“Free babies,” Lila Rose called to people who passed by Bruin Walk on Monday. “Take a baby.”
Rose and other members of the club Live Action handed out life-size models of a 12-week-old fetus ““ which is about the length of an index finger ““ to educate students about abortion on Monday.
On the 34th anniversary of Roe v. Wade, the club displayed a cemetery of more than 2,000 gravestones in Meyerhoff Park. Each gravestone represented 23,000 abortions that have taken place in the United States since 1973, when the Supreme Court decided in Roe v. Wade to legalize abortion.
In addition to the cemetery display, members of the club passed out fliers featuring facts about abortion and displaying visuals, such as representations of the different stages of a fetus.
“One of the biggest denials of the right to life in our society is the denial of the unborn,” Rose said. “They’re just us at an earlier stage.”
Rose urged students to participate in the club’s cause. “(Students) can join us to be voices for the voiceless,” she said.
But some students who saw the display and read the fliers said they see the benefits of legal abortion.
“I’ve always felt women should have a choice about what to do with their children,” said Melvin Ku, a graduate student in physiological sciences who said he knows many single, young mothers and sees how hard it is for them to raise a child.
“I’ve seen the kinds of circumstances the women are in. I want to wish they have a better situation,” Ku said.
Christina Popa, a leadership team member of the club, said she participated in the event because she believes students should know all sides of the abortion debate. “It’s an important issue students should be more aware of. (They should) at least know what the other side is and learn more about it,” Popa said.
Standing in front of the cemetery display, fourth-year design student Togo Kida said he wasn’t aware the number of abortions in the United States are “so outrageously high.”
“If a woman gets raped, I think the woman has the right to the abortion,” Kida said. “It’s just hard to distinguish the right and wrong reason. Not being able to distinguish that is why the numbers of abortions are so high.”
But for Ngoc-Minh Pham, a third-year English student, abortion should not be an option. “I think pro-life is pro-choice because you choose whether or not to have safe sex, except with rape, which gets into a gray area,” Pham said. “I think this cemetery is a bold statement ““ I definitely stopped and looked at it. If anything, it will gather spectators and that’s a start.”
But others point to the fallibility of birth control as an argument in support of abortion. The most common methods of birth control all do not offer a complete guarantee against pregnancy ““ condom wrappers and oral forms of birth control typically warn users that the product is highly effective but does not offer 100 percent protection.
In addition to aiming to educate students, Live Action members also passed out their first magazine, The Advocate. The magazine will be published quarterly and will contain information about anti-abortion issues.
“I hope people pay attention to The Advocate. This issue has to do with the huge lack of pregnancy support at UCLA,” Rose said. According to The Advocate, UCLA provides no pre-natal care for students, no adoption referral services and no pregnancy support groups.
But according to Lynne Fukumoto, a nurse practitioner, the Ashe Center refers female students who want pre-natal care outside UCLA. If the student wants counseling, she can set up a meeting with a women’s counselor at the student health center on campus.