Cambridge students have condemned anti-abortion protests held on Market Street last Saturday (18/05), claiming such events “should not be allowed”.

The members of the Centre for Bio-Ethical Reform UK (CBRUK) set up large display boards with graphic imagery of aborted foetuses and handed out leaflets to passers-by as they made efforts to engage them in discussion.

CBRUK is an anti-abortion organisation which has sparked controversy in the past for its use of photos of aborted fetuses and comparisons of abortion to genocide. The organisation has been holding multiple protests in Cambridge and other UK cities in recent months.

Beth Davey, the organiser of the protest and the Field Administrator for CBRUK, told Varsity: “We are here to educate people on the humanity of life in the womb and the reality of what we call abortion.”

Cambridge students watching stated that they were “disgusted” by the protests. One argued that CBRUK “should not be allowed to do this,” and suggested it is “not okay that they can come into the city”.

In an argument between CBRUK members and a group of Cambridge students, an anti-abortion campaigner told a student that people would look back on the period of legal abortion in the UK since 1967 in the same manner that modern Germany looks back on Nazi Germany.

The campaigners argued against abortion with the claim that the abortion of foetuses is comparable to the murder of living adults. They refuted the suggestion that poverty or rape were sufficient reasons to seek the termination of a pregnancy.

Another student told Varsity: “As a survivor I think it is deplorable to accost people on the street and tell people who have potentially experienced sexual violence or rape that they should be forced to carry a child to term.”

A group of onlooking Cambridge students clapped and cheered when the protesters packed up and left Market Street at around 3 pm. They also ripped up and disposed of the leaflets which the campaigners handed to them.

In March, the group held a similar demonstration outside St John’s, which students of the College slammed for its “deliberately divisive rhetoric”.

A spokesperson from CBRUK told Varsity: “If abortion is such a noble choice, why do its supporters get so angry when it is seen? We don’t protest abortion; abortion protests itself the moment it is exposed. It undeniably ends a human life; even honest pro-abortion advocates acknowledge this. Yet they exploit women by hiding this truth from them.”

“Abortion as a response to the evil of rape is despicably cruel to the mother who deserves compassion. If we wouldn’t justify killing a born child because they might grow up in poverty or have a rapist father, why would those same reasons justify killing an unborn child?” they continued.

“How is pleading arbitrary differences between a child before and after birth by the pro-abortion lobby any different from the dehumanising tactics of the pro-slavery lobby to justify that atrocity? We have a strict code of conduct for volunteers that would not permit the alleged comment to be made,” they said.