In “celebration” of Respect Life Month, SLU Students for Life has kindly turned our quad in to a graveyard. The Cemetery of the Innocents is a yearly display of wooden crosses, each of which signify a certain number of abortions performed daily. This year the crosses are decorated with colored ribbons which represent the country in which the abortions are performed and proportionally represent pregnancy terminations by nationality. The cemetery, however, is an intentionally misleading display and an incomplete homage to Respect Life Month.

The question of terminating a pregnancy has never been, and never will be, simple enough to carve out of wood. When a woman finds it necessary to make a decision that will profoundly affect her future, she is confronted with more complicated questions than whether she wants children. Resources, timing, those she is dependent upon and those dependent upon her are all substantial and emotional variables that affect her choice. Simplifying this heartbreaking process into a morbid display of loss is ignorant and cruel. Instead of enlightening SLU students on the reality of abortions, the cemetery serves to shame those who have made a very difficult decision.

Similarly, the cemetery is an inadequate tribute to what Respect Life Month should represent. By focusing only on abortion and ignoring the millions of people that die for unjust reasons, Students for Life has created a hierarchy of worthiness. Those who claim to fight for life should be concerned with the causalities of war, capital punishment, starvation and disease, among other things. The cemetery promotes the belief that life is only worth protecting in the womb. Post birth, death begins to lose its sadness.

Next year, Students for Life should hold themselves to a higher standard, one that respects the lives of the women that were forced to make these decisions and one that encompasses the varied and complex instances of loss.

– Written by B*llikens for Choice.