SFL response to latest Daily criticism

Remember the Michigan Daily op-ed entitled "Abortion is not Genocide?" Well, here's our reply: [hat tip: Carmen Allen, SFL president]

Letter to the Editor: Students for Life stand up for the rights of the unborn

Students for Life is a social justice group. Not political. Not religious. We’re here to confront a social justice issue that would otherwise remain disregarded on campus.

If, as Daniel Chardell claims in his column (Abortion is not genocide, 10/11/2011), he spent nearly two hours on the Diag, he would have heard our justification for the dehumanization-based parallel between the unborn and Holocaust victims. And if Chardell had spent a portion of that time perusing the display, he would have read one panel that said, “Comparable is not identical.” Abortion’s existence today is due largely to ignorance, not the shoveling of the innocent into gas chambers. Certainly the millions of deaths in each case deserve equal attention, but while pro-choice advocates aren’t ending the mass extermination, they are not Nazis.

Chardell assumes that Students for Life does not understand the “much larger societal issue” of unwanted pregnancies. We beg to differ. The central problem isn’t that unplanned pregnancies are occurring but that we’re cultivating a culture in which we’ll sacrifice a human life to make ours more convenient. Sure, we could devote all our time and resources to prevention, but then who will advocate for the unborn? Something still won’t change: The unborn still won’t have rights, society still won’t care and innocent lives still will be sacrificed when the condom breaks. Minimizing abortion isn’t ending it altogether.

So excuse us for our radical idea that the life created from a broken condom still has the same value as the millions lost before it. Students for Life doesn’t care what you do with your sex life. You can sleep with whomever you want, whenever you want, however you want — until a third person enters the picture. And, yes, we’re the same radicals who at that point expect you to take responsibility for procreation.