College Students Celebrate Abortion With Coat Hanger Display

State   |   Rebecca Downs   |   Apr 28, 2014   |   11:52AM   |   Rock Hill, SC

Cemetery of Innocents displays are certainly a popular way for groups to communicate their pro-life message on campus, while demonstrating the sheer magnitude of how many lives abortion claims. They are certainly powerful and effective, but perhaps a bit too much so. Students for Life of America posted a tutorial video on tips for displays after four were vandalized in seven days, including at the University of Miami and University of Washington.

In January, the College Republicans of Winthrop University did such a display to mark the 41st anniversary of Roe v. Wade and the 56 million abortions the country has faced since then.

coathanger2Apparently the display was too much for some students to handle. After just one hour of the flags being put up on a Saturday night, students were seen stealing flags. And, during the night, someone stole the sign which explained that one flags represents almost 19,000 aborted babies since Roe.

The group also hosted a viewing of Abortion 180, a pro-life film narrated by Ray Comfort, who seeks to compare the Holocaust to abortion and bring, or at least enlighten, passerby to the pro-life message.

Now, months later, a group at Winthrop University known as the Socialist Student Union, decided to hold their own event in protest. The student group decided to cover the DiGiorgio Campus Center lawn, once full with pro-life flags, with a wire coat hanger display.

Each flag from the College Republican display was a representation of the unborn who have lost their lives to abortion. Each flag was a symbol as well as a real number. Kevin D. Williamson points out for National Review Online, though, that “[t]he wire hanger  is indeed a powerful symbol — the symbol of a lie engineered with malice aforethought.”

The display also advertised an event, “Abortion 360:  A Domestic and International Look.” Campus Reform obtained photographs of the display, with advertisements for the event attached to the coat hangers. Students from Winthrop University were interviewed by Campus Reform, including one anonymous student, who, although pro-choice, “found the promotion for the event really unappealing and distasteful.”

And the Socialist Student Union was not the only university group involved with the event. In the program description obtained by Campus Reform, Dr. Jennifer Disney, Director of the Women’s Studies Program at Winthrop University is listed as giving the “prospective.” Pi Sigma Alpha,  the National Political Science Honor Society, is also listed as a sponsor of the event. The program directly references the event from the College Republicans and invites students to “join us… in a different perspective on reproductive rights and the abortion debate.”

Like this pro-life news article? Please support LifeNews with a donation during our April fundraising campaign!

What is perhaps the most odd involvement of all from the university is how those students who attend the event received a “cultural event credit.” Winthrop University is a taxpayer-funded institution and students must attend three cultural events for every 20 hours completed in other to graduate. Apparently a “perspective” that is advertised and promoted with a symbol that is largely a propagated rallying cry, but also a myth, is considered worthy enough as part of the requirement for students to graduate.  With sponsorship from such student groups, and by counting towards cultural credits, does the university endorse such a perspective?

Pro-life students create the Cemetery of the Innocents displays in order to foster discussion, but also to educate students of what over 41 years of legal abortion has done to this country. The Socialist Student Union and other pro-abortion forces on the campus of Winthrop University may wish to present “a different perspective” but the truth remains that over 56 million children never got the chance to “join in” on such a “perspective,” and all in the name of “reproductive rights.” Abortion advocates have been found unable to handle the perspective of the truth, and so have turned to vandalism and events promoted in ways that even those who are pro-choice find “appalling” and “distasteful.”