If you walked past Lowry Mall on April 23 or 24 you saw them: very graphic images of mutilated babies, aborted fetuses and miscarriages.

Even if you didn’t walk past Lowry Mall, you heard about the display, set up by The Center for Bio-Ethical Reform’s campus outreach team and sponsored by the new student organization Students for Life, that garnered so much attention and controversy.

We fully recognize that it is not our place to tell a student organization how to function, nor is it our place to tell the student body what the correct response to such a display is. But given the rippling effect the exhibit, a part of CBR’s Genocide Awareness Project, caused on our campus, we felt it necessary to give our opinion and recommendations.

First and foremost, as a newspaper and a member of the Fourth Estate, we firmly stand by the principle of freedom of speech. The CBR group had every right to express its opinion and anti-abortion message. Whether Lowry Mall was the correct venue to do so is another discussion. We question how exactly a group planning to present such potentially controversial material to the public was given a permit to do so in a heavily trafficked, popular and central location on campus.

In the end, however, whether they had set up in Speakers Circle or Lowry Mall, it is inarguable that CBR was exercising its freedom of speech to present its viewpoint on an issue.

That being said, we fully disagree with the manner in which that viewpoint was presented.

We think students have no right to get angry at the fact the group was allowed to voice its argument, but we think students have every right to be enraged at the fact the argument consisted of such disturbing images.

Most severe of all was the connection the group made between abortion and genocide. They treated the two as if they are one and the same – and they are not. Doing so is an extreme offense to survivors of real genocides like the Holocaust. The MU Jewish Student Organization said it perfectly in an email: “Students for Life corrupt their own cause as well as history when they hijack this painful historical event for their own propaganda purposes.”

That’s where we would like to speak to Students for Life directly and say that you are hurting your own cause by creating false associations of abortion with genocide and by posting what you should know are potentially triggering images. If your goal is to “educate” students on your pro-life perspective, you’re not going to have much luck when you offend them right from the start.

The highly controversial manner in which Students for Life and the Center for Bio-Ethical Reform approached the public cast a shadow over the other student groups like Sustain Mizzou and the Freedom Movement who were soliciting students in an approachable, educational manner.

In the end, freedom of speech triumphs, but the end does not justify the means. If Students for Life, or any other group for that matter, wants to spread a message to the student body, it must be in a proper manner that promotes intelligent, respectful discussion and not offensive, distracting controversy.