Avoiding Unintentional Exclusion: A Reflection From Florida GAP

by Alanna Gomez

As we have begun our two week mission trip of pro-life outreach on American university campuses, I have been reflecting on a TED Talk I heard recently. In the talk, Dave Meslin claims that apathy as we think of it doesn’t exist in our culture. People often complain that society doesn’t get involved with issues, ranging from city planning and politics to more serious issues. Instead of blaming apathy, Meslin blames intentional exclusion. He uses the example of a City of Toronto re-zoning application and compared it to how companies like Nike advertise their products.  The city puts an ad in the paper, full of text in small font, and obscures the purpose of the application so that you must thoroughly analyze the ad just to understand what is going on.

The information on how to actually get involved is hidden in the final paragraph, if anyone gets that far, because they don’t really want people to be involved. In contrast, Nike wants people to buy their product so they make an eye-catching ad, with all the information on where to find their product, and why you want to buy it, immediately evident.

Although not intentional, the pro-life movement is sometimes guilty of subconscious exclusion. Instead of asking ourselves if our projects and outreach compel the culture to engage in the abortion debate, pro-lifers sometimes complain that the media is ignoring our message and that the culture simply isn’t willing to dialogue about the issue or actively form opinions based on the evidence. In fact, abortion advocates often insist that the debate is over- no one wants or needs to discuss abortion.  However, we have found that this is not the case, especially on a university campus like Florida Gulf Coast University, when we hold the Genocide Awareness Project (GAP).

For example, whenever we hold GAP on university campuses, Planned Parenthood representatives usually react by putting on their pink t-shirts and setting up a table with free candy and condoms. They have a supply of signs with various slogans like “Women’s Health Matters” and “Pro-Woman, Pro-Family, Pro-Choice”.  This is a positive and attractive message, and always gathers a crowd of supporters. In contrast, we put up graphic, ugly, bill-board sized pictures of babies that have been killed, along with victims of other terrible injustices. One might think that this would turn people away, and be a barrier to dialogue but we have found just the opposite. These terrible images are the catalyst that many students need in order to seriously engage in the abortion debate.

I observed throughout an afternoon how the pink clad Planned Parenthood crowd started off standing in a group, holding their signs and opposing the pictures and then transitioned to small groups, standing or sitting by our display, signs set aside, dialoguing with our pro-life student volunteers. We had many students spend several hours talking with our volunteers, some going to class and then returning with new thoughts or a changed mind.  While pro-abortion organizations might want us to believe that people have their minds made up, this sort of project which really invites people to engage proves otherwise.

During our open microphone session, where we take questions from the crowd and answer them for everyone to hear, a student asked me why we don’t just work on sex education to reduce the number of abortions. What I tried to express to him was that it isn’t enough for us to merely reduce the number of abortions- we want to end abortion.  One way to do that permanently is to reach out to the culture, to university students, and help them come to the conclusion that abortion is wrong before they find themselves in a crisis pregnancy situation. They need the opportunity now to decide that killing their child is not a viable option.

We are looking forward to a week and a half more of our outreach on Florida university campuses and continuing to change minds and reach the hearts of students while compelling them to engage in this debate and will be sharing those testimonies with you!