What should have been a beautiful Monday was marred by many things - tracking down friends in Boston, watching news coverage and having my morning framed by an offensive form of free speech. Anti-abortion protestors set up large billboards outside the Student Union on Monday and Tuesday featuring graphic medical images, suggestions that abortion is genocide and numbers where one can call to have a disingenuous conversation with an anti-abortion advocate about your abortion or unplanned pregnancy. That they were there on Tuesday is particularly galling given the situation in Boston, as they attempt to juxtapose their message against real terror, destruction and heartache.
At this point in the debate, we all know each other's arguments and straw men quite well, so I will endeavor to stay away from these when I discuss two points I took offense to. I can make no guarantees that my contempt won't seethe through.
First, as a lawyer, I am an ardent advocate of the First Amendment and free speech. Yet I had to wonder if there was some way to classify what was placed on our campus as hate speech. There's a long list of people this could apply to - how hateful was it to women on campus who have suffered miscarriages and have to look at those images? How hateful to the men who supported them? To women who exercised the right to have an abortion, and the men who supported them? More broadly, to anyone who experienced a trauma and who was triggered by the sight of blood and gore? And how hateful was it to victims of genocide, or those affected by it, to make such a rank comparison? What was their day like, after seeing those images? To post them, in that size, in that location, certainly shows contempt - to those of us who are pro-choice, to women, to the campus community as a whole and the various members who might be affected by those images.
Second, and also as a lawyer, I value precision in language. This is why I find the comparisons of abortion to genocide offensive. Legally - and because it is a recognized international crime, the legal definition is certainly relevant - genocide is "the deliberate and systematic destruction of, in whole or in part, an ethnic, racial, religious or national group." None of the groups mentioned in the definition - ethnic, racial, religious or national - are being targeted by abortion. There are no defining characteristics present, nor are any particular groups being targeted in whole or in part. Any argument to the contrary is not only ideological and distorted but also offensive to those who are victims of, or experienced the effects of, genocide. And this comes before we get to another qualification for genocide - the act must be systemic. That is, it must be organized, system wide and affecting a group or system as a whole. Systemic means the Holocaust or the Rwandan genocide, in which whole societies participated, with mechanisms in place, in the wholesale destruction of a particular group. Anti-abortion advocates will claim that the dwindling network of abortion providers in our country is systemic, but again, they are distorting facts to fit their arguments. Abortions are not being forced on all pregnant women.
The University at Buffalo is a public university and, as such, we must allow anyone to exercise legal free speech on our grounds. I do not know how this group came to campus, but if one of my fellow students requested their presence, they have clearly failed to think about the quality and content of the speech they've used to express their views as well as failed to internalize many of the values the university inspires and seeks to imbue in students.
I was pleased to see that later in the afternoon other students had gathered with their own signs to cover the billboards and messages from the other group with a variety of carefully considered messages about their own points of view. Thankfully, there are some of us with more consideration for our community.
