"Disgusting!" "You ought to be ashamed of yourselves!"

These were some of the most common visceral reactions that staffers of the Genocide Awareness Project (GAP) heard from passersby on Oct. 26 and Oct. 27. The exhibit, sponsored by Berkeley Students for Life (BSL), immediately provoked responses from students and non-students alike. The signs themselves belong to the Center for Bioethical Reform (CBR), which BSL had invited for these two days to help coordinate and staff the display, which has been in operation at over 100 college campuses over the past 11 years in both the U.S. and Canada.

Now here's something you may not expect: I agree with those negative reactions. No one denies that this display was controversial, and much less would anyone deny that the imagery was anything short of "disgusting" or "sickening."

Yet that is the gruesome truth about abortion: it is the most horrendous practice on the face of the earth. Who would think that a black child is more likely to die in his mother's womb-being torn apart limb by limb-than on the streets of crime-ridden Richmond or West Oakland? Don't tell me that we're doing that child and society a favor by killing him now, because doing so isn't going to lower the crime rate. Whoever thought that punishing unborn children instead of prosecuting criminals or finding proactive ways of reducing poverty would solve society's problems? Are we looking for effective and permanent solutions, or simply the most "practical" one?

Americans ought to be ashamed for having permitted the state-sanctioned killing of over 45 million children since Roe v. Wade in 1973 up to the year 2005, according to the Alan Guttmacher Institute (AGI). Another statistic from AGI reveals that 22 percent of all pregnancies in the U.S. end in abortion. One out of every four people from our generation was lost to abortion. Yes, "shame" is a proper word.

Despite the hotheaded reactions and a counter-protest consisting mostly of students from a women's studies class and members of Berkeley National Organization for Women (NOW), GAP staffers were pleased to have many enlightening conversations with countless students. Berkeley is no longer the liberal bastion it is often believed to be. Today, it is a very apathetic campus, and it takes a large scale event to get people to talk about issues that matter. What was particularly pleasing was the fact that these students were very willing to engage in rational dialogue. Even some of the counter-protestors eventually engaged with us in a very respectful discussion, for which we are very grateful.

Perhaps the question on most people's minds was, "How can you compare abortion to genocide?" Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood, wrote in a 1939 letter to Clarence Gamble that "we do not want word to go out that we want to exterminate the Negro population, if it ever occurs to any of their more rebellious members." In "Pivot of Civilization," Sanger is quoted as saying: "We are paying for and even submitting to the dictates of an ever-increasing, unceasingly spawning class of human beings who never should have been born at all." Naturally, Sanger's solution was to become active in the American Eugenics Society (AES) and to found her own organization by which she could subtly eliminate those who in her mind were undesirable.

Furthermore, the writings of AES affiliates influenced Adolf Hitler himself to develop his own master plan to "purify" the human race, as shown in "The Horrifying American Roots of Nazi Eugenics" by Edwin Black.

Even today, black women are targeted the most by Planned Parenthood and other abortion providers, receiving 37 percent of all U.S. abortions. Hispanic women come in second at 22 percent, thereby accounting for 59 percent of all abortions in our country.

How can we allow ourselves to believe that preventing the births of minority groups so disproportionately can be considered anything other than genocide, especially when you take the origins of Planned Parenthood into account? I only wish I could say that this horrifying and little known truth were a fabrication, but the evidence of it abounds, and I would encourage skeptics to look for it themselves. Abortion is truly America's hidden genocide, and a legal one at that.

Tags: ABORTION