the 2,400 babies aborted last year
in Escambia County, Florida
Posted on 03/18/2003 9:11:15 AM PST by freepatriot32
More than 2,000 wooden crosses intended for a pro-life demonstration were stolen on the night of January 21st from a vehicle owned by the president of the Oregon State University College Republicans. The crosses were part of a demonstration to commemorate the 30th anniversary of the Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision which prohibited the states from passing laws criminalizing abortion.
College Republican President Chad Robinson had worked with members of his organization for over 18 hours to cut and assemble the crosses for the protest. It took members an additional one-and-a-half hours to pack them into his pick-up truck, which he parked in a lot the night before the Roe anniversary. When he returned to the vehicle early the next morning, he found only two crosses left, one in the bed of the truck and the other laid across the hood.
“Despite the fact that some have resorted to illegal and criminal tactics to squelch our message, we will not be intimidated and will not give in to their discriminatory actions,” Robinson told the Daily Barometer, the OSU student paper.
In spite of the theft, the protest was able to proceed as scheduled due to the fact that approximately 1,000 additional wooden crosses had been kept in a separate location. In all, the College Republicans had planned to place 3,500 crosses into the ground of the Memorial Union Quadrangle at OSU, one for each of the 3,615 abortions that are estimated to occur daily in the United States. They were forced to make their statement with 2,000 crosses less than intended.
Campus police have no suspects in the crime, which incurred monetary damages of approximately $450, though the College Republicans report receiving a number of calls and letters requesting the cancellation of their protest in the days prior to the event. Robinson did note that his organization has generally had genial relations with pro-choice groups on campus, although the symbolism created by leaving one cross on his truck’s hood led him to think that the theft was related to the crosses’ intended purpose.
Despite a cold and rainy day, the College Republicans set up the remaining crosses on the 22nd as planned, marking each row with a sign denoting it as a “cemetery of the unborn.” A number of abortion-rights demonstrators showed up to counter-protest. One large sign noted a World Health Organization statistic that 78,000 women die each year from unsafe abortions and asked onlookers to consider each cross as representative not of aborted children, but rather of 40 women who had died as a result of abortion procedures in the previous year.
The day’s activism wasn’t limited to the protest on the Quad. A full-page ad supporting abortion rights and costing $668.25 appeared in the day’s edition of the Daily Barometer. The National Organization for Women paid half the cost of the ad and support from Planned Parenthood and Students for Choice helped to fund the remainder.
The College Republicans declared the demonstration a success, and an editorial in the Daily Barometer agreed. “Those who trailed College Republican President Chad Robinson in the wee hours of the morning, who spent several hours unloading the thousands of crosses and who ultimately hoped that these actions would quell what they felt was an unwelcome display for OSU students likely felt the wind flee from their bloated sails,” the paper’s editors declared
Ten-to-one it was members of the "Abortion Party", formerly known as the Democrat Party*
Motto of Boxer, Dodd, et al: "All abortions, all the time"
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