Pro-life organization holds protests on campus

Members of the Center for Bio-ethical Reform were in the Mendenhall Brickyard Monday advocating for pro-life.

Maggie Egger, project director for the Center for Bio-ethical Reform, said the protest, called the Genocide Awareness Project, was for promoting awareness about abortion. She said the organization uses their posters to make the comparison that abortion is genocide.

“We use the genocide approach because this is a genocide. We are killing 1.2 million human beings every year. If that’s not a genocide, what is?” said Jackie Hawkins, project director for the Center for Bio-ethical Reform.

Egger said the reason they visit schools is to inform people through showing violent and graphic posters, which some students found acceptable.

"It opened my eyes to the situation. It gave viewers a different way to see it. The pictures were graphic but sometimes it may take that to get a point across, especially for something a big as life,” said Cook-Brown, sophomore communication major.

The organization compared abortion to the deaths of over 12 million people in the Holocaust and to the oppression and murder of African Americans in the United States.

“In this country, we decided blacks were not people and so we enslaved them and killed them and now in this country, we’ve decided if you aren’t born, you also aren’t a person,” said Egger.

She also said she wants to make people aware of the dehumanizing language that is used in genocides to refer to the victims.

“To refer to an unborn child that is wanted, we call it a baby. Yet an unborn child that is unwanted, we call a blob of cells, parasite or product of conception, so they are all very dehumanizing terms,” said Egger.

Egger said there is a history of reformers using violent and graphic images to get their points across.

“Without seeing the injustice that you are trying to expose, it’s never going to go away,” said Egger.

Some students were in opposition to the protests and how graphic they were. Shawn McNeely, a junior psychology major, said he is pro-choice and disagreed with the message of the protests.

“Their way of going against abortion is attacking people and comparing it to genocide. Imagine being a woman who had an abortion or considered one and seeing those signs. It would make that woman feel terrible. If you're going to be pro-life, that's not the way to win anyone over,” said McNeely.

In the spectrum of pro-life versus pro-choice, Egger said she thinks a woman has the right to choose, but only when it doesn’t involve hindering the rights of someone else.

“I’m totally pro-choice as long as the choice, whether its made by a woman or a man, doesn’t harm another person. I think all people should be able to do what they want to with their own body as long as it doesn’t hurt someone else,” said Egger. “In the case of an abortion, that choice is decapitating and dismembering a tiny human being and I am not okay with that.”

Kayla Simmons, a sophomore engineering major, said using the word genocide to refer to an abortion is inappropriate.

“The Holocaust was a genocide; the African slave trade was a genocide. The people that experienced these events were met with oppression and force and couldn't do anything about it. For abortion to be compared to a genocide is lessening the severity of these incidents. Abortion is a choice, and it may be an inhuman choice, but it’s still a free choice,” said Simmons.

The protest took place outside of the “designated public forum,” or free speech zone at ECU, which is the small area right next to the Cupola. The zone extends to the area to the South of the Cupola by sidewalks on all four sides.

According to the university’s policy on Assemblies and Public Addresses in Designated Public Forum, the zone “has been open to public speech by tradition and administrative approval.”

The Center for Bio-ethical Reform is a national organization that is not affiliated with ECU or any of its student groups.