Dear Editor,
The extremist anti-abortion group, the Genocide Awareness Project (GAP) has recently left its mark on our campus. This project, sponsored by the Center for Bioethical Reform (CBR), promotes a dangerous, distorted message: women who have abortions and doctors who provide abortions are comparable to those who commit hate crimes and perpetrate genocide against entire populations. GAP exploits the horrific experiences and suffering of African Americans, Jews, and ethnic groups from the former Yugoslavia.
While GAP purportedly strives to foster debate and discussion about abortion, their inflammatory tactics prove otherwise. GAP uses images of lynchings and the Holocaust to provoke black and Jewish students, demean victims of genocide, and incite violence against women and abortion providers by likening them to Nazis and members of the Ku Klux Klan. Furthermore, while GAP claims that its photographs of so-called aborted fetuses are genuine, nearly 90% of abortions in this country are performed in the first trimester, when the embryo is smaller than a grain of rice.
Each year, 70,000 women who have control neither over their reproductive systems nor over their lives die from botched, illegal abortions. These are the people we must remember in any dialogue over abortion, and these are the people GAP systematically refuses to mention in their hateful, misleading rhetoric.
GAP claims that their displays are protected by free speech. This is hate speech, plain and simple. GAP’s brand of violence and misleading imagery has no place on Temple’s campus.
To find out more about reproductive rights, or to help stop GAP, contact the Feminist Majority Leadership Alliance.
Sincerely,
Lydia Keaney
English / Spanish major
Class of 2004
President, Temple Feminist Majority Leadership Alliance
215-760-9464
lkeaney@temple.edu
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