A group of about 40 students gathered Thursday in front of the Auditorium to protest against the poster displays mounted on Farm Lane on Wednesday by MSU Students for Life as part of their initiative, the Genocide Awareness Project.
Protest coordinator and media and information freshman Elise Conklin said the group was not protesting against the opinions behind the campaign, but rather against the use of the posters showing aborted human fetuses.
“Everyone is entitled to their point of view, but it’s about respecting the student body, those who may or may not have mental illnesses,” Conklin said. “The visitors that we have may be looking at the school for prospective college.”
Spanish senior Chelsie Holmes said the main reason she came out to the protest is to stand up for those who were forced to see the posters and may have been emotionally affected by it.
“I basically am just here to support the people who are walking around and had to see this and had no choice in the matter and potentially are harmed by it,” Holmes said.
Holmes criticized the comparison of genocide to abortion, saying it was “immoral and insensitive.”
“It’s the twentieth anniversary of the Rwandan genocide, and there are genocide victims walking around this campus, and there are rape victims walking on this campus, and this a trigger, this could hurt people,” Holmes said.
Professional writing sophomore Madison Page said MSU Students for Life should have considered other ways to convey their point in a better way.
“We wanna really show that this is not right, this is not the right way to voice your opinions about an issue, especially when it’s already as controversial as this,” Page said. “And so we want not only voice our opinions, but show them better way to voice your opinions than using just like scare tactics and disgusting imagery.”
Zoology freshman Alyse Maksimoski said they were an unaffiliated group of students who got together to counter-protest the Genocide Awareness Project initiative.
Maksimoski said one of the goals of the protest was to make a statement that “not all people think like this and that it’s a woman’s choice and it’s a woman’s decision to do what she wants with her own body and they shouldn’t have a say in that.”
