Giant posters of bloody bodies on UF's Plaza of the Americas on Wednesday offered passersby and students eating lunch pictures of what organizers called a new kind of genocide - abortion.
The Center for Bio-Ethical Reform, a national nonprofit education foundation, displayed images of aborted fetuses next to photos from the Holocaust and Rwandan genocide as part of its Genocide Awareness Project.
UF's Pro-Life Alliance sponsored the event.
Student groups advocating abortion rights quietly protested next to the display, offering pamphlets on "abortion myths."
Thomas Clifford, an English senior, said the anti-abortion group had as much right to protest as anyone else, but the display was done in poor taste.
"They're forcing these images upon people who don't want to see them," Clifford said. "I was actually eating as I was walking up, and I couldn't eat anymore."
Saba Rahman, a freshman, said it wasn't fair to equate abortion to past genocides and the lynching of blacks in the 19th and 20th centuries.
"That's not to say abortion isn't tragic, but you're not killing someone because of their race," Rahman said.
Still, Mark Harrington, director of the Center for Bio-Ethical Reform, said his group has changed some minds with its presentations over the years.
At Florida State University, Harrington said one student said his views were changed within 10 minutes of seeing the abortion photos.
"What we're trying to do is plant the seed of thought," he said.
"All this is is a picture of what's legal."
He said Adolf Hitler's persecution of the Jews was legal at the time.
"There's a different motive, but the result is the same," he said.
Shannon Boyer, vice president of the National Organization for Women's UF chapter, said a woman should be able to decide whether to have an abortion without obscene images in her face.
"They're graphic, but any sort of medical procedure is graphic," Boyer said.
