Answering a question about dehumanization at Grand Valley State University.

Online discussions can be a lot of fun.  When we do it social media, only our friends see it.

But when we do it on a newspaper webpage, most people who read it don’t agree with us.  That is our target audience!  So we monitor and respond to online comments.

We clarify confusion and challenge sloppy reasoning.  We reinforce the visual images these students saw when we were on campus.  Unlike many commenters, we avoid ad hominems and make only rational arguments.

Here begins a series presenting reader comments and our responses on an online article about GAP in the Grand Valley State University Lanthorn.

Annoyed Protester: We support the rights for those to chose what they wish to do with their body and the potential life they carry. … I just do not approve of the way they decided to compare it to genocide and had the nerve to basically call me a murderer because I support the right to choose.

CBR Response:  Annoyed, thank you for your comment.  Our purpose is never to condemn those who may have aborted in the past or those who support abortion.  Our purpose is to clarify the confusion that exists about the baby in the womb and his or her moral status.  We don’t say that you are a murderer, but we do say that you are the victim of a confused culture that has taught you that decapitating and dismembering little human beings can be justified.

For example, you call the baby in the womb as a “potential” life. Science tells us — and your own common sense will bear this out — that the baby in the womb is both human (not a pig, horse, or cow) and alive (not dead but alive and growing).  The abortion industry dehumanizes this child so that they can justify killing him or her.

We compare abortion to genocide because abortion kills 1.2 million children per year, many by decapitation and dismemberment, and some of them by torturing them to death.  Yes, late-term babies can feel excruciating pain.

If you watched the big Cunningham-Hunter debate on Incrementalism vs. Immediatism, you may have seen CBR Executive Director Gregg Cunningham announce that CBR would no longer include the following statement in it’s Volunteer Agreement for the Genocide Awareness Project (GAP) and other projects:

If asked a secular question, I will give only a secular answer, not a spiritual answer.  I will give spiritual answers only in response to a spiritual question or comment.  (Note:  Many people reject spiritual answers and use them to change the conversation or to discredit the pro-life position.)

Yes, this is going away, but I wanted to clarify the confusion about what it meant and why it was included in our Volunteer Agreement in the first place.

First of all, this was in no way a prohibition to sharing the Gospel.  In our GAP training, which we call the Pro Life Training Academy (PLTA), we routinely remind people that God commands us to share the Gospel.  I have shared my Faith at GAP on many occasions.  Other staff and volunteers have done the same.

But if a student asks why abortion is wrong, it is pointless to reply, “The Bible says, ‘Thou shalt not kill’”  Three reasons:

1. If the student does not accept the authority of Scripture, then such a pronouncement won’t be very compelling to him.  We have to reach him where he is and go from there, just like Paul did in Athens (Acts 17:16-34).  He preached the Jewish Scripture to the Jews, who accepted the authority of Scripture.  But with the Athenians, he stared with a frame of reference they would understand.
2. In most cases, the student likely already accepts the premise that killing a human being is immoral.  (Even atheists agree that killing 6 million Jews is immoral.)  He just disagrees that the preborn child is morally equivalent to a born person.  Most often, his mistake is not a belief that killing is OK, but is rather a belief that preborn children are somehow subhuman.
3. People mistakenly believe our opposition to abortion is just a religious tenant that should remain a matter of personal discretion, much like our belief in keeping the Sabbath.  But we don’t oppose legalized abortion because it violates our religious beliefs; we oppose legalized abortion because it unjustly kills another human being.  That is a much different argument, and we need to make that point crystal clear.

Of course we can also share the Gospel, but we can make a compelling arguments against abortion that don’t depend on a belief in Scripture to be credible.

Some people want CBR to be focus primarily on evangelism.  But if we were to do that, what version of evangelical message would we adopt?  Would it be a Catholic version?  A Baptist version?  A Lutheran version?

We don’t have a theological statement, nor do we proscribe an evangelical approach that all must embrace.  We, like others in the pro-life movement, work with Catholics, Protestants, non-denominational, and even anti-denominational Christians to witness against the evil of child sacrifice.  When it comes to sharing the Gospel; we have to believe that every Christian is being trained (or should be trained) how to do this within their own particular Church.  (Full disclosure: On occasion, atheists have volunteered to help with our outreaches to secular audiences, and we have accepted their help.)

There need to be places in the pro-life movement — and we believe CBR should be one of those places — where Christians of good will can come together to fight a common foe, which is child sacrifice.  Otherwise, we end up fighting each other… about Catholic vs. Protestant, Calvinist vs. Arminian, Latin liturgy vs. Southern drawl, King-James-only (KJO) vs. Nearly Inspired Version (NIV), etc., etc. etc.  The list of issues that could divide us, if we let them, is endless.

If you don’t agree, if you believe your pro-life-ism cannot be separated from your particular brand of Christianity, and if you can’t work with other Christians outside your own particular brand, then there is still a place for you in the movement.  But CBR won’t be that place, because our mission transcends denominational boundaries.

That is not a statement of judgement against denominational pro-life work.  To the contrary; we wish every “pro-life” church would join this fight, as a part of the mission of that church.  And true to our calling, we will make our abortion images available to you and support your denominational pro-life mission in every way possible.

“You all are a bunch of racists for comparing abortion to slavery!”

The accusation is almost comical.  We hear it all the time from students who have no better argument for decapitating and dismembering little human beings.

But of course, we didn’t invent the comparison.  Long before there was a CBR, Jesse Jackson compared abortion to racial injustice.  He must have been a racist.

As it turns out, Republican presidential candidate and retired neurosurgeon Dr. Ben Carson has also equated abortion with slavery.  He must be a racist, too!

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by Nicole W. Cooley

At the Shenandoah Valley Soap Box Derby, a complete stranger asked, “Did you go to Tennessee?”

He seemed really excited about my orange Tennessee hat.  I hated to disappoint him, but “No, my boss did.”

Furrowed eyebrows.

I continued, “I am a pro-life activist.  We travel all over the country with our Genocide Awareness Project (GAP), and I always get a hat from each campus.”

Who knew a simple baseball cap could spark a conversation about abortion with a complete stranger?

… he carefully dismantled each [fallacy] in a patient way, not acting superior, but as if he were merely suggesting another way to look at it.

I’ve been a collector all my life.  I collected Longaberger baskets for years.  I still buy a new basket on occasion, but at over 200 baskets, I’m pretty satisfied there.

As a child, I collected rocks from the different places we lived.  We were a military family that traveled all over the world, so I have lots of rocks, including some neat limestone from England and large round rocks from a beach in Scotland.

But of all my collections, my current one is the most meaningful to me.  You see, every hat has a story.

At the University of Tennessee, I spoke at length with a student who used to be pro-life, but changed her mind in college.  Veteran pro-life apologist Mick Hunt took the lead.  I call him “the philosopher” because he’s great at talking with students who are wrestling with higher-level questions.  Her struggles centered around “bodily autonomy” arguments like the “famous violinist” who could be saved by an unwilling kidney donor.  We sat on the grassy knoll across from the display for over an hour.

Mick gently explained how a mother’s relationship to her own child is different from a person being forced to offer his kidney to a complete stranger.  I took note of his probing questions to specifically identify the fallacies in her thinking.  I also saw how he carefully dismantled each one in a patient way, not acting superior, but as if he were merely suggesting another way to look at it.

I’m not sure if that young lady is pro-life today or not. But, I do know she must have wrestled with the things we talked about for some time.  Most people are not solidly pro-life without having first wrestled a bit.

For most people, being pro-life or pro-abortion is a continuum; few are truly 100% pro-life or pro-abortion.  Most get hung up somewhere along the line because of those pesky “exceptions” to the rules.  They struggle with the idea of telling a rape victim she should carry to term or with preventing abortion in the case of fetal abnormalities.  That’s why GAP is such a great tool for college campuses.  We help students wrestle with the hard questions.  We challenge the status quo of their own opinions.  We put pebbles in their shoes and force them to think.

After watching Mick Hunt at work, I vowed to be ready next time.  I went home and studied the bodily autonomy arguments in depth.  At the next GAP, I would be ready to plant a few pebbles of my own.

Nicole Cooley is a CBR project director and a new FAB contributor.  This is the first in a series of “hat blogs” about memorable conversations gleaned from her experiences with GAP.

Choice Chain at George Mason University. (Click to enlarge photo.)

by Maggie Egger

A young woman approached me and as she got closer I could see she was breathing very heavily; she seemed upset. She looked at our signs for just a moment and then quickly voiced her complaint: “I would call myself pro-life, but was about rape? I think it’s kind of insensitive for someone to tell a woman who’s been raped that she has to carry that baby.”

“First, I want to say that we as individuals, and as a society, need to do everything we can to help women who have been raped. We don’t do enough. We don’t do enough to punish rapists, and we don’t do enough to help women deal with the trauma. You would agree, right?”

“Yeah, absolutely.”

“Okay, then let me ask you a question. Would you be in favor of giving rapists the death penalty?”

She looked a little uncomfortable….I waited a bit. Trying to coax her, I said, “I don’t support the death penalty at all, so I would say ‘no.’”

“Yeah, I don’t support it either.”

“Okay then. No death penalty for rapists. Should we give the woman the death penalty because she was raped?”

She looked flabbergasted. “No, of course not!”

“No! Of course not! She’s the victim! But, there are some cultures where a woman who has been raped is killed because she’s seen to have brought dishonor on her family.”

“I know, it’s horrible.”

“You’re right, it is. Okay, so here’s my last question. Should we give the unborn child the death penalty because their father was a rapist?”

A young man standing next to her, who had just a few minutes earlier said he wanted to remain moderate on the issue, suddenly said, “Oh my gosh, I totally get what you’re saying. That’s a good one.” I almost felt like I was watching a cartoon, and a light bulb had just begun to glow above his head.

She smiled sheepishly, knowing that she was stuck. “No, I guess that doesn’t really make sense at all.”

Your support will allow us to do Choice Chains more places, more often.  Please click here and be as generous as you can.

Maggie Egger is a CBR Project Director in Virginia.

Masked male students at UNC try to distract and misdirect people from images of aborted children with banner, drums, and absurd ad hominems.

“Pro-choice” NCSU students tried to block the view of GAP until campus police stopped them.

by Mick Hunt

In Part 1, I wrote about how abortion clinic escorts use misdirection and distraction, which are among the tools of stage illusionists as a way of controlling the audience’s attention.  These same tools are also at the heart of “pro-choice” rhetoric.

Ad-hominem attacks against pro-lifers are obvious, and a trained debater won’t be sidetracked by them, but virtually every women-centered question or statement is also misdirection.  The real issue is not whether we should care about women.  Everyone knows we should.  The real issue is about caring for pre-natal children.

My answer to many questions is, “We should treat pre-natal children the same as we should treat born children.”  Or, “Whatever problem you pose with a pregnancy and a pre-natal child, we should find a solution that is, in principle, no different than if the child were born.”

To a large extent, even the scientific debate over when human life begins is misdirection and distraction.  My philosopher-carpenter friend, John S., wrote recently in a letter to a state official, “Questions like ‘when does life begin’ or ‘what is a person’ are exercises in playing dumb.  We know when life begins—it begins at conception (fertilization).  We know what a person is—it’s a human being.”

The answer then is not so much in talking about abortion, but in acting as if abortion is murder.  The Genocide Awareness Project (GAP) is a powerful appropriate indirect response to the gravity of abortion.  It’s really not debate, but a presentation of facts through imagery.  GAP is a statement of the obvious to people who are distracted.  Any contribution to debate we make has more to do with interpreting the images for people who are confused.

GAP creates problems for abortion-choice supporters. In the face of evidence of the gruesome violence, “pro-choice” rhetorical engagement is a losing proposition.  GAP compels either acquiescence, active resistance, or a dilution of our effort.  Since the activists don’t intend to quit, they must issue propaganda and organize protests.  They spread propaganda through social media and campus publications.

We see resistance in most schools, but I’d like to focus for now on the campus of the University of North Carolina (UNC), Chapel Hill, and at North Carolina State University (NCSU) in Raleigh.

At Chapel Hill, abortion supporting students lined up in front of the GAP display with signs and helium balloons.  A couple of masked male students tapped on snare drums for endless hours.  A Planned Parenthood representative stood on a wall overlooking the scene and shouted meaningless patter about condoms and filing complaints with the Dean of Students.  At NC State, the abortion “counter protest” took a further step by attempting to block the view of the GAP display and form a complete wall of bodies and signs.

The portrayal of the victims of abortion through GAP helps distracted and misdirected people attend to the real issue of abortion.  And if GAP is so effective that abortion supporters must turn out in force to distract people from seeing the images, then shouldn’t we do GAP even more often?

Mick Hunt (Meredith Eugene Hunt) is a FAB contributor.  He has helped organize more than 50 Genocide Awareness Projects (GAPs) all over the southeast and elsewhere.

Abortion Escorts at “Femcare” in Asheville

by Mick Hunt

Illusionists and stage magicians know the secret of misdirection.  They’ll focus your attention on something relatively unimportant while the important action is happening right in front of you.

Master pickpocket and entertainer Apollo Robbins says misdirection happens in your brain as well.  He told the audience in a popular TED Talk that our minds are incapable of focusing on multiple aspects simultaneously.  We often experience “blindness” to things we see every day.  New information cannot be processed while trying to recover old information.

So, for example, when Apollo asks George what’s in his pocket, George’s mind turns inward to remember.  In the meantime, for a few moments, George did not notice what’s going on around him, that Apollo stole his watch.

Misdirection, both physical and rhetorical, is a critical tool in supporting the abortion of pre-natal children.

In my recent blog “Echo Tourism,” I mentioned an article titled “The Last Shift” written by a volunteer abortion escort and self-proclaimed “Asheville’s Village Witch.”  For 10 years she greeted women seeking abortion at their cars in the clinic parking lot and walked them to the entrance.  This is when we sidewalk counselors speak to the women, offering help and urging them to let their children live.

She wrote:

…I always started a running patter, something like this—I’ll be talking about all sorts of things so focus on my voice.  It’ll be like a late night monologue, only I’m not very funny.  I’ll talk about your shoes—gosh, those are cute!  Or how far you had to drive—did you have far to come this morning?  BlackMountain?  Oh that’s not so bad.  How was the traffic?  Gosh, this is (fill in the blank) weather, isn’t it?  Does that RAV get good gas mileage?

A running patter.  In the online manuscript of Sleights of Mind, What the Neuroscience of Magic Reveals about Everyday Deceptions, Stephen Macknik & Susana Martinez-Conde (2010) wrote:

Patter, it turns out, is one of the most important tools in the magician’s toolkit for attention management.  There are only a dozen or two (depending on who you ask) main categories of tricks in the magician’s repertoire …  Sleight of hand is of course critical, but so is patter, the smooth and confident stream of verbiage that can be used to hold, direct or divide attention.  Apollo tells George [his victim on stage] one thing while doing two other things with his hands.

The Asheville abortion place’s website admits as much when it says,

…we have volunteer escorts who may approach your car to walk you to our front door and help distract you from the demonstrators out on the sidewalk.

In this situation, the patter is meaningless babble.  Some escorts may be more adept at sincere conversation, but nothing they say pretends to engage the subject of abortion.  And yet, even when abortion-choice advocates seem to engage the issue, it’s almost entirely misdirection and distraction.

I’ll explain in my next post, showing how this relates to the work of CBR.

Mick Hunt (Meredith Eugene Hunt) is a FAB contributor.  He has helped organize more than 50 Genocide Awareness Projects (GAPs) all over the southeast and elsewhere.

Abortion advocates: Isn’t this equivalent to a cell you can cut out of your finger?

One student at Oakland University (OU) said, “If you cut off your finger, then you can take the cells and turn them into reproductive cells which can be turned into a human being.  So why is the embryo so important?”

Two factors in play here, dehumanization and confusion of wholes with parts.

He is confusing wholes with parts when he equates an individual cell that is part of a human being (the cell in your finger) with a cell which is a human being (a human being at an early stage of development).  The cell in your finger can never act as a whole living organism. You leave it alone and it dies.  The embryo in you womb is a living human being.  You leave it alone and he grows into a fetus, infant, toddler, adolescent, teenager, etc.

Theoretically, it may be possible to create a new human being by manipulating an individual cell taken from the “parent.” Once that process is complete it would be a new human being. But until then, it’s only a cell from the “parent.”

He then uses this theoretical possibility of asexual reproduction to equate a baby in the womb with a cell in your finger. It’s just another way of dehumanizing the unwanted human being that he intends to kill.

Very interesting article by Sarah Terzo summarizing reporters’ comments after actually seeing abortion.  Reading her piece reminded of an article written by Dr. Richard Selzer years ago, entitled What I Saw at the Abortion.  He talked about the effect of actually seeing an abortion:

And it has happened that you cannot reason with me now.  For what can language do against the truth of what I saw?

More about that in a minute.  First, here are some of the best quotes from Ms. Terzo’s piece:

I felt a profound and unmistakable kinship with the foot and hand in the tray, a kinship so strong it was like the rolling of the sea under my feet.  (Harper’s Magazine author Verlyn Klinkenborg)

But the nurses, medical assistants, and doctors who worked inside procedure rooms … knew that an eleven-week-old POC harbored tiny arms and legs and feet with toes.  (author Sue Hertz, who spent a year observing abortions a busy abortion clinic)  [FAB: POC = products of conception]

I have seen this before. The face of a Russian soldier, lying on a frozen snow covered hill, stiff with death and cold. … A death factory is the same anywhere, and the agony of early death is the same anywhere.  (author Magda Denes)

Having seen what I saw, I cannot for a moment abide the disingenuousness of those who argue that a fetus is not human, or those who convince themselves that abortion is not killing.  (Newsday reporter B.D. Colen, who witnessed a 2nd-trimester D&E abortion)

As I left the operating room, I shook my head in an attempt to get the horrible vision out of my head. I couldn’t. It was there; it would always be there: a little hand…a little rib cage.  (former medical student)

Read the entire article here.

In 1976, Dr. Richard Selzer was a surgeon at Yale University.  In January of that year, he authored an essay entitled “What I Saw at the Abortion,” which appeared in, of all places, Esquire Magazine.  In this piece, he described witnessing a prostaglandin-injection abortion performed at 24 weeks gestation.  Referring to the spirited fight put up by the preborn child in the defense of his own life, Selzer concluded:

Whatever else is said in abortion’s defense, the vision of that other defense will not vanish from my eyes. … And it has happened that you cannot reason with me now.  For what can language do against the truth of what I saw?

Indeed, what can lying words and sophistry do against undeniable truth?

Dr. Maureen Condic, Associate Professor of Neurobiology and Anatomy at the University of Utah, testifies before a Congressional hearing on the Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act.

Dr. Condic earned her PhD from University of California, Berkeley.  She is a widely published scientist whose works have appeared in a wide variety of peer-reviewed journals.

Read the LifeNews coverage of the story here.

Excerpts from her written remarks:

The neural circuitry responsible for the most primitive response to pain, the spinal reflex, is in place by 8 weeks of development. This is the earliest point at which the fetus experiences pain in any capacity.  And a fetus responds just as humans at later stages of development respond; by with withdrawing from the painful stimulus.
***
Imposing pain on any pain-capable living creature is cruelty.  And ignoring the pain experienced by another human individual for any reason is barbaric.  We don’t need to know if a human fetus is self- reflective or even self-aware to afford it the same consideration we currently afford other pain-capable species.  We simply have to decide whether we will choose to ignore the pain of the fetus or not.  (emphasis in the original)

Video of her testimony:

Role-playing helps PLTA students understand and retain techniques for answering the hardest questions.

Want to learn how to articulate and defend the pro-life position, even in a hostile environment?  How about others in your pro-life student or community group?  Would they want to be confident in answering the toughest pro-abortion questions?

Act now; we have openings for the Fall semester!

At the Pro-Life Training Academy (PLTA), we don’t just tell you what to say.  Instead, you will spend an entire afternoon practicing your best answers to their toughest questions.

But don’t listen to me, listen to Zack Wepfer, who attended the PLTA in Tuscaloosa, Alabama:

I can honestly say that the PLTA exceeded expectations and I feel confident in fully defending the prolife stance against anyone!  I will be able to use that training for the rest of my life.  I would highly recommend the training …

Levi Crawford concurred:

The world wants a philosophical argument grounded in reason, so pro-lifers like myself turn to the Pro-Life Training Academy (PLTA).  With the intuitive learning and detailed outlines we received, we were much more confident and successfully handled opposition at our next pro-life event on campus.  There is no doubt in my mind that the Pro-Life Training Academy was the key to our clear victory over the child murder apologists.  PLTA was simply invaluable.

We spend a lot of time on role-playing.  You will practice and become confident in your best answers to their toughest questions.  Act now; we have openings for the Fall semester!

Course Outline:

• Standing on the shoulders of giants.  Listen to those who came before.
• Modulated conflict is your friend.  Do not fear it.  Embrace it.  Use it.
• What is it?  The slam-dunk scientific certainty that life begins at conception.
• But when is life important?  The philosophical case for personhood at conception.
• Three steps to success:  Columbo Questions, Trot out the Toddler, and SLED.
• Hard questions:  Rape, incest, life of the mother.
• The genocide claim.  Abortion is not just another evil.

Would you like to host a PLTA in your city?  Please call us and we’ll set the date!  Act now; we have openings for the Fall semester!

Maggie Egger

CBR Project Director Maggie Egger shares a story from her recent GAP excursion to the University of South Florida

What about rape?

She was staring intently at the pictures when I approached her and asked what she thought of abortion.  She said “I’ve never really thought about it.  I don’t really have an opinion.”

I’d heard that so many times already that I already had my next question prepared.  “Well, can you maybe think of a hypothetical situation where you would think it was okay?”

She thought for a moment and then said, “In the case of rape, I think it would be up to the woman what she want’s to do.  I guess that would be the only time I would say it would be okay if that’s what she decided.”

I then gave her this hypothetical rape situation:  A married woman has consensual sex with her husband on Monday and then is violently raped on Tuesday.  She discovers she’s pregnant.  After discussing it all with her husband, they decide to continue with the pregnancy because there’s a possibility that the baby is her husband’s.  She gives birth, and then has a paternity test done.  They find out that the father is actually the rapist’s and not her husband’s.

I asked “Would it then be okay for her to kill the month-old infant?”

She replied, “Of course not!”

Then I countered, “So, what is the difference between the month-old infant and the 6-week embryo that makes it okay to kill one and not the other?”

That lead us to a discussion of fetal development and when life begins, as well as the harmful effects that abortion has on women, especially women who have already suffered the trauma of rape.

The conversation was slowing down a bit and she went back to looking at the pictures in front of her.  So I just came out and asked her again, “So what do you think about abortion?”

She paused for a minute, looked at the pictures again, looked at me and said, “Ya know, I guess there is no good reason to do that.”

Indeed.

The PLTA gives you the confidence to answer any pro-abortion challenge.

How do you convince the skeptic?  What do you say to the screaming pro-abort?  Need help?  Then maybe the Pro-Life Training Academy (PLTA) is for you.

The Pro-Life Training Academy equipped us to answer tough questions about abortion and taught the science and logic behind the pro-life position.  The Pro-Life Training Academy is a great resource that every pro-life group should take advantage of!  (Claire Chretien, U of Alabama)

No matter what your role in the pro-life movement, we train you to articulate and defend the pro-life position, even in a hostile environment.  This spring, we took the PLTA to Lexington (Kentucky), Tuscaloosa (Alabama) and Auburn (Alabama).

Would you like to us to train your pro-life group?

If your activism puts you in the line of fire, this training is for you.  Maybe you are a group of pro-life activists who frequent the local abortion facility, like our audience in Lexington.  Perhaps you are preparing to show abortion photos in public, like our audience in Tuscaloosa and Auburn.  Perhaps you lead a group of high-school pro-lifers who need to learn the basics.  Either way, the PLTA is for you!

We learned the facts about abortion, the reasoning behind the arguments, and the most effective strategies for changing hearts and saving lives on our campus.  (Peter Ascik, U of Georgia)

We spend a lot of time on role-playing.  We don’t just tell you how; we show you how and help you practice.  We don’t just care how much you know in your head; we care how well you can convince others.  That’s what you care about!

Course Outline:

• Standing on the shoulders of giants.  Listen to those who came before.
• Modulated conflict is your friend.  Do not fear it.  Embrace it.  Use it.
• What is it?  The slam-dunk scientific certainty that life begins at conception.
• But when is life important?  The philosophical case for personhood at conception.
• Three steps to success:  Columbo Questions, Trot out the Toddler, and SLED.
• Hard questions:  Rape, incest, life of the mother.
• The genocide claim.  Abortion is not just another evil.

Would you like to host a PLTA in your city?  Please call us and we’ll set the date!

Jay Watts explains how to defend the preborn by “trotting out the toddler.”

My friend Jay Watts and the Life Training Institute (LTI) offer the best pro-life apologetics training around.  Now they can come to you at no cost!

LTI has recieved a grant to reach 20,000 more high school students in 2013 than they did in 2012. This gift makes it possible for LTI to offer Jay and the other LTI speakers to Christian schools across the United States at no cost.  LTI will send these guys out to any place in the country to speak to a high school audience on The Case for Life.  What’s more, they will cover their own travel costs.  The only thing the Christian high schools — both Protestant and Catholic — need to do is open their doors.

Jay and I have worked together several times training people to debate angry pr0-aborts at CBR events.  I can assure you that Jay is a first rate presenter.  Here are links to Jay’s bio page and to his presentation at the 2013 SALT Conference.  Scott Klusendorf has assembled a whole team of talented speakers, and I encourage you to take advantage of this generous offer.

We have to be serious about getting the truth about abortion to our youth and equipping them to think and talk about this issue with their peers.  When you consider that, according to Guttmacher Institute, half of all abortions are sought out and performed on young women 15 to 24 years old, you can understand why this donor felt so strongly about reaching American high schoolers.  Since conscience demands that we talk about abortion, prudence demands that we learn to talk about it effectively and teach our children to do the same.  LTI teaches this skill better than anyone else.

Here is Jay’s presentation at the 2013 SALT Conference:

Earlier, we reported that CBR intern Seth Gruber was exposing abortion at Westmont College, the Christian school where he is a student.  There is a great discussion going on right now on Seth’s blog.

One commenter wrote:

I would like to take a moment to remind everyone that Nazi Germany and abortions have very little to do with one another.

Here is my response, except I have revised the opening statement:

The commenter is, of course, correct.  Abortion and the Holocaust have nothing to do with each other … if.  If — only 2 letters, but such a big word.  If the preborn child is not a living human being, then there is no relevant similarity between the abortion and the Holocaust.  But if the preborn child is a living human being — science tells us that it is both alive and human — then abortion kills 1.2 million living humans ever year.  In that case, there are many similarities between abortion and the Nazi Holocaust.

1. In both cases, rights of personhood have been denied the victim class.  In Germany, it was a judicial decision by the Reichsgericht in 1936.  In the US, Roe v. Wade legalized abortion in 1973.
2. In both cases, the perpetrators have used dehumanizing language to justify their actions.  Nazis called their victims rats, pigs, vermin, untermensch (subhuman), etc.  In the US, wanted preborn children are routinely called “babies.”  However, unwanted perborn children are never called babies, but are instead called products of conception, mass of cells, blob of protoplasm, “potential” life, etc.  Even though embryo and fetus are medical terms that define age — so are infant, adolescent, and teenager — they are often used in ways that incorrectly suggest something less than human.
3. In both cases, the perpetrators believed that what they were doing was actually good for society.
4. In both cases, the victims had something that was wanted by those in power, or the vicitms simply got in the way.  Jews got in the way of a racially pure society.  Eastern Europeans had lebensraum (living space) that the Nazis wanted for the German people.  Unplanned babies get in the way of career development, acquisition of material wealth, maintenance of lifestyle, etc.  They get in the way of sex without responsibility.
5. Victims have been spoken of as a disease on society or diseased themselves.  Nazis described Jews and others as “parasites” and “bacilli”.  In his medical textbook Abortion Practice, Warren Hern analogizes the unwanted preborn child to a disease, the treatment of choice for which is abortion.
6. In both cases, the perpetrators have asserted that resources are inadequate to care for the victim class, if they were allowed to live.  Nazis called their victims “useless eaters.”  Pro-aborts awfulize the birth of unplanned children by saying that nobody will take care of all of them and that their presence will endanger the planet.
7. Genocide is often framed in the language of “choice.”  The Nazis asserted that the make-up of the German nation was an internal matter for the German people to decide.  Abortion advocates argue that abortion should be a matter of “choice.”

Yes, there are many similarities that can help us put this present version of genocide in its proper perspective.

For more, see our brochure, How can you compare abortion to genocide?

Dehumanization – one of our most effective Genocide Awareness Project (GAP) panels.