Posted on 11/28/2001 2:48:37 PM PST by Caleb1411
At 6:15 a.m. in an industrial park in central Los Angeles, a plain-looking warehouse is unlocked. Beyond the iron gates and surveillance camera, another iron gate leads to a truck yard, which leads to the giant doors. Inside, the trucks are warmed up. A few more people show up. Some are staff, some are volunteers and two of them are off-duty police officers who will escort the trucks.
The reason for all the security is apparent when you look at the trucks. Photographs of aborted fetuses, blown up to billboard size, decorate each side of the bed of every truck. The word "Choice" in quotation marks and a web address loom over the photos. Some of the babies are juxtaposed against a dime as big as their entire body. Every working day, five days a week, since June, these trucks have been on the freeways of Los Angeles turning heads for three hours as they drive through morning traffic.
The trucks are the latest weapon of the Center for Bio-Ethical Reform, a non-profit pro-life group dedicated to getting the public to face the issue they love to avoid. Its founder and director, Greg Cunningham, briefs the crew before leaving on today's run. Using a large map, he reveals his plan. Today they will follow a loop that begins on the 605 North to 60 East to 57 North, to 210 West to 134 West, to 405 South to the 10 East to 5 South and back to 605 South. "We will drive this loop ad nauseam -- that is, until every driver that has seen us is nauseated!" Cunningham jokes. The session ends with a brief prayer. At 6:40 a.m., everyone boards the trucks.
Riders wears body armor -- a 50 pound, bullet-proof SWAT vest with steel panels on all four sides of the torso. Each vest has pepper spray in its pocket. Helmets are located under the seats, just in case. "The California Highway Patrol turned down our application to armor-plate the cabs," explained Cunningham. "The windows are not bulletproof, but they are coated with mylar film, which can stop a brick. We don't put our people in harm's way for the purpose of getting beaten up."
A security car, outfitted like a police car, follows the convoy of trucks, keeping lanes clear behind them and making sure no one can stalk the convoy upon return to the warehouse. The security car and the trucks are equipped with video cameras that document all surrounding activity on each trip. Each member of the convoy communicates by radio. "Violence against pro-lifers is under-reported because a lot of pro-life activists just don't think the police will do anything about it," explained Cunningham, "and frequently they won't do anything about it. It's harder to get district attorneys to prosecute it and it's harder to get judges to find people guilty for it or penalize them significantly. [Yet] a bogus allegation of an assault against a pro-abort is likely to land a pro-lifer in jail."
During the early part of the trip, the trucks are going against the commute. Stalled traffic on the other side of Highway 60 cannot miss the message on each truck. The trucks move at 45 mph, the minimum legal speed on California's highways. As he drives, Cunningham explains their mission. "The truck campaign is an outgrowth of the [pro-life] Genocide Awareness Project, which involves the outdoor display of large photo murals on university campuses. We've now been on 33 public campuses all over the country. Probably three quarters of a million students have seen these pictures now.
"The campus project resulted from a fairly sophisticated analysis we had done on the unchanging principles of social reform, going back 150 years or more. We've examined every movement from the abolition of child labor, the abolition of slavery, to the civil rights movement and the anti-Vietnam war movement. Successful social reformers invariably used horrifying pictures to dramatize injustice and to confront the culture and prick the collective conscience. But since the reformers were social liberals, they found sympathetic allies in the press, who would broadcast these photos. Clearly, the press, if not hostile, is certainly not sympathetic to our [pro-life] point of view. So we had to come up with a new mass medium, a way of putting these pictures into the heads of people who are never going to see them in the media. The freeway system is built for transportation, but it could be appropriated for educational purposes. Commutes are getting longer and freeways are getting more crowded each year and you basically have a captive audience of people who can't change the channel and can't turn the page when they see us."
Cunningham's voice is earnest, steady and gentle. "When I am asked a question on talk-radio, two or three words into my answers, everyone starts shouting me down. When I was on the Leslie Marshall show, she got so angry with me that she hung up on me. I was supposed to come on at six in the evening on the Brian Whittaker show; but he kept me on hold until six-thirty, just beating the heck out of us, criticizing, misstating facts, and taking hostile calls, not letting me off hold into the conversation; so I finally hung up. Without realizing it, these talk show hosts who are so vehemently opposed to the truck project are making our point, which is, you can't hang up on the trucks. You can't put them on hold and you can't shout them down.
"The trucks are in your face," said Cunningham. "That's critical, because another aspect of social reform that we identified was massive societal denial among people complicit in injustice or complacent in response to the injustice. They felt guilty about it, and, as a consequence, didn't want to know more about the injustice than they already knew. So if you want to teach people who don't want to learn, you've got to develop methodologies that don't rely on the consent of the person you are trying to educate. Once you look at the pictures, they are in your head and you're never going to get them out. Every time you hear the word 'abortion' thereafter, instead of an abstraction, you are going to see a dead baby, tortured to death, bloody, sickening. Over time, if you have a functioning conscience, these images will begin to change the way you feel, think and ultimately, behave."
"Those who shout me down are foils for me," mused Cunningham, "because they are demonstrating their fear of my answer. These trucks have created pandemonium on the other side, because there is nothing they can do to stop this. If they respond violently, they draw more attention to us and discredit themselves. If they take us to court, they create a forum for the project. It's like the dilemma of an animal caught in a leg-hold trap; the harder it pulls, the deeper the teeth sink into its leg. The pro-aborts don't know whether to ignore this or resist it, so the only semi-coherent criticism we hear, besides 'You're upsetting children,' is that the pictures aren't real. The liberals know that if the pictures are real, they're dead. There's no moral defense for their position that's in any way convincing, so they resort to the same tactics that neo-Nazi skinheads employ when confronted with evidence of the Holocaust. They just say the pictures are fake and it never happened."
Cunningham recognizes that some people will never be convinced. "This project only works with those who have a functioning conscience. This is an educational, not a spiritual, project. A person who understands the magnitude of the evil that abortion represents and endorses it nonetheless is not ignorant but is morally bankrupt. I'm not aiming this at the 20 percent of the population that is irremediably evil, but at the, maybe, 60 percent that's just confused about all of this or believes abortion is the lesser of two evils because they don't know how evil it actually is. Evil that remains invisible quickly becomes tolerable. It's imperative that you make it real to people."
The unwanted nature of the message is what Cunningham believes gives it power. "That creates a great deal of anger, but Martin Luther King created a great deal of anger, the anti-Vietnam war movement created a great deal of anger. Earth First creates a great deal of anger. Social reformers don't care what people think of them, but what people think of injustice. I'm willing to get people angry at me to get them angry at abortion."
Though a conservative, Cunningham does not spare conservatives in his prescription to end abortion. The principal reason the pro-life movement has made so little progress over the last 30 years is because social reform is new to conservatives," he said. "Conservatives, to their discredit, are frequently defenders of an unjust status quo and it's political liberals who usually try to effect reform. Conservatives mistakenly imagine that in order to be effective, you have to be liked. At some level, they just can't deal with disapproval the way liberals can." Conservatives are "beaten down by liberals who are very clever at identity politics. 'If you're against abortion, you're against women.' That's an intellectually dishonest way of changing the subject; to discredit your opponent because you don't want to deal with his argument. None of those tactics work in the face of a dead baby picture in your windshield on the way to work. Is this a baby or isn't it? Is this an act of violence or isn't it? Should this be lawful or not?
"The pro-life movement doesn't have a clue as to how to change peoples' understandings of the facts of abortion. They just want to shout conclusions and opinions at people. What's really bizarre is that mainstream pro-life organizations and the Church are working harder than Planned Parenthood to suppress the best evidence we have -- photo evidence -- that abortion is an act of violence and it does kill a baby."
Cunningham is very disappointed with the efforts -- or lack thereof -- of Catholic bishops to fight abortion. "The U.S. bishops just bought an ad campaign whose operating principle is subtlety. During the Vietnam War, the working press had historically low approval ratings because people were angry that night after night the television showed the police chief of Saigon blowing out the brains of a Vietcong suspect, or naked children whose clothing was burned off by napalm running toward the camera. Those photos lodged in the public mind and gradually eroded public support for U.S. involvement in the war. The press was willing to take the hit. The protesters were willing to accept persecution. They had their eyes focused on a public policy objective and you can't win that on the cheap.
"But the bishops want to win this on the cheap," continued Cunningham. "They are laboring under the misconception that to be effective you have to be liked. They need to go back and read the prophets of the Old Testament and note the consistency with which they were persecuted and even martyred. Jesus said, 'If they persecute me, they will persecute you.' Well, they're not persecuting the bishops because the bishops have been very careful to avoid any behavior that invites persecution.
"The National Council of Catholic Bishops is releasing these insipid, 'subtle' ad campaigns that are designed to be just pro-life enough to mollify the 20 percent of the Church that is comprised of traditional orthodox Catholics, but not pro-life enough to antagonize the 20 percent of parishioners who are hard-core pro-aborts and are constantly trying to throttle and thwart pro-life activism in the Church. So the 60 percent who are in the middle on all of this are just abandoned to twist in the wind. It's the attempt to create the impression that NCCB is serious about abortion, when they're really only doing half-measured, conscience-salving stuff that is so dishonest.
Cunningham is equally disappointed with Evangelicals in the fight for life. He believes both Catholics and Protestants are losing an opportunity and uses the term "the Church" as a reference to all denominations. "The bishops are wrong about this," he said. "It may be that when you offend people they will close their ears, but I'm not speaking to them. I care what they do with their eyes and they can't close their eyes on the freeway without having a wreck. We are a visual culture. So many people in the pro-life movement learned in an age when people read and listened. That's over. Kids learn today by looking, and people my age, middle-aged people, don't get that. The bishops and Respect Life coordinators don't get that, and that's one of the reasons we're losing this thing. Gut decision makers tend to be voyeuristic; so if that's where the culture is, that's where we've got to engage them. The bishops are just bureaucrats. If the bishops were where the pope is in the fight against abortion, this fight would be over.
"This slaughter is occurring with our permission. The Church is permitting an atrocity to happen that God has given us the resources to stop. That's why the Church has blood on its hands in a very real sense. When Jesus commanded us show our love for God by obeying His commandments, he wasn't just talking about prohibitions against doing evil, He was talking as well about our affirmative duty to intervene on behalf of those who are being victimized by injustice. That's what the parable of the Good Samaritan is about and it's that affirmative duty that the Church is failing to discharge. Even while the Church mumbles platitudes about abortion being law, you show me your checkbook and I'll show you what you're serious about. From that perspective, the Church is hardly serious about abortion. All 'peace and justice' issues are irrelevant to dead babies. Illiteracy, homelessness, poverty, disease, hunger are absolutely irrelevant to a dead baby. Abortion is a threshold sin. It's a foundational evil."
As we turn on the 210 and enter the San Gabriel Valley, traffic gets heavier. As we get closer to Pasadena, the cars start getting more expensive. Although no one is making obscene gestures at us today - otherwise a frequent occurrence -- many people are glaring or staring at the trucks. Passengers in cars point and seem to be having animated discussions. "When we are in Orange County and the Inland Empire, we get looks of stunned disbelief," said Cunningham. "Some people will attempt to cut us off or break into the convoy. They'll do that when they haven't seen the police car behind us. We'll see more aggressive driving the closer we get to West L.A. That's where the cultural elites are.
"Sometimes we'll go into Malibu and Topanga Canyon and that's where the studio bigwigs are. You'll start really seeing the obscene gestures and scowls and frowns. They're scandalized because they regard these areas as their domain and we're violating the sanctity of their liberal environs by bringing the truth of abortion to Malibu."
To prevent legal harassment, the project keeps two public interest law firms on retainer: the Life Legal Defense Foundation and the Thomas More Center. "We involve counsel in the planning of everything we do, from the conceptual level all the way through implementation," said Cunningham. "We structure our activities to give us maximum litigation advantage and our adversaries the minimum of openings to harass us in court. In the eleven years the Center for Bio-Ethical Reform has been doing its work, we have not been sued once. We are easily the most aggressive pro-life organization in the country. We've only sued someone else once; we brought a federal lawsuit against Indiana University last year and forced a settlement on them that allows us to display our Genocide Awareness Project at a very prominent location on their campus."
In spite of the "in your face" approach of this project, Cunningham denounces all pro-life violence. Still, Cunningham thinks the pro-life movement has not been all that violent. "Look at the history of social reform," said Cunningham, "and note the thousands of bombings and riots and injuries and arrests and murders (especially during the civil rights movement and anti-Vietnam war movement). Compare that to the pro-life movement, where only seven lives have been lost in 30 years, with only a tiny fraction of bombings and arsons and virtually no riots. To suggest that the pro-life movement has been violent is preposterous. There were more people killed during a few days of rioting in the Rodney King matter in Los Angeles than have been killed in the entire history of the pro-life movement -- not only in this country, but worldwide.
The Genocide Awareness Project is funded by donations. "Ironically, much of our work is being funded by people in the southeastern United States. There are some enlightened donors there who believe the best way to fight abortion in Kentucky is by funding pro-life activism in Southern California because California is such a trend-setting state. If you're able to make a dent in public opinion here, the theory is that the influence that the activism creates will spread to other parts of the country. Almost all of the funding has come from private individuals and almost none of it is institutional money." What is Cunningham's goal should the funding continue to increase? "Expansion to more cities," he said.
A former state legislator, justice department official, and assistant U.S. attorney, Cunningham, 54, says something deeper keeps him doing pro-life work. "I sat in the U.S. Attorney's office in Los Angeles," said Cunningham, "and every week watched 25 or 30 resumés come across my desk from people at very good law firms and from very good law schools; day by day it became clearer to me that any one of these people could do my job at least as well as I, and some of them better. But none of them would be willing to fight the greatest moral evil the world has ever seen. I thought to myself, 'I'm going to have to stand before the judgment seat of Christ and explain what I was doing while the sewers of our cities were running red with the blood of our children.'"
"I don't understand Christians who agonize about being in the will of God and then dedicate their lives to doing the work that the pagans are perfectly willing to do! Christians want to live a 'normal life' and the 'American Dream,' but that notion would have been absolutely anathema to firstcentury Christians. I admit, I'm a materialistic person. I used to have a private plane. I had a Rolex and drove a Porsche, and I miss them. But I can't have those things and sit here on the freeway, scandalizing Southern California with the horror of abortion. We've got to make a choice. If I'm going to be serious about giving more of my time to this work, then I've got to be willing to live more modestly than I was willing to live. I'm not some super-spiritual person; this was not easy. My contemporaries with whom I went to law school are at the apex of their careers, doing things I would rather be doing and living in places where I would rather live.
"A guy named Leith Anderson wrote a book called Dying For Change about the Church," continued Cunningham. "He noticed that the Church and para-church organizations tend to move away from geographical centers of cultural influence while liberal organizations tend to move into centers of cultural influence. We see this again and again, that conservatives would rather live where they want to live and be left alone, where liberals want to change the world. So liberals go where they can have the greatest possible impact -- the news centers, media, entertainment and education - to the points of influence that have the greatest impact on the culture. Conservatives, again, are dumb as a post about all this. The irony of it is most traditional Christians, Catholic, Evangelical, what have you, are conservatives, and they're under a biblical mandate from our Lord to change the world. It is we who are supposed to be changing that world and we have abdicated that responsibility to pagan liberals -- some of them masquerading as Catholic clerics."
As we enter a bumper-to-bumper 405 South at the Sepulveda Pass, we are in what Cunningham describes as one of the areas where the offense taken at the photos is greatest. He is able to generalize reactions according to car models. "Porsches aren't that bad and Mercedeses aren't that bad, but there's something about a BMW that attracts serious pro-aborts. I saw a lady who almost had a wreck on the 405 North; she got off at one of the Hollywood exits and she was leaning out of her window, wobbling and swerving, trying to shout backward at us, while she tried to exit. I was afraid she would get cut in half. If abortion is O.K., then why do these pictures upset them so?"
As we move south of Westwood, we turn east on 10 and traffic thins out. Gawkers continue to slow down and stare as they pass us, but the ride back to the warehouse is uneventful. As we pull into the lot, a pickup following us takes down the building's address, then flees before the police stop him. They don't bother chasing him. Another successful mission is accomplished. An estimated 400 thousand drivers have seen the message.
Cunningham's strategy is best summarized by analogy to a chess game. "This is like a chess game where we don't even let our opponent sit down at the table until we've pre-positioned the pieces to place him at checkmate," said Cunningham. "Then we invite him to sit down and tell him, 'It's your move.' Although we're not going to do anything unlawful or immoral, we're not going to play this game pursuant to rules written by pro-aborts and weak bishops."
As a first step, partial birth abortion needs to be outlawed (as a practical matter, that would mean to me outlawing third trimester abortions.) That would mean that in order to save the mother's life, or in the case of a dire threat to her long-term health, sometimes birth would have to be induced at quite a young gestational age; some babies won't make it, and there will be a lot more million dollar preemies. I suspect that the biggest foes of such a measure would be insurance companies-- but we are a rich country, and if necessary our taxes could pick up the cost-- at any rate, I think most Americans would agree that it's the right thing to do.
Second, I think the pro-life people need to agree to a statute that explicitly guarantees the legality of in vitro fertilization, regardless of future abortion legislation (of course, at a later date such a statue could be repealed.) But, I think such a measure would greatly reassure people who worry that somehow a fetus could become a "legal person", with all the ramifications of that. In fact, it might be good to clarify in the statue that the fetus was not a "legal person." I think such a concession is the absolutely required in order to pave the way for future legislation restricting abortion.
Beyond that, I can't see how anyone can be both opposed to abortion and opposed to sex education in the schools. Of course, the ideal would be that parents would provide their own children with all of the information they could possibly need, but as a practical matter, that simply doesn't happen. The best way to do sex education, though, is for the pro-choice and pro-life groups, regardless of religious beliefs, to get together and design such programs together. (Although abstinence is certainly the best choice for young people, we have to recognize that not all kids will make that choice-- but a bad decision to have sex doesn't have to result in more tough choices.) Such programs should provide true, scientific information, as well as present the range of beliefs of the designers. Telling kids what to believe never works anyway-- the best way is to tell them what you believe and why. Hopefully, any kid who is confused will go home and ask their parents what they believe. Modern birth control really does work, and it is virtually bulletproof when both a barrier and a hormonal method are used simultaneously.
Finally, girls and boys need to be helped to understand one another better, and presented with a common message on sexual responsibility. For example, in the bad old days my parents told my brother "don't get anyone pregnant" and they told me "only married people have sex." Neither of us was given any useful factual information, so the assymetric moral message was exacerbated by almost complete ignorance. Moreover, although most adults will recognize the truth of the statement "Women use sex to get love, while men use love to get sex", no teenage girl will ever willingly see that boys and girls don't think alike. They need to be helped to understand the differences. These sorts of discussions should happen at home, in churches, in girl and boy scout troops, in other youth organizations, and as a part of sex education in the schools.
That would be a good start. I'm raising two teenage daughters, so I think about these sorts of issues a lot-- how to help them to grow up into healthy, responsible adults, and to avoid ever having to deal with an unplanned pregnancy.
I find your reference to cells through which your fecal matter pass thru to be somehow akin to the cells of an incubating baby instructive as to the respect for which you have regarding this serious issue....unfortunately.
That IS strange.
I have two prolife bumper stickers on my vehicle, one of which was vandalized by someone who didn't like the message. It read: It's a baby, not a choice. Now I wonder why anyone would do violence to a bumper sticker?
The stats on women who've died from poorly performed or illegal abortions are all over the board from less than 100 per year to tens of thousands according to NOW or NARLA. The question of whether or not all these roughly 100 million or more aborted babies have died is not a question at all. They are indeed dead. A sad fact that we all will have to account for someday as a nation.
Sex education is perhaps a noble idea but from what I've witnessed of public education and cultural issues...I fear your good intentions will be warped by minority activism and will end up teaching our kids more of the wrong thing. I also have two teenage daughters (almost ...12 and 13) and in Sudbury MA, they have already been taught about sexual preference sensitivity. I fear I don't trust our public schools in this matter. It's best left to the parents.
You are correct about birth control....it does indeed work and pity that more folks who don't wish for children and continue to copulate unabated don't use it religiously.
Thanks for the time you took and the genial tone of your reply....we do have some common ground. There are others on this thread that exhibit a callousnes towards pregnancy in general that is disturbing.
Actually we're not. The fertilized ovum is undeniably alive. It's genetic code is undeniably human. Therefore it is human life. But is it a human life? I don't think so.
"I find your reference to cells through which your fecal matter pass thru to be somehow akin to the cells of an incubating baby instructive as to the respect for which you have regarding this serious issue....unfortunately."
Yes, it is a serious objection to the idea of "potential" sentience or personhood -- although I myself made no reference to feces. I was thinking more of the stomach actually.
Evil lurks on all sides of any arguement.
That is one of the most sensible and realistic things I have seen from a Pro-lifer.
That was a very well thought out and stated position. I am in 100% agreement with every word. I have already saved and filed it in my "good stuff" folder.
Thank You!
Menlo Park (or maybe it was Palo Alto -- it was right on the border, I think) eventually passed some kind of law that prevented this guy from using signs as big as he wanted. I don't know the pretext of the law, and I'm not sure if it was ever challenged in court or not. But I wouldn't be surprised if somebody attempts to write a law, claiming that these trucks are a menace because they might cause someone to become so upset at their graphic nature that they might cause an accident.
Thank you for that. That's my gripe with most radical pro-lifers - that they will not admit to any compromise being acceptable to them.
I also believe that a fertilized egg, while it may have potential to be a "life," it does not have a "soul" per se and the sin involved in terminating it is no greater than that of killing an animal. Obviously there is a lot of room to differ as to when "life" begins, most arguments boiling down to religion and whether or not a fetus has a "soul" and at what time the "soul" enters the body. Is it before brain waves start (late first trimester)? Personally, I feel that prior to having brain waves, the embryo is not the same as a living person.
Most pro-choice folk I know are very queasy with the partial birth abortion question, would love to see it outlawed, but are seriously fearful about the "slippery slope" argument, especially when faced with pro-lifers so radical they want RU-486, IUDs, and The Pill (possible abortifacient in very small percentage of cases) banned.
If more in the pro-life movement were serious about actually wanting to reduce the number of abortions by making compromises, I think they'd be more successful.
Humans managed to figure things out for themselves for millennia before PP got involved. Micromanaging the sexual education of millions of American children sounds about as workable as Social Security, just about as efficient, and just about as effective. Nothing like big government to help the young. (/sarcasm)
Just a question--if the government can't even teach kids to read and do elementary math, what makes anyone think that they can do anything about illicit pregnancies? I think that taboos worked much better -- at least taboos were basic, taught from the earliest years, reinforced at home, schools, and in churches, and affected the behavior of young people until they were close to being on their own...
Just speculating here, of course, and only assuming that the reader thinks abortion is a BAD thing, which is by no means certain.
I also know that the such conflict and guilt over sexual desire is almost exclusively a feature of the Judeo-Christian cultures. You hardly ever see in other cultures that have not been infected.
Another thing to consider is that at the time of the origins of the Judeo/Christian taboos, people got married at a very young age thus really never faced the issues of having to surpress their teenage sexual desires.
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