*Today's post is more of a question, and rather than reproduce the images of the discussion, I will write about them.
Today I witnessed what is an annual event at the University of Texas at Austin. An anti-abortion protest group was set up outside of Gregory Gym. Set up behind them were 30 foot tall billboards, a traveling road show of graphic photos that the group claims depict aborted fetuses. The appeal of the photos is obvious, an attempt to ask, "how can people kill tinier people." Note that the photos these groups use (and there are many such groups that hold similar protests at campuses around the country) are not necessarily depicting the same medical circumstances that the groups claim the photos depict.
What was interesting is that this event appears to have taken place under some guise of university sanction. University of Texas police were providing security, and the billboards were protected by barricades obviously owned by the University of Texas. Such marks of officialdom lead me to believe that the protest had to have been organized through some university sanctioned student group, presumably with a faculty sponsor. Obviously the University's allowing the event does not equal an endorsement of the group's message, but they certainly weren't trespassing.
As a colleague and I walked out of the gym, he asked an intriguing question, "I wonder what would happen if someone launched a similar protest with equally graphic images of dead US soldiers and Iraqi civilians?"
I don't know the answer to that question, but I'm captivated by it and its ramifications. What if a similar student group, operating through the same channels and meeting the same bureaucratic requirements, launched an anti-war protest graphically depicted some of the 4,000+ Americans who have been lost?
I don't know how UT would respond to such an event, but it would be explosive. How would your academic institution react?
*I have not included relevant images in this, our visual rhetoric blog, as a personal decision not to reproduce images that I feel inhibit, rather than enabling, civil debate.*
Comments
Good Question
It's an interesting question. I think you're right to assert that the response would be "explosive." Just to speculate, it seems like the objection would be a lack of respect for the war dead (this is the issue that came up in my posts about the photographs of soldiers killed in battle returning to the U.S.). To speculate further, it's not hard to imagine the very people who organized the abortion protest advancing just that objection to the war protest--untenable due to lack of respect. Yet we might well ask, then, why similar respect is not accorded to the "dead babies" depicted by the abortion protesters; i.e., if graphic images are disrespectful to the dead, they should be off-limits, period, whether the dead was a grown soldier or a fetus (if one accepts the argument that disrespect is a good reason not to allow such a protest, and this is of course debatable). (I realize I'm putting words in their mouths, but still, it doesn't seem outside the realm of the possible to see this as an objection that would be raised, with the ensuing paradox.)
My issue with the abortion protest is mostly that it is insulting to my intelligence. It asserts that I don't know what abortion "really" is, and that by confronting me with the "truth" of abortion I will "naturally" agree that abortion is murder once my vision has been corrected by the images. It presumes ignorance on my part. The protest seems to assume that it isn't possible both to understand the mechanics of abortion and still be pro-choice. It's not the graphic nature of the images that bothers me so much as the condescension inherent in the argument.