You can spread your beliefs if you want, but the pictures are completely inappropriate for small children to see. Lots of children found your flyers you passed out in Blacklick today and several have contacted the sheriff’s office about it. You are affecting the children that we chose not to abort with your anti-abortion messages. – Alisa Goins, posted on Created Equal’s Facebook timeline, 6-7-2016
Day Two saw Justice Riders raising the profile of abortion victims with Created Equal’s Operation Overpass and Killers Among Us projects. The former included large banners displayed over multiple overpasses throughout Columbus, Ohio. The latter sent our team pounding the pavement to distribute flyers around the neighborhood of an abortionist, making known his vile vocation before his community.
Some residents disturbed by flyers left on their doorsteps expressed ire on our Facebook timeline. One of the threads common to nearly every raging remark? Fury that young children could see the photo of an aborted baby on the flyer.
Let’s leave aside for a moment our collective experience that children are not traumatized by photos of aborted babies—any distress we’ve observed seems to be a result of children seeing their parents’ anger in response to the pictures. What does this concern for children reveal about society? That we have a common impulse to treat younger humans with greater care and protection.
Why are we more enraged to hear of a father abusing his eight-year-old daughter than the same father physically assaulting his adult daughter? Isn’t it because the former is even more defenseless and needy as a result of her younger age?
Or people often ask, “You really think a pregnant twelve-year-old should be forced to carry a baby?” This, too, is telling. Why did they say “twelve-year-old” and not “thirty-five-year-old”? Because they know what we know: that the younger the human, the greater our interest in securing their protection.
We feel concern for young born children—whether they be in our homes, on the street, or under the yoke of evil men.
But who is even younger? The fifteen-week-old fetus who will be dismembered piece by piece by might of the forceps. The eight-week-old embryo whose body will be ripped apart as she’s sucked through a cannula. Shouldn’t we have at least the same concern for her?
If the livid recipients of our flyers truly have great concern for young children, why isn’t their response compassion for the baby seen on the flyer?
Consider the rest of Ms. Goins’s comment:
I do not necessarily believe in abortion either, but sometimes there are medical reasons or other good reasons it needs to be done and we don’t need to traumatize all the children that were not aborted. If you really cared about human life, then erase these images from your flyers.
Ms. Goins’s support of abortion—in spite of a tepid protest to the contrary—reveals a deeply-seated prejudice by which humans are divided into two basic categories: those worthy of our care and protection and those who are not.
Truly, we share the concern of these frustrated Blacklick residents for those who are young. But until they are willing to open their minds to the plight of children even younger than their own, we will be divided by a wall—a wall of ageism.