Anti-abortion exhibit spurs counterprotests from campus activists
Lindsay Ayling and other student activists protest UNC Police's involvement during on-campus demonstrations on Tuesday, Oct. 22, 2019. After Monday's protests, UNC Police arrested graduate student and activist Maya Little and charged them with misdemeanor larceny.
Content warning: This article contains violent imagery and discusses abortion.
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About a dozen students gathered on Polk Place on Tuesday afternoon to protest the Genocide Awareness Project’s anti-abortion installation on campus and UNC police behavior regarding on-campus demonstrations.
Tuesday was the second day of the Genocide Awareness Project’s scheduled presence on campus, which involves a large-scale installation in the quad that compares abortion to historic acts of violence and genocide, such as the Holocaust or the Wounded Knee Massacre in South Dakota. On Monday, graduate student and activist Maya Little was arrested by campus police for taking "articles from another individual's hand."
A group of counter-protesters gathered next to the installation. They held signs advocating for a woman’s right to choose and warning passersby of the graphic images included in the installation.
Cora Martin, a first-year peace, war and defense major, helped organize the counter-protest.
“This was a 24-hour project,” Martin said. “We started yesterday at noon.”
Students hold up signs, covering their faces, as they protest the Genocide Awareness Project on Polk Place.
Martin said the project's demonstration is upsetting to students and visitors on UNC's campus.
"It's really important to us to demonstrate to the Carolina administrators, as well as the community, that we absolutely are not in favor of this," Martin said. "This seems to be a horrifying demonstration of what the administration seems to think is acceptable on our campus."
Graduate student and activist Lindsay Ayling said she was not involved in the planning of the counter-protest, but came out to support the cause.
Ayling said she believes Little was arrested yesterday because of their activism against Silent Sam.
“(Campus police) were incredibly aggressive about it and violated their constitutional rights,” Ayling said.
Along with another activist, Ayling held a banner that read “Abolish Campus Cops." Ayling said she feels there is a discrepancy between how UNC Police interact with demonstrations against Silent Sam and how they interact with the demonstrators of the Genocide Awareness Project.
“The campus police also busted up our Silent Sam sit-in because they said that everything we had out there was a temporary structure...so, if that’s a temporary structure then what is that?” Ayling said, referring to the project’s installation.
Last February, activists also set up a memorial to James Lewis Cates, a Black student at UNC who was murdered on campus by a white supremacist gang in 1970. This structure was also removed by campus police, Ayling said.
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"So why are the campus police out here protecting this large, oppressive temporary structure, while at the same time using all of these provisions about temporary structures to bust up anti-racist activists on campus?” Ayling said.
Fletcher Armstrong, southeast director at the Center for Bio-Ethical Reform, said that he welcomes counter-protests in response to the group's installation. The Genocide Awareness Project is a movement under the Center for Bio-Ethical Reform.
“This is America,” Armstrong said. “It is our First Amendment."
Demonstrating in a public space is one of the ways that citizens can resolve their disputes, Armstrong said.
"Each side makes their case, and then other people of good faith see both sides and choose what side they want to be on," he said. "It’s the only way we can decide these issues. Otherwise, we are not living in a democratic republic anymore. We are living in something else.”
Armstrong said the counter-protesters do not have sufficient evidence to prove that an unborn fetus is not human.
“If they can provide compelling evidence of that, heck, we’d pack up and leave right now,” Armstrong said. “But they don’t have that evidence. All they have is flimsy justifications to justify decapitating and dismembering little human beings. We don’t think that justification is right.”
He said that despite what the counter-protesters may believe, the true purpose of the Genocide Awareness Project is to shed light on the act of violence that abortion is.
On Oct. 18, the University sent an email to the campus community announcing that the Genocide Awareness Project would be demonstrating on campus from Oct. 21 to 23. In the email, administrators said that students who felt negatively impacted by the display could call Counseling and Psychological Services, and that affected faculty and staff could contact the Employee Assistance Program.
To Martin, the fact that this information had to be included in the message points to why the group shouldn't be allowed to demonstrate on campus.
"I think that if the University administration knows that a display is going to be upsetting enough to offer CAPS support to students, then they shouldn't offer their support to the group," Martin said.
