Column by Amanda Wallace. Email [email protected].

This past week, abortion detractors have pushed me beyond my previous mode — racy —and into a hard, left-leaning “pro-choicer.”

I have always found those titles to be silly. I am a huge fan of life, and I’m sure the people who find abortion morally abhorrent do not wish for complete fascism. It is only on abortion that we make these grandiose implications about our neighbors.

If I believe in gun rights and wish to have an RPG launcher in my garage, my neighbor might believe me to be crazy, but probably wouldn’t call me a murderer, or claim I was perpetrating genocide.

Genocide is not a word to be bandied around. It is not something you say casually. Genocide is a word you use to describe real monsters: Hitler and Saddam, and those who were involved in the massacres in Bosnia and Rwanda.

If you are a student of history, you’ve read and seen pictures of true horror, true genocide: The man with machete cuts across his face; the Sudanese baby girl being stalked by a vulture as she takes her last breath; the seven mass graves found at the Sobibor death camp; true evil that words are simply incapable of expressing, moments in history where you want to ask “why?” because you never thought your fellow man would be capable of that. That is genocide.

So, with this historical context, how dare anyone call a legally upheld medical procedure that name?

Moral outrage brings out the fighter in us all, but must it be expressed in violent imagery, or in the rhetoric of hate? Does anyone truly expect to change someone’s mind with the picture of a beaten little boy or a woman’s chest ripped open to remove cancerous tunics?

This is not the language of peaceful discourse. This is “the Lady Gaga approach” to politics — I will shock you into paying attention to me. You can’t talk back if I’m screaming over you.

When the disease that killed my grandmother is brought into a fight it has no part in, I am not only taken aback, I am offended on a level so deep it makes me physically ill.

According to the Susan G. Komen site, “the scientific evidence does not support a link between abortion and breast cancer.” Sure, some women who have had abortions now suffer from breast cancer. Some women who eat cereal every morning for breakfast also have suffered from breast cancer.

Causation and correlation are not the same thing. There are no words for a family broken by cancer. It should never be used as political ammunition.

I believe in free speech. Every man is entitled to make himself a fool. The right to free speech should not make a person a beast. I have been told I was going to Hell by preachers who don’t know me from Eve. I have had fliers politely pressed into my hand by well-meaning people that show pictures of baby chicks being debeaked. All of these are things I can live with. When I am visually assaulted on the way to class, I cannot express my anger.

What is the point? Because it is doubtful these images are effective. Shock rarely is. For those that support the cause, their moral outrage is defended. For those that do not, their belief that their opponent is “crazy” is confirmed.

I know they will ultimately be as effective as this column. Because these are the kinds of things where opinions are not changed by screams and lurid, bloody images. They are changed by time.

Long after we are dead, a victor will be declared, and we will not care, and maybe then, we’ll have peace.

Until then, please keep your blood and gore to yourself.