As many UT students already know, once per semester or so there is an advocate group that comes to campus and protests abortion. They usually set up along the Pedestrian Mall and display gruesome images of aborted fetuses on large poster boards for all passing by to see.
This is not the only way they try to make us students aware of their cause and of the horrors of abortion. They have a truck, too. It’s not just a pickup truck, but a mid-sized moving truck with large images of an aborted fetus next to a quarter on the sides of the trailer. Every so often it shows up, and, most recently, it was cruising around campus on Friday.
The logic behind this method of in-your-face advertising is particularly flawed. At face value, the promoters may feel that shocking college kids through a twisted pathos of dead babies will change all of our minds to an anti-abortion state. This is not the case.
For one, such provocative promotion is not effective. Those who are opposed to abortion see those pictures and become offended. The disturbing images likely just reaffirm the way they feel about abortion. Those who support abortion rights see that truck and also become offended. They probably get angry or laugh at the ridiculous nature of the way the protest is presented.
On top of heightening the negative emotions of those who already have an opinion on abortion, the promoters run the risk of alienating those who might be on the fence about the issue from the ideals they’re trying to instill. Such obscene methods of advertising might even repulse those who are in line with the ideas of this truck’s organization.
Other advocate groups don’t try to shock people into agreeing with them. Mothers Against Drunk Driving members don’t drive a truck around with pictures of grisly car accidents and remains plastered to the side of the trailer. Amnesty International members don’t drive a truck displaying images of convicts strapped to a table receiving lethal injections to make their point. This anti-abortion group takes things too far in an attempt to win the minds of a fresh crop of thinkers in college students.
That gets old. Our campus is a valuable tool for freedom of speech, self-expression and the sharing of different ideas for students. But when people unaffiliated with our university get permits to come out and spread their views in such offensive and distracting ways, it detracts from the healthy academic environment our campus fosters and creates a hostile one instead. Consider the occasional fanatical religious people that come to campus and yell to us that we’re all going to hell because “God hates fags.” The abortion images act in the same offensive way.
It’s almost insulting that all kinds of people feel like they can just come to our campus and prey on the minds of college students in an effort to convert us to whatever ideals they believe in. It’s as if they think our opinions are so easy to manipulate, and we’re just ripe for the pickin’ for recruitment into some viewpoint. It’s even more insulting that they think they can just cruise through campus with their aborted babies thrown up on their silly looking truck. Do they even have a permit to creep around UT property, or are they trespassing?
This is not a call for the university to ban outsiders coming to campus. What’s frustrating is the concept of how outsiders come in and the insensitive manner in which some conduct protests. In all, many of these organizations are simply recruiters. Most students don’t need or want to be recruited into anything, especially not by the abortion truck. And if they’re not here to recruit, their sole purpose is to stir up the pot.
Whether you’re anti-abortion or for abortion rights, the abortion truck is laughable. Unfortunately, this sick joke is bigger than all 30 feet of that truck.
— Oliver Casey is a junior in enterprise management. He can be reached at [email protected].
