Spinnaker (student newpaper) printed an op-ed piece critical of the GAP project.  A few days later, I offered a rebuttal, which was printed in its entirety in the most recent issue.  Awesome!  Next to my letter was another pro-life op-ed piece, this one by another Spinnaker editor.  Hurray for The Spinnaker!

I was pleased that The Spinnaker printed my letter.  They also appended to my letter some final comments of their own, essentially a rebuttal to some of my points.  No problem; we welcome debate.  But I did want to respond, so I sent them this e-mail over the weekend:

Dear Spinnaker Editors,

I just wanted to sincerely thank you for printing my letter in your February 29, 2012 edition, along with another column from the pro-life side of the debate. I do appreciate you allowing commentary from both sides of the debate on our Genocide Awareness Project. Even if we disagree on key points, you were fair to print both sides.

I did want to respond to your comments that appeared at the end of my editorial in the paper. Not trying to be argumentative, but I thought I should address some of the points you raised.

Think of it as a friendly chat over coffee. In fact, I’ve attached a cup of coffee. From several hundred miles away, e-mail is the best I can do. Please feel free to print it out on your printer and share a cup with each member of the staff! You’ll note that it’s a bit flat, but still steamy. Try that with the US Postal Service!

Anyway, you said that your reference to “bloody babies” made no link to abortion victims, just to the photos the GAP displayed. I can’t think of any bloody babies we displayed other than abortion victims. Most people don’t think about abortion victims as “bloody babies”, and that is exactly why we want them to be seen, because that is exactly what they are.

As to the differences between the miscarried fetus, the aborted fetus, and the fetus in the womb, they are very different. The aborted fetus has generally been torn into pieces. In fact, one part of the abortion procedure is to reassemble the pieces to make sure that no part of the fetus has been left inside the uterus, which could create a serious infection. On the other hand, the miscarried fetus is generally not torn apart, although it can happen, depending on how the baby is removed. Miscarriages can occur spontaneously, which normally results in an intact embryo/fetus. If they find the baby dead and have to induce labor, that also can result in an intact fetus. At least it did for ours, who died at 19 weeks. We had another that died earlier in pregnancy, and the removal did (I was told) damage the body beyond any recognition or recovery.

Regarding living babies in the womb, obviously they have not been torn apart and therefore look nothing like the aborted babies we displayed.

You say that you did not describe a fetus as “just a blob of tissue.” Perhaps you didn’t explicitly make that claim, but when you advocate a debate about abortion in which the facts of abortion are hidden, you invite people to believe the myths that the abortion industry has advanced, including the myth that the unborn child is just a blob of tissue. It isn’t necessary for you to claim that the fetus is a blob of tissue, because for so many, that is the default assumption. That’s why it is up to us to prove otherwise. Pictures are, for most of our audience, the most effective proof we have.

Finally, you said that you didn’t encourage readers to be pro- or anti-abortion. Perhaps not explicitly, but the effect of your message is still pro-abortion because you don’t point people to the most important issue … whether or not the pre-born child is a human being whose life we must respect in the same way that we respect the life of a born child. We are more than willing to have a debate about our strategy and tactics, but the debate over abortion really centers around the questions of (1) who the pre-born child is, and (2) how must he be valued.

You were skeptical of our comparison of abortion to genocide. Obviously, abortion is nothing like genocide … IF. If pre-born children are not living human beings, then abortion does not kill humans and there are no relevant similarities between abortion and genocide. But if pre-born children are living human beings – science tells us they are – then abortion kills 1.2 million living humans every year in the US. If not genocide, what else would we call it?

UN General Assembly Resolution 96, adopted in 1946, describes genocide as “a denial of the right of existence of entire human groups, as homicide is the denial of the right to live of individual human beings …” Resolution 96 goes on to say it is a crime “whether committed on religious, racial, political or any other grounds …” (emphasis added). With abortion, the “entire human group” denied the right of existence is unwanted, pre-born children.

If it is wrong for whiter people to kill darker people for something they can’t control (the color of their skin), how can it be OK for older people to kill younger people for something they can’t control (their age)?

Blessings to all of you,
Fletcher