Abortion foes plan campaign - Planned Parenthood calls the caravan's start poorly timed
By Dawson Bell
© 2001 Detroit Free Press

In a move intended to provoke controversy -- and almost certain to succeed -- a California anti-abortion group plans to expand its new shock-advertising campaign to Michigan in coming weeks.

A caravan of trucks displaying enlarged photos of aborted and dismembered fetuses is set to appear on the highways around Detroit and Ann Arbor sometime early in September, said Gregg Cunningham, director of the Center for Bio-Ethical Reform.

The Anaheim-based group's original fleet, usually made up of four 25-to-30-foot-long trucks accompanied by security vehicles, has been touring freeways during rush hour in southern California for about five weeks.

Cunningham said Wednesday that southeast Michigan is among the first areas targeted for expansion because major donors, whom he declined to identify, asked that it be. The national campaign will cost millions of dollars, he said.

The center's national legal counsel, the Thomas More Center for Law and Justice, is based in Ann Arbor. Cunningham said the campaign is designed to reach people who would otherwise be disinclined to "confront the reality of abortion."

"We want to force the debate to occur and focus on the basic reality: Who is the baby, and what is being done to him?" he said.

The photographs depict what the center says are fetuses aborted between 7 and 11 weeks. Emblazoned across the signs is the word "CHOICE," with the center's Web address or phone number at the bottom.

Michigan abortion-rights advocates either could not be reached or declined to comment. But on Wednesday, the Orange County Register quoted Linda Schwarz, cochairwoman of Pro-Choice Orange County, as saying: "It's distasteful and very inappropriate for children to see."

Jon Dunn, a California Planned Parenthood official, told the newspaper the images were inaccurate, which Cunningham denies.

The center's tactics are controversial even among those who share its goals.

Barbara Listing, president of Right to Life of Michigan, said there are divisions within the pro-life movement about whether the use of graphic images is effective.

She declined to criticize the center, but other pro-lifers said they are concerned that its in-your-face style may alienate potential sympathizers.

Cunningham said photographic images have long been a key part of social reform movements, including antislavery, civil rights and child labor fights.

"You have to move beyond the abstract," he said. "Social reform never works if you can't dramatize the injustice."

The mobile billboard project is the second national campaign by the center to bring graphic images of abortion to audiences that haven't sought them. The first is a college campus display called the Genocide Project, which has visited universities nationwide and in Canada. It was displayed at the University of Michigan and Eastern Michigan University last fall, and prompted angry opposition at both campuses.

Andrew Shirvell, a U-M senior and president of Students for Life, said the project gave a tremendous boost to his organization, however. "It raised the issue to a level it has never been before."

Cunningham conceded that taking the images on the road where they can't easily be avoided is potentially more explosive than on campus. The caravan's itinerary is kept secret for security reasons, he said. Its drivers wear body armor and its movements are videotaped.

So far in California, there have been lots of angry gestures, phone calls and e-mails, he said, but no incidents of violence.