See the photos

[Loves Us] -- I praise your work with the truck pictures... I also would like to suggest that you consider smaller pictures that we ‘civilians’ could put on our cars just like the new advertising program now being done. I'll bet you could have millions of pictures on our cars in a few months. Once again, thanks for your service.

[Loves Us Not] -- Since you don’t have the good sense to mind your own business, don’t be surprised when the citizens of the Bay Area treat your disgusting convoy like the evil, wicked, un-American, lying propaganda it is. I plan to make extra donations to NARAL, CARAL and Planned Parenthood, aside from my normal giving, during the period when your Convoy of Female Oppression is in the Bay Area. Freedom of choice is legal in this country and I and many others aim to make sure it stays that way. Your organization is not better than the Taliban. You seek to oppress women through attempting to legislate your repressive morality, just like the Taliban. Your operatives know that if you control a country’s women, that you control everything through fear. That’s how the Taliban did it, and that’s exactly what your organization seeks to achieve.

CBR note: It is ‘evil, wicked, and un-American’ to kill babies, not to show them. It is ‘lying propaganda’ to portray abortion as a morally neutral way of resolving crisis pregnancies. Finally, the term ‘Taliban’ has become the latest ad hominem with which the political left seeks to change the subject when caught defending the indefensible.

[Loves Us] -- I saw the pictures and they are so heart-sickening, but I and others need to see and really know what happens during an abortion. I have never seen such graphic pictures. Thank you for all you do.

[Loves Us Very Not] -- May the scum suck … [expletive] of your organization rot in their own (and very personal) … [expletive] hell for the trauma my wife has experienced. Should I meet one of your ‘trucks’ on the road, I do hope they are ‘well protected’. There are folks out there who might be itching to play a game of hard-ball your drivers might find ‘interesting’.

CBR note: More threats of violence. People who use violence to eliminate annoying unborn babies may also be capable of using it to eliminate annoying pro-life activists. That is why we wear body armor and travel in the company of armed, off-duty police officers.

[Loves Us] -- [From someone identifying herself as a 17 year old female.] At first I was pro-choice but after viewing [the photos on] this Website am having doubts. This Website change [sic] my way of thinking.

[Loves Us Not] -- To whichever fanatic that is running the asylum, I feel that your ‘choice’ campaign is terrible. Nobody needs to see those pictures, especially children. How does one explain that image to a child? How did you explain it to your child? But then again, you are just raising another lunatic for your asylum. Now, you ‘pro-life’ people preach that abortion is killing, but yet you ‘pro-life’ people blow up abortion clinics and shoot the doctors that run them. And just how is that ‘pro-life’? But you fanatics don't think about that sort of thing, do you???? You don't see ‘pro-choice’ people going around blowing up your disgusting trucks, do you??? But then again, you would probably like that to happen so you could add that to your advertising campaign. Why don't you all get at least half a brain and realize just how inappropriate your trucks are and take them off the streets.

CBR note: You explain an aborted baby image to a child in the same way you explain images of airliners exploding into skyscrapers. You reassure the child that you will protect him from harm. You explain that sometimes people do evil things, but violence against innocent victims is never acceptable behavior. You emphasize that love is better than hate and generosity is better than selfishness. Unless you think Peter Jennings, Dan Rather and Tom Brokaw are "lunatics" for showing horrifying images of terror to children, your view of our activities is curious indeed. Every week millions of children see shocking terror pictures on the covers of news magazines in the check-out lines at supermarkets, etc. Are the editors of these publications "lunatics?" When you accuse us of complicity in attacks on abortionists and their facilities you are associating yourself with the racists who disingenuously blamed Martin Luther King for the violence of the Black Panthers. It is a crude attempt to change the subject. It didn't work when the Klan did it, and it doesn't work when it is pulled by pro-aborts. Every successful campaign of social reform has historically been waged by activists who publicly displayed horrifying pictures to dramatize injustice. They made injustice impossible for a complicit culture to camouflage. Remember the disturbing photos used by the civil rights movement? Remember anti-Vietnam War activists and shocking imagery from the battlefield? ‘Inappropriate’ is an inappropriate term for mainstream tactics of social reform -- tactics which will always be normative behavior for political activists.

FORCE-FEEDING FACTS

The San Francisco Chronicle, November 24, 2001, in an article entitled “Abortion Foes Plan A Convoy, Pictures Of Fetuses Displayed On Trucks,” also made our point that the trucks make abortion impossible to dodge. The article begins with the statement “This is not the usual -- nor avoidable -- display occasionally seen outside a few Planned Parenthood facilities in the Bay Area.” That is the very complaint offered by abortion provider Jane Gerhardt of the National Women’s Health Organization. In a September television news interview on Channel 6 in Orlando, FL she said of our trucks:

If they had picked a hall and sat down and said we are offering information to people who want to come – fine, that way people would have a choice. People on I-4 had no choice.

This, of course, is what racists told the civil rights activists who wanted to stage a protest march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama in 1965. No one much cared what they had to say as long as they stayed in the black church and didn’t bother any white people. Effective reform never begins until people are bothered enough to finally engage. Supporters of injustice will always try to keep reformers from confronting those who are indifferent.

CHILDREN

The Orange County Register, July 25, 2001, carried a story called "Abortion Foes Drive Point Home" with a subhead which read "Trucks Emblazoned With Graphic Images Of Fetuses Shock Some Commuters." “It's distasteful and very inappropriate for children to see,” said Linda Schwarz, co-chairwoman of Pro-Choice Orange County [California]. “It's a low kind of tactic.”

The Orlando Sentinel, in its September 6, 2001, issue, reported a story under the headline “Anti-Abortion Convoy Cruises I-4 Today,” in which abortionist Gerhardt offers another complaint:

‘Little kids [in cars] will see this’ said Jane Gerhardt of the National Women’s Health Organization, Orlando abortion clinic.

* * *

A spokeswoman for the Catholic Diocese of Orlando's Respect Office said the church does not support the tour.

The Oracle (Univ. South Florida) September 5, 2001, in an article headlined "Fetus Truck Tour Rolls Into Tampa" reports:

Eddie Gilley, area director for the Baptist Christian Ministries at USF said he is a supporter of the pro-life movement but doesn't agree with the tactics being employed. He said the fact that young children riding on the roadways may come in contact with the pictures is disturbing.

* * *

Gilley said the streets are not the place for such a display but a college campus is a good forum for the debate.

It is sad but true that the church works as hard as Planned Parenthood to cover up the horror of abortion. But concerning children, our pictures hurt the feelings of born children and save the lives of unborn children everywhere they are displayed. For that reason, CBR plans truck routes which consciously avoid elementary school, daycare centers, playgrounds, etc. There is no public forum, however, that is not occasionally visited by children. Saying we can’t show these pictures anywhere that the occasional child might inadvertently see them is tantamount to saying we can’t show them anywhere that large numbers of adults are likely to see them. That is a double standard to which we will not submit. We care very much about the feelings of born children but we care more about the lives of unborn children. We are more pro-life than pro-feelings.

RATIONALE

The pro-aborts have framed the abortion issue in terms of “choice.” We must reframe it as a careful consideration of what is being chosen. Public opinion surveys reveal that only a small minority of Americans support “pregnancy termination” in the second and third trimesters – especially if performed by “partial-birth” abortion. A large majority, however, supports a right of abortion if committed in the first trimester of pregnancy. This fact is problematic from a pro-life perspective because The Centers For Disease Control report that some 90% of abortions are committed in the first three months of pregnancy.

These same surveys also disclose that public support for early abortion derives from the inaccurate perception that the first trimester baby is a mere “blob of tissue.” In contrast, most Americans see the mid and late-term fetus as a real “baby” whose level of gestational development entitles it to rights of personhood. It is also clear that few Americans believe a suction abortion to be the moral equivalent of a “partial-birth abortion.” We, therefore, conclude that it is vital to convince the public that the first trimester baby is as fully entitled to rights of personhood as a more mature fetus and that even an early suction abortion is as indefensible an act of violence as any “partial-birth” abortion. Extensive focus group research has proved conclusively that our pictures are the most means by which to achieve that goal.

The problem isn’t merely that most people don’t know any of this. It is that they don’t want to know it. It’s like the old joke about the pollster who asked a respondent which is the greater problem, “ignorance or indifference.” The interviewee said “I don’t know and I don’t care.” Concerning abortion, that sort of denial can only be penetrated with pictures.

For the first time in recent history, political conservatives are using shocking pictures to reform an unjust status quo which is being defended by political liberals. Our trucks are not the solution but they can make the solution possible. Until most Americans are convinced that early abortion is an act of violence which kills a baby, few will boycott businesses which support abortion, few will support pro-life candidates and few will take their crisis pregnancy to the crisis pregnancy center instead of the abortion clinic.

SEND HELP

The Reader’s Digest, November, 2001, in an article called “Please Don’t Call Me Mommy,” said the following concerning fundraising:

During the last 15 years, the number of non-profit groups competing for donations has doubled to more than 750,000 says Michael Nilsen, public affairs manager at the Association of Fundraising Professionals.

Needless to say, the vast majority of those non-profit’s are pulling donations away from the unborn. National Public Radio station KPCC in Los Angeles reported during its “Morning Edition” program on December 10, 2001 that the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation had just contributed a quarter of a billion dollars to a group called Conservation International -- to save the environment. If only wealthy pro-life Christians could be persuaded to send that kind of money to pro-life groups – to save the unborn. It seems the secular world cares more about the environment than the church cares about the babies. And so it has always been.

On the eve of His crucifixion, Christ was moved to repeatedly exhort all but one of His disciples to remain awake while He prayed in the garden at Gethsemane. St. Thomas More observes that the only one of the twelve who was not asleep was Judas, the one who was serving Satan. He was wide awake. He was the energetic, self-starting, risk-taking servant of evil – while the church slept. How little things have changed.

Perhaps that is why, as pro-life groups struggle, The Chicago Tribune, October 31, 2001, quoted William Lutz, spokesman for the National Abortion and Reproductive Rights Action League (NARAL) as boasting that “The pro-choice community was very motivated [after September 11th] and fundraising has actually exceeded our goals.” NARAL goes on to exault that their donations are running 10% ahead of projections.

Abortion is happening with the permission of the church. The church is permitting to happen a genocide which God has given His people the where-with-all to stop. You, faithful reader, are among the few who claim Christ's name and also stand up for His little ones. The burden to fight abortion, therefore, falls disproportionately on you. Mark 12:42, describes Christ's observation of a poor widow contributing her "mite." In addition to seeing what she gave, He paid careful attention to what she kept. It is our prayer that you will keep as little as you must to give as much as you can.