At Northern Kentucky University, showing abortion photos created more informed dialogue than anything else we could have done.

When you suit up for pro-life work, what would you rather do, feel good or make an impact?

Unfortunately, many of us have adopted a form of “strategic relativism,” in which any strategy or tactic used to fight abortion is just as good as any other.  People say things like, “You fight abortion your way and I’ll fight it my way.”

The inevitable result is that many of us (perhaps most) are engaged in activities that aren’t particularly effective at winning hearts, changing minds, or saving lives, nearly as much as they are good at making pro-lifers feel good about doing them.

While it’s true that our movement has multiple components, just as the body has many parts (I Corinthians 12:12-31), this principle does not mean all strategies/tactics are equally valuable or effective.  In business, construction, child rearing, war, and every other field of human endeavor, there are some methods that simply work better than others.  We would be mad to choose whatever feels good, when experience and logic demand we employ tactics that actually work better.

Don’t be a strategic relativist!  The babies deserve your best.

But that’s not all.  The people who give time and treasure to your work also deserve your best.  They give sacrificially.  Shouldn’t they count on you to invest wisely?

And finally, think of yourself.  If you are investing yourself in this work, don’t you want to maximize your own personal return on investment?  Let’s put it this way: if you had a 401K, would you settle for a 2% annual return when another investment was paying a guaranteed 25%?

Abortion pictures are an indispensable tactic because they force large numbers of people (literally, everyone in sight) to learn and reflect on the two most important facts: (1) the preborn child is a living human being, and (2) abortion is an act of violence that destroys a living baby.  Abortion pictures prevent honest people from denying these facts.

Pro-lifers love to talk about creating dialogue.  The record is clear: when you show thousands of passersby exactly what abortion is and does, you create more dialogue (and more informed dialogue) than anything else you can do.

Note:  FAB is indebted to CBR Maryland for inspiring and contributing to this article.  The good folks at CBR Maryland are definitely making an impact!

Sign-holding protesters (right side of walkway) draw big crowds at Auburn University. They tried to defend the indefensible, but could not. Having failed that, they called us names or simply tried to change the subject. But all of it focused attention on GAP and abortion.

History is clear on this point: injustice can be defeated only by reformers who confront evil and accept persecution from angry defenders of the status quo.  People who exploit others are enraged when their cruel tyranny is threatened.  When William Wilberforce used pictures to win the debate over slavery, he was attacked in the newspapers, physically assaulted, and even threatened with death.  But he showed the pictures anyway.

Conflict is not only an indicator that the status quo is threatened; it is also a facilitator of change.  It focuses public attention in ways nothing else will.  Dr. Martin Luther King said, “I am not afraid of the word ‘tension.’  I have earnestly opposed violent tension, but there is a type of constructive, nonviolent tension which is necessary for growth.”  This tension created a public forum in which racists were forced to defend segregation.  They could not do it, so the reformers won.

Images like this educated the public on the evils of slavery. Additionally, they created the kind of tension/conflict that (a) forced the public to think about slavery and (b) created a public forum that forced slave traders to defend the indefensible.

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Thought-provoking video asks the question (and answers it) whether pro-lifers should support candidates with the rape/incest exception.  Please watch the video and leave your comments!

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?

We convert more students at the March for Life than at any other event.

Earlier this year, Simcha Fisher posted her essay entitled Eight Reasons Not to Use Graphic Abortion Images at the March for Life at the National Catholic Register Online.  Center for Bio-Ethical Reform (CBR) Executive Director Gregg Cunningham, perhaps the world’s premier pro-life strategist, responds.

Eight Reasons or No Reason to Put Away Abortion Photos?
by Gregg Cunningham

In a National Catholic Register online essay titled “Eight Reasons Not to Use Graphic Abortion Images at the March for Life,” Simcha Fisher concedes that “Americans are tragically ignorant about what abortion really is …” but then lurches to the non sequitur that abortion photos should never be shown in public, and then only “as a last resort” in private.  The mainstream pro-life movement has covered up the horror of abortion for forty years, and now wonders why the public is still not horrified by abortion.  The result has been a failure to outlaw abortion — anywhere, and at any point in pregnancy — and fifty million dead babies!

Had Martin Luther King displayed lynching photos only in “private,” and only “as a last resort,” black people would still be drinking from segregated water fountains.  Dr. King instead commissioned the making of sickening photos and then urged their widespread publication and broadcast.  The result was the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

The history of social reform is the history of horrifying pictures:  Pictures of slaves being tortured to death; pictures of Native American women and children massacred by the U.S. Calvary; pictures of African Americans beaten to their knees for trying to register to vote; pictures of little children abused in mines and factories.  These pictures traumatized children just like those Ms. Fisher seeks to shelter at the March For Life.  But the imagery also convinced the country that the victims were real people, fully entitled to rights of personhood.  It additionally persuaded the electorate that the injustices depicted therein were sufficiently egregious to warrant criminalization.

Many of the children who attend the March are genuinely devout and authentically pro-life, but others are only nominally Catholic if Catholic at all.  Some are, or soon will become, sexually active.  Some are, or soon will become, pregnant.  More than a few will abort.  Some of them, however, will change their minds because we showed them the indescribable horror of abortion.  We have testimonies to prove this.

Ms. Fisher says we should hide the horror of abortion because post-abortive women attend the March.  CDC reports that nearly half of all abortions are performed on post-abortive women.  Post-abortive women are, therefore, among the women most at risk of aborting.  They are, consequently, the women who most need to see the terrible truth, lest they kill again.  Many post-abortive women (and men) have told us they now realize that visualizing what they had done forced them to stop trying to rationalize it.  Only then were they able to confess and repent, so they could be forgiven and healed.

Ephesians 5:11 commands us to “expose the deeds of darkness,” not to show them only privately nor only as a last resort.  Responsibility for the terrible longevity of history’s most horrific slaughter does not rest entirely upon our adversaries.  We will be judged for our timidity, perhaps as harshly as they will be judged for their barbarity – by history and by Providence.

Every now and then, we hear the claim that some woman saw our abortion pictures and the resulting grief caused her to take her own life.

Dubious Claim

We are skeptical of this claim, to say the least.  First of all, the claimant never has first-hand knowledge of the alleged suicide;  the alleged victim is somebody’s friend’s roommate’s sister’s cousin.  Furthermore, we never read about the alleged suicide in the local paper or campus paper.

We have been using abortion imagery continually for twenty-two years.  The pro-aborts universally hate and fear us as the source of this tactic.  They would destroy us if they could.  If there were the slightest credible evidence of even one suicide whose proximate cause could be linked to our imagery, wouldn’t they have come forth with specific allegations to that effect?  But they never have, because there has never been such an incident.  And even if there were, we will have done all in our power to offer post-abortion women free counseling support and spiritual healing.  We show only compassion for post-abortive women, consistently describing them as abortion’s second victim.

The Larger Context

But of course we can’t dismiss the possibility that a post-abortive woman might take her own life.  It is possible.  But shouldn’t every action be evaluated within the largest possible context?

If we cover up the truth, 1.2 million human beings will be killed, this year and every year from now on.

Mothers of these aborted babies are 6 times more likely to commit suicide (source) and are at greater risk for a wide range of physical complications (source).

Women who have aborted are also at greater risk to abort again (source).  They are, consequently, the women who most need to see the terrible truth, lest they kill again.  Many post-abortive women (and men) have told us they now realize that visualizing what they had done forced them to stop trying to rationalize it.  Only then were they able to confess and repent; only then could they be forgiven and healed.  Healed people don’t commit suicide; hurting people do.

Pro-life parental involvement laws reduce teen suicide rates (source).  Exposing the truth about abortion helps pass this kind of protective legislation.

If a post-abortive woman takes her own life … and we know that too many do … who is at fault?

• Is it the abortion industry, who invaded her body and butchered her child?
• Was it her college professor, who told her that her preborn child was just a blob of tissue?
• Was it her pastor, who knew the truth but covered it up by never showing her pictures of abortion so she would know the truth as well?
• Was it her boyfriend, who threatened her with abandonment if she would not abort their child?
• Was it her parents, who pressured her to abort because they did not want to help raise a grandchild and/or who wanted to avoid embarrassment?
• Was it the political system, which protected the abortion industry from any kind of accountability, so that they could maximize profit at the expense of women and children?
• Was it the education system, which allied itself with Planned Parenthood to tell her that sex on the first date was a good thing if she liked the guy and that having many partners throughout her life was normal?
• Was it the entertainment industry, who taught her boyfriend to believe that he is entitled to sex without responsibility?
• Or was it the pro-lifer who didn’t do enough to warn her of the consequences of abortion, before it was too late?

Historical Note

From WarHistoryOnline.com:

On April 4, 1945, elements of the United States Army’s 89th Infantry Division and the 4th Armored Division captured the Ohrdruf concentration camp outside the town of Gotha in south central Germany.  Although the Americans didn’t know it at the time, Ohrdruf was one of several sub-camps serving the Buchenwald extermination camp, which was close to the city of Weimar several miles north of Gotha.  Ohrdruf was a holding facility for over 11,000 prisoners on their way to the gas chambers and crematoria at Buchenwald.  A few days before the Americans arrived to liberate Ohrdruf, the SS guards had assembled all of the inmates who could walk and marched them off to Buchenwald.  They left in the sub-camp more than a thousand bodies of prisoners who had died of bullet wounds, starvation, abuse, and disease.  The scene was an indescribable horror even to the combat-hardened troops who captured the camp.  Bodies were piled throughout the camp.  There was evidence everywhere of systematic butchery.  Many of the mounds of dead bodies were still smoldering from failed attempts by the departing SS guards to burn them. T he stench was horrible.

…  During the camp inspections with his top commanders Eisenhower said that the atrocities were “beyond the American mind to comprehend.”  He ordered that every citizen of the town of Gotha personally tour the camp and, after having done so, the mayor and his wife went home and hanged themselves.

Was General Eisenhower responsible for these twin suicides?  Should he have covered up the Holocaust to protect the emotional wellbeing of those who were complicit in causing or permitting these crimes against humanity?  Could the Holocaust ever be understood and future genocide averted if the evidence of past genocide is whitewashed and suppressed?

Summary

The pro-aborts are desperate to stop the display of our images and they will use every lie at their disposal to intimidate us into hiding the truth.  Don’t let them get away with it … ever.

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When funding or timing prevents us from taking our huge GAP display, we can still win hearts, change minds, and save lives by invading campus with a few “Choice” signs!  Here we are at Tennessee Tech University (TTU).

This was an excellent target because TTU is another school which allows citizens to reserve space for displays, without requiring a student invitation.

On this day, we identified 5 freshmen willing to form a pro-life club on campus!

At upper-right is CBR SuperDuperVolunteer Gary Johnson, who is in a special category all his own!  He is a real blessing to everywhere he goes.  We just need to take him more places!  That’s where your support comes in.  Link here to send Gary to more places … to bless more students!

Below, Deeper Still and CBR volunteer Debbie Picarello can engage students at a very different level than Gary ever could do.  Link here to help Debbie bring hope and healing to post-abortive women … and  men!

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We would love to display our huge Genocide Awareness Project (GAP) at every major university ever year.  But when funding or timing prevents GAP, we can still win hearts, change minds, and save lives by invading campus with a few “Choice” signs!  Here we are at Middle Tennessee State University (MTSU).

This was an excellent target because MTSU is one of many schools where we can reserve a good space without a student invitation.

At upper-right is long-time CBR volunteer Kathy Hardin.  She and her whole family have been a huge blessing to CBR and to many babies and moms.  Below is Kathy’s daughter Karine, who first graced the cyberpages of FAB in 2011.  She’s come a long way since Armenia!  At MTSU, Karine was a force to be reckoned with.  She asked anyone and everyone to take a pro-life pamphlet (bearing abortion photos, of course) and almost nobody refused.

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When she sanctions consumer fraud as a means of victimizing abortion customers, she reveals a view of women that is both archaic and repressive.

Gregg Cunningham recently spoke at a church in Stockholm as part of a month-long European tour.  As perhaps the world’s premier pro-life strategist, Gregg is frequently asked to consult with pro-life leaders in Europe and elsewhere around the globe.  This particular talk was attended by Ida Ali-Abdulla Lindqvist, an extremist abortion advocate who posted a one-sided story on the Swedish state television website.  In this essay, Gregg responds.  Note: your browser can translate the links to English (or something like it).

Swedish Abortion Extremist Clearly Frightened of Abortion Pictures
by Gregg Cunningham

Shortly after my antiabortion presentation at a church in Stockholm, Ida Ali-Abdulla Lindqvist posted an extremist abortion manifesto on the Swedish state television website.  She misrepresented her position on abortion to gain access to our meeting (unnecessarily, because we eagerly welcome our adversaries, particularly if they are journalists) and then misrepresented the events which transpired at that meeting.

Mr. Mats Selander and I advocated the public display of prenatal development imagery and abortion photos to ensure that voters, and especially people contemplating elective pregnancy termination, possess the clearest possible understanding of an unborn child’s humanity and of abortion’s inhumanity.  In advanced societies, healthcare professionals are ethically obligated to present patients with disturbing clinical information, even over their patients’ objection.  The same duty should exist regarding abortion.  Ms. Ali-Abdulla Lindqvist, however, demands that this information be withheld.  Why does she fear the truth?   Because she can’t face the facts without losing the argument.

She incorrectly asserts that our “strongest weapon” is the use of “confusion, shame, and guilt.”  But in reality, our strongest weapon is the truth – the truth which must be seen to be understood.  The truth for which no words are adequate.  The truth revealed in our aborted baby photos.  That truth dispels confusion and can only induce feelings of shame and guilt if abortion is exposed as an indefensible act of violence that kills a real baby – which, of course, is precisely the truth Ms. Ali-Abdulla Lindqvist is trying to hide.

Ms. Ali-Abdulla Lindqvist says our abortion photos are “manipulation” and “mental abuse” of the “most disgusting sort.”  But it is Ms. Ali-Abdullah who is the manipulator and abuser.  Nothing could be more manipulative than abusing women by misleading them into abortions they would have rejected had they been shown the horrifying truth.  When she sanctions consumer fraud as a means of victimizing abortion customers, she reveals a view of women that is both archaic and repressive.

Ms. Ali-Abdulla Lindqvist then falsely accuses us of displaying abortion-related imagery which was not representative of most pregnancy terminations in Sweden.  This is not true.  Because 95% of Swedish abortions occur in the first 12 weeks of pregnancy, 95% of our abortion-related imagery depicts embryos and early fetuses of 12 weeks or younger.  A brief look at our website (www.abortionNO.org) proves this point.

She also criticizes what she mistakenly suggests were a set of questionable “statistics,” but which I clearly explained were not “statistics” at all.  They were merely rough estimates being offered for purposes of discussion.

She refers to a question from a young man who asked whether any of our videos depicted miscarriages.  She intimates that my answer was evasive, but all of our abortion imagery was obtained at abortion clinics.  Women go to abortion clinics for abortions.  When women miscarry, they are generally treated in a hospital or their doctor’s office by the obstetrician/gynecologist who treated them during their pregnancy.  All of our abortion imagery depicts abortions.  Anyone who alleges otherwise is placing themselves on the same moral plain as Holocaust deniers who say Jewish death camp photos are fakes.

Ms. Ali-Abdulla’s racism and gender bias and are on full display as she rages against patriarchy generally and white men specifically.  Half the babies butchered by abortion are male and that alone should give men a voice.  But she is also an anti-Christian bigot.  She asserts that the Swedish Lutheran Church will not be perceived as a “modern institution” unless it suppresses meaningful dialogue regarding abortion.  Censoring speech may be a modern institutional value in some parts of the world, but thankfully not in Sweden.  Christianity is committed to timeless truth, not fleeting modernity.

Ms. Ali-Abdulla Linqvist is frightened of these pictures.  We can hear the fear in her voice.  Like most feminists, she wants no debate over abortion.  She understands that abortion photos make that debate more difficult to suppress.  She understands that abortion photos make that debate more difficult to win.  People yawn at words.  No one yawns at pictures.

New report by Reuters says that graphic anti-smoking ads have resulted in 100,000 people kicking the habit.  Apparently, when people saw pictures of what smoking actually does to people, it motivated them to stop.

You reckon graphic images of abortion might work for the pro-life movement?

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Images like this educated the public on the evils of slavery. Additionally, they created the kind of tension/conflict that (a) forced the public to think about slavery and (b) created a public forum that forced slave traders to defend the indefensible.

You’ve heard the joke:

Inquisitive son:  “Daddy, what’s the difference between ignorance and apathy?”

Preoccupied father:  “Son, I don’t know and I don’t care!”

To end the slave trade, William Wilberforce had to overcome ignorance and apathy in England.  People didn’t know much about the slave trade and simply didn’t care.  It’s the same problem we have with abortion.

CBR uses graphic abortion images to (1) educate the public about the true nature of abortion, and (2) create the kind of non-violent tension that focuses public attention.  We do this because reformers have always done it.

Reformers like William Wilberforce, Lewis Hine, Martin Luther King, and others never defeated injustice by covering it up.  No, they always exposed injustice using graphic images and, in so doing, created non-violent conflict that (a) focused public attention and (b) created a public forum in which evildoers were forced to defend the indefensible.

Gregg Cunningham, director of CBR’s Research Department and our resident expert on the history of social reform, wrote this essay.

William Wilberforce and Graphic Imagery

Dr. Marjorie Bloy notes in “The Anti-Slavery Campaign in Britain” (HistoryHome.co.uk) that one of reformer William Wilberforce’s greatest challenges in abolishing the slave trade and then slavery itself, was the fact that “… many people were unaware of the horrors of slavery ….”

In his book Bury The Chains (Mariner Books, 2005), Adam Hochschild points out that “… in England itself, there were no caravans of chained captives, no whip-wielding overseers on horseback stalking the rows of [Caribbean] sugar cane.  The abolitionists first job was to make Britons understand what lay behind the sugar they ate, the tobacco they smoked, the coffee they drank.”

Eric Metaxas, in his Wilberforce biography Amazing Grace (Harper San Francisco, 2007), echoes Hochschild in explaining why it was vital for abolitionists to make the privations of slavery real to British voters:

Of the many social problems Wilberforce might have thought needed his attention, slavery would have been the least visible of all, and by a wide margin.  In fact, the answer to how Britain could have allowed something as brutal as West Indian slavery to exist, and for so long, has much to do with its invisibility.  Few British people ever saw the slightest hint of it, for only a tiny handful of the three million Africans who had been pressed into British slavery over the years ever set foot on British shores.  They were kidnapped [in Africa] and shipped straight to the West Indian sugar plantations thousands of miles away.  The sugar and molasses from these plantations came to England but who could have known of the nightmarish institution of human bondage that attended their making?  Who could have known that much of the wealth in their nations booming economy was created on the other side of the world by the most brutal mistreatment of other human beings, many of them women and children.  Most British citizens had never seen anyone branded or whipped or subjected to thumbscrews.  They had no idea that conditions on West Indian sugar plantations were so brutal that most of the slaves were literally worked to death in just a few years and that most of the female slaves were too ill to bear children.  Black faces were very rare in Britain in the late eighteenth century, especially before the 1770s, and any blacks one might have seen would probably have seemed to be treated rather well.

The Telegraph.co.uk, explains the importance of expressing the inexpressible savagery of slavery in a feature article headlined “Am I Not A Man And A Brother?” (11 March 2007).  It reported that “Slavery was undermined by the very thing that kept it going – a brutality unendurable by the slaves or by the awakening sensibility of the British public.”  It was awful pictures which “undermined” it, shifting public opinion in support of abolition when nothing else had worked.

No reformer ever defeated injustice by covering it up. William Wilberforce and Thomas Clarkson knew that in order to end the slave trade, they had to expose its horror.

Artists’ depictions of slavery were just as provocative to Eighteenth Century English sensibilities as abortion photos are in 21st Century America.  But abolitionists used them anyway, because slavery was shocking and voters needed to be shocked.  At BBC.co.uk, in the section titled “Religions, William Wilberforce” (last updated 7 May 2011), we read that “… [T]he abolitionists were brilliant at public relations and devised radical new ways of bringing their cause to public attention.”  The writer says “They had pamphlets full of eye-witness testimony.  They had extraordinary graphics such as the famous image of the slave ship, Brookes, which showed captive Africans packed like sardines in a can.  The potter Josiah Wedgewood struck a brooch that depicted an enslaved man on bended knee.  At the bottom of the brooch was the inscription: ‘Am I not a man and a brother?’”  (Source link)

Metaxas says that this disturbing picture of a tortured slave “… was reproduced on snuffboxes and made into cameos that women wore pinned to their dresses and in their hair.  It was also made into made into a letter sealing fob … so even the wax seals on letters would draw attention to the cause.”

For his confrontational tactics, Wilberforce was denounced as an extremist.  In the book William Wilberforce: The Life of the Great Anti-Slave Trade Campaigner, by William Hague (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2008) quotes Wilberforce declaring, “If to be feelingly alive to the sufferings of my fellow-creatures is to be a fanatic, I am one of the most incurable fanatics ever permitted to be at large.”  At BBC.co.uk, in the section titled “Religions, William Wilberforce” (last updated 7 May 2011), we read that:  “For Wilberforce personally it meant enduring vitriolic attacks in the newspapers; he was physically assaulted, he faced death threats and he had to travel with an armed bodyguard.”  (Source link)

Catholic school chaperones tell us that the pictures of abortion we show had more influence on their students than any other speaker or event.

If Simcha Fisher shows up today for the March for Life in DC, she’ll be sorely disappointed when she passes E. Barrett Prettyman Courthouse on Constitution Avenue.  That’s where we will be with our billboard-sized photos of aborted babies.  In her blog at the National Catholic Register, Ms. Fisher advanced “Eight Reasons Not to Use Graphic Abortion Images at the March for Life.”  We beg to differ.  Read her blog here.  Below, FAB resonds to each of her assertions.

There will be children at the march.  First of all, children as young as nine do become pregnant and they do get abortions (we have press clippings to prove it).  In America, a school nurse can take a pregnant child out of class and to a judge who can certify that this little girl is sufficiently mature to make an abortion decision behind her parents’ backs.  It happens all the time.

Even parents who don’t allow their children to watch violence on television often take them to the grocery store, where check-out lines are flanked with magazine covers depicting dead and dying victims of violence, terrorism, natural disasters, etc., some of them as gruesome as anything we use.  They have been seen by countless children whose clueless parents never even noticed.

We have had countless women tell us that nothing less shocking than our abortion photos would have sufficed to dissuade them from killing their children.  So we have to ask ourselves, “Which is worse, children being upset by a picture of abortion or other children being killed by the act of abortion?”

When Christians complain, we ask “Would Jesus use bloody pictures to show people the result of sin?”  Jesus controlled every aspect of his capture, trial, and execution.  He arranged to have Himself beaten so badly, He didn’t even look human (Isaiah 52:14).  His beard was torn off of his face (Isaiah 50:6).  In this condition, He walked through the most crowed part of Jerusalem on the most crowded day of the year.  His bloody body horrified throngs of Passover pilgrims, including large numbers of young children.

He made this disturbing spectacle as public as possible, because he wanted to disturb us with the gravity of our sin (but also bless us with the grace of His forgiveness), despite the fact that many children would be traumatized in the process.  Did He get this wrong?

There will be post-abortive women at the March.  If there are post-abortive women all around us, there are also pre-abortive women around us.  And with as many high-school students as come to the March for Life by the busload, you can bet there are pre-abortive women (and men) in the crowd.  The most compassionate thing we can do for pre-abortive women (and men) is to show them the truth so that abortion is no longer a temptation.

Furthermore, the history of social reform demonstrates that we can never end abortion by covering it up.  So we have to ask ourselves, “Which is worse, women feeling sorrow over past abortions, or the killing never ends?”

Mothers will be there.  Yes, mothers will be at the March for Life with their children.  We will be on the left-hand side of the parade route.  There is ample opportunity for parents to redirect their children’s attention away from the display.  Parents do it all the time.

Other parents don’t try to hide uncomfortable truth from their children.  They use our pictures as a teaching moment, so that their children will know the truth and will not be entrapped by the twin evils of complicity and complacency.

Those are real babies.  At the Holocaust museum and in any book on the Holocaust, you will see pictures of dead people, and those people are very real.  Their bodies are stacked up like chord wood.  Victims of injustice want their plight to be known, and they want injustice to end.  If it is wrong to show pictures of dead victims at the March for Life, it is equally wrong to show pictures of dead victims at the Holocaust Museum.

Public image matters, but changing minds matters even more.  We don’t care what people think about us; we care about what they think about abortion.  Civil rights activists actually wrote Dr. Martin Luther King a letter asking him not to come to Birmingham.  They thought he might undo all the great progress they had made.  They thought his methods were too confrontational.  Maybe they thought his public image was bad for the civil rights movement.

But he went to Birmingham anyway.  He got thrown in jail, and he used his time in jail to write his famous Letter From a Birmingham Jail, perhaps the most important document to emerge out of the Civil Rights Era.  He wrote about the necessity to make people uncomfortable with the status quo.  He said that civil rights moderates were more dangerous to the cause of civil rights than the Ku Klux Klan.

Abortion pictures do not push women into abortion.  We have been told by many, many women that they had decided to abort their babies, but seeing our pictures changed their minds.  We have never heard of any woman who said she had decided not to abort, but seeing our pictures caused her to change her mind and change her mind.

Pictures do not desensitize pro-lifers to the extent that they leave the movement.  Yes, of course we who see the pictures every day don’t react with the same emotion as we used to.  I’m sure that surgeons and emergency room doctors don’t react to blood with the same emotion that they felt when they first entered medical school.  But so what?  Does that make them less effective?  Do they leave the profession?  Are they less committed to saving lives?  Does it make them think that death is not such a big deal?

What people see changes their minds.  To say that pictures don’t force unwilling people to change their minds is simply not supportable by the facts.  When Americans saw pictures of Black men and women being attacked with dogs and water cannons, certainly not all of them changed there minds about racial injustice.  But enough did change their minds to bring about the needed reforms.  When people see abortion photos, certainly not all of them change their minds.  But many do.  Ms. Fisher’s argument is not with us; her argument is with these — women who didn’t abort, people whose minds were changed, people who became more motivated to stand against abortion — and many others who have said that abortion pictures changed their minds.

Last resort?  If people need to see the truth, as Ms. Fisher says, then why should we limit their exposure to once or twice per lifetime?  Why?  Did they broadcast video and publish photos of racial injustice only once or twice?

Finally, Ms. Fisher asserts that we should show abortion pictures only as a last resort.  With more than 50 million dead in this country over 40 years, we have to ask, “If not now, then when?”  I don’t know about Ms. Fisher, but if I am ever kidnapped and my captors are planning my execution, I hope that those who know of my plight won’t wait until I am dead before they decide it’s OK to use every tool in their toolbox to rescue me from death and save my life.

Debbie Picarello

When talking wasn’t enough, abortion pictures did more than talk.  They saved a baby’s life.  Denise was born just a few weeks ago, but pictures saved her life back in May!

Although grieving a previous abortion, her mother Vicki still planned to abort her child.  Fortunately, CBR volunteer Debbie Picarello (who also volunteers with Deeper Still, a post-abortion recovery ministry) was able to show abortion pictures to Vicki online.  Recalling the conversation, Debbie said it was clear that “talking wasn’t enough.”  With your help, CBR had trained Debbie to use abortion pictures … when “talking wasn’t enough.”

The photo that told the story of slavery “to the eye”

I’ve shown this photo to thousands of people … in homes and churches and meeting rooms.  But I didn’t know the story behind the photo until I read it today.  The piece was written by Frank H. Goodyear, III, assistant curator of photographs at the National Portrait Gallery.  The man in the photo was identified as Gordon … only as Gordon … with no last name.  Excerpts:

[Photography] also played an influential role in broadening the national debate about slavery. As this famous photograph suggests, photography was capable of communicating powerful ideas about the so-called “peculiar institution”—ideas that ultimately undermined the prevailing notion that slavery was a benign tradition.  (emphasis added)

***

Recognized as a searing indictment of slavery, Gordon’s portrait was presented as the latest evidence in the abolitionist campaign. An unidentified writer for the New York Independent wrote: “This Card Photograph should be multiplied by 100,000, and scattered over the States. It tells the story in a way that even Mrs. [Harriet Beecher] Stowe [author of the 1852 book, Uncle Tom’s Cabin] can not approach, because it tells the story to the eye.”  (emphasis added)

Link to entire story here.

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. said, "America will never reject racism until America sees racism." Was he wrong?

With abortion pictures, we send a strong message to a culture that prefers to ignore or trivialize abortion.  We also have a message for pro-lifers who think we are too confrontational:  No social reform movement has ever succeeded by covering up injustice.

Social reformers win when they expose injustice and make people uncomfortable with the status quo.  This is perhaps the overriding theme of Dr. Martin Luther King’s Letter From a Birmingham Jail.

Commenting on the WBIR story about our GAP on Market Square, Lissa wrote:

This is no way to win hearts, Dr Armstrong. If anything, you turn people away and they will never hear the message that all life is sacred. Please go watch 180MovieDotCom and learn a loving, Christ-filled way to truly get through to people’s hearts.

I responded:

Ms. Hailey, our operating principle comes from the King family. Dr. Martin Luther King said, “America will not reject racism until America sees racism.” He was successful in bringing social change because he was able to bring about the broadcast/publication of video/photos that made people see what racism was all about. When they saw Black men and women being attacked with dogs and water cannons, they realized that segregation was way worse than they imagined. His niece, Dr. Alveda King, now says, in the same way, “America will never reject abortion until America sees abortion.”

Thomas Clarkson used a diagram of a slave ship to help end the slave trade in England. Clarkson’s biographer Adam Hochschild said that “Iconic images have power because they allow us to see what previously we could barely imagine.” American abolitionists use images to help people see the horror of slavery. Lewis Hine used photographs to show people what abusive child labor looked like.

In every one of these examples, social reformers were successful when they exposed injustice. Can you name one example in which reformers were successful by covering up injustice?

I would encourage you to read the statement by Alabama Clergymen (12 April 1963), which prompted Dr. Martin Luther King’s now-famous Letter From a Birmingham Jail. These well-intentioned clergymen said, in essence, that Dr. King was too confrontational, that his tactics did nothing to solve the problem of racism, and that he should just stay home. Then read his response. He explained why it was necessary to create in society a discomfort with the status quo. Without that discomfort, there is no pressure for change. He explains it much better than I can. If his letter leaves you unconvinced, then there is not much more I can say.

Lisa replied:

No, there isn’t anything more to say if you think that showing huge pictures of dismembered fetuses is changing anyone’s heart for the better. It’s not just “uncomfortable” … it’s shocking, it is revolting, it is offensive and turns people OFF and they are NOT hearing your message … AT ALL.

Further, you are handing the enemies of life ammunition to use against not only you but everyone else that advocates for life, especially that of the unborn. I state that I am pro-life and I am automatically assumed to be “one of those crazy people waving around pictures of fetal tissue” and one step away from bombing an abortion clinic. MY message of love is LOST because of YOUR offensive pictures.

Go look at what Ray Comfort is doing 180movie … HE is changing hearts, or rather, he is opening hearts to the love of Christ and from there Christ is changing hearts and minds. God is using Him to bring love, hope and a message of life to a world mired in sin in the name of pleasure and convenience … and it is working. What you are doing is not.

My response:

They are not hearing our message? Tell that to the nine babies whose lives were saved when their mothers saw the pictures over at UTK the first time. Tell that to Lisa and Suzanne at the end of this video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b8Rk44gn824