Justice For All prides itself on being educational and though I am certainly anti-abortion, I find its tactics one-sided. Yes, the pictures can be overwhelming, but the saddest part about its campaign is not the 50-foot fetus, but how black and white it paints this issue.
Justice For All should not only advocate on behalf of the rights of unborn children, but bring attention to the trauma women often face after aborting.
Abortion is not just about the baby and it is not just a way to end an unwanted pregnancy; it is just as emotional as it is physical. It can have lasting emotional impacts on women. Justice For All acts on the behalf of the child, but fails to act on behalf of the mother.
According to the Elliot Institute, 61.3 percent of women polled felt depressed after an abortion and only 3 percent of those polled were at peace with their decision to abort. The emotional trauma associated with abortion is horrifying, but not surprising.
The life of the child is gone, but a woman has to live with the pain everyday. Of those polled by the Elliot Institute, 94 percent regretted aborting their baby.
Abortions will continue to happen even if it is made illegal. There are other ways to avoid unwanted pregnancies and Justice For All should include them in its campaign. By helping women avoid pregnancies, it can avoid abortion altogether.
Instead of only educating others about moral obligations, it should promote contraception as well.
It promotes abstinence as the only 100-percent effective form of contraception, but it’s foolish to think a significant number of students can be convinced to stay celibate until marriage. Condoms and birth control are just two mediums of contraception, and though there is still a chance of pregnancy, the likeliness is lower when safe sex is practiced.
I agree that anti-abortion campaigns should be brought to universities as a catalyst for discussion. Even if you disagree, they serve as a challenge for us to think and to act and to support or to protest and to stand up for what we believe in.
Though Justice For All shares its view in a less conventional fashion, it does open the door for debate and questioning.
However, it fails to reach women on a more personal and emotional level. Abortion does not only terminate a pregnancy, but it affects everyone involved and that’s what Justice For All should focus on when it visits universities.
— Mariah Najmuddin,
University College freshman
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JosephusF 1 year, 6 months ago
Maria, it's clear that you are a freshmen who has not been introduced to the concept of research- a supreme tenant of the University of Oklahoma.
If you had done some research instead of copying and pasting from the Justice For All script, you would know that all those statistics are false.
The Elliot Institute sounds official, but It is a three person operation headed by David Reardon who is NOT a doctor and is NOT a psychologist. The Elliot Institute is a Christian organization that aims to restrict women's reproductive rights through graphic images and misleading images. I'm sure he slut-shamed the women in the study and convinced them that their abortions were wrong.
The American Psychological Association- an actual research organization that is widely known as credible- has stated on many occasions that Reardon's research is not true and that an abortion does not have an any more impact on a woman's mental health than other factors.
You can read the peer-reviewd research here: http://www.apa.org/pi/women/programs/abortion/index.aspx
The Christian right spends a great deal of time propagating false information created by activists turned "experts" in order to debunk mainstream science and facts.
Anon 1 year, 6 months ago
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/11/05/AR2010110507322.html
Please check the facts. This Washington Post article by a psychology professor, who chaired a task force on the study of mental health and abortion, clearly states all the lies associated with coming to the conclusion that women are more likely to be depressed after abortion.
You are not taking into account the fact that women who are more likely to get abortions have less stable lives in which to raise a child, and so would be more likely to get postpartum depression if they did carry it to term (therefore, they would be depressed no matter what). You are also falling prey to the stories of regret you hear; the vast majority of women who have abortions say they would do the same thing if they faced the choice again.
So please, stop spreading the lie that abortion is always associated with trauma. For some women, it is, I am not denying that. For many others, it is not. And for some women, having the child is just as traumatic as getting an abortion - yet people don't seem to be drawing the conclusion that having a child leads to depression (despite conditions like postpartum depression). Why? Because they are a minority of cases - and so are women who have depression after abortion.