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JHU group aids Justice For All

 By Michael Sciscenti

Last June, five members of Johns Hopkins' Voice for Life, myself included, boarded a Southwest Airlines plane at BWI and five hours later landed at LAX. None of us could have predicted what would be in store for us in the week that followed.

The group, with the help of Defend Life and Scott Klusendorf, went to Los Angeles to help with a pro-life exhibit at UCLA. The exhibit is put up by a group called Justice for All (JFA) and has many of the familiar pictures found in the Genocide Awareness Project (GAP), but a slightly different presentation.

The purpose of both JFA and GAP is to spread awareness about abortion and how heinous an act it is, but they go about it in different ways.

GAP compares the pictures of aborted fetuses to other cases of genocide, like the Holocaust, while JFA focuses on the question of "What is the unborn?"

The Justice for All exhibit is arranged in the shape of a triangle, with an 18-foot-high panel making up each side. People would take over an hour to walk around the whole exhibit and read it.

The first side addresses the humanity of the unborn, the second addresses the inhumanity of abortion, and the third deals with the concept, "Do no harm." Each panel starts with a question and then presents pictures and information.

The exhibits can be found in their entirety on each group's web site: www.jfaweb.org for JFA and www.abortionno.org for GAP.

Many pro-lifers may have qualms concerning the use of graphic images, or may have seen the images used in situations or locations that are inappropriate. I too believe that there are places and times when such pictures should not be used, but a college campus is the perfect place for such things.

At a university those of us manning the exhibit are able to discuss with passersby what they think about abortion and try to explain to them how the unborn are innocent human beings and therefore, it is wrong to kill them.

The effectiveness of exhibits like JFA is another reason I wholeheartedly support them. I wish I had counted the number of people at UCLA that came up to us and said, 'Wow, I've totally changed my mind."

While the exhibit may not change everyone's mind, it does a lot of educating. The most common thing we heard from people was, "It's legal through all nine months? No way!" This fact shocked and caused disbelief in many.

We also heard from a few pregnant women and their boyfriends who, after seeing the exhibit, said they were not going to have an abortion.

One of the main reasons these exhibits are so successful is that they are completely non-religious and that everyone who works them is required to have read Scott Klusendorf's Pro-Life 101 or to have attended one of his seminars, which teach you how to scientifically and philosophically argue the pro-life cause. Being able to non-religiously argue our cause is essential if we are going to convince the majority of secular Americans that abortion is wrong.