I have been insanely busy for the past couple weeks, mostly building up to the Cornell Coalition for Life’s big display of the semester. Because of our ridiculously low membership and budget, we can really only do one big thing each semester. This time, we decided to create the Cemetery of the Innocents on Cornell’s Arts Quad.

The display consists of 370 small American flags, each representing 10 abortions for a total of approximately 3,700 abortions in America every day - and that’s the low end of the estimates. Our goal in bringing the Cemetery to Cornell was to raise awareness and give students a better perspective about the actual numbers of abortions every day.

Abortion advocates would like people to believe that they want abortion to be “safe, legal, and rare.” But only one of those adjectives is honest - legal. Abortion is not safe - for the mother or the child - and it is most definitely not rare. Do they try to make it safe? No, they allow - encourage, excuse, ignore - abortionists to provide their services in the filthiest of the filthiest clinics. Do they try to make it rare? No. They believe that it is a woman’s right to choose in any and all situations, at each and every stage of pregnancy. Rarity is the least of their concerns.

With that in mind, CCFL’s Cemetery was incredibly successful. It was also incredibly stressful to organize, but ultimately it was worth it. A surprising number of students, faculty, and staff made statements like, “You guys are doing a good thing here,” or “This is something this campus really needs to see,” or simply, “Thank you.”

On the other side, I was equally surprised that the pro-abortion crowd didn’t make more of a showing. We had a few immature people rip up our quarter-cards or brochures right after we handed them out, but that’s not really a big deal. The first explosion was around 1PM (the display was from 8AM-4PM). A girl came over and screamed at us for a solid 30 minutes, dropping the f-bomb every other word, asking us insane questions, refusing to let us answer, and then screaming at us for not answering. Eventually she walked away, with the promise that she would bring her own sign back!

Haha, sure enough, at about 2PM she comes back with one of her SAGE (Students Acting for Gender Equality, or more acurately yet less officially Students Against Gestating Embryos) cohorts with a big sloppy sign that reads “These people believe if you are RAPED or a victim of INCEST you should still NOT be able to have a CHOICE.” Her buddy had pieces of paper that said, “We believe women can think independently. Pro-choice does NOT mean pro-murder.” She then proceeds to stand in the middle of our display quite stubbornly. I walked over to her and told her that technically, CCFL had reserved the entire Arts Quad and we had the right to kick her off. However, in the name of dialogue I was willing to let them remain - so long as they moved to another part of the Quad, perhaps across the sidewalk. After a short staredown and one more threat to call the CU Police, she moved. That was about as exciting as it got.

Here are a few pictures of the display:

(the front of the display - I can’t get it on this page without it being huge, clicking it should provide a larger picture)

(sign explaining the display)

(the other side of the display with a sign from the American Life League)

(our SAGE friend)

It was a long day, to say the least.

Update: Haha, I just noticed that they must have originally misspelled “Believe” because the “E” is pretty squished in there. Smooooth. And this is from the girl who during her 30 minute, f-bomb littered rant, asked me and my friends if we went to Cornell. When we said yes and asked why she wanted to know, she said it was because she thought Cornellian women were intelligent, but apparently not! Haha… apparently not.