Julie and Emily Ascik, Co-Presidents of Carolina Students for Life.  (They both are wearing glasses. Click to enlarge.)

by Mick Hunt

The Genocide Awareness Project (GAP) changes lives among our audience—students, staff, and faculty of our nation’s largest public universities.  And it also changes the pro-life student leaders who host the project, by making them stronger.

In an earlier post, I gave examples of “pro-choice” meanness at UNC, including an account written by CBR Project Director Edie Benchabbat, who described how some UNC students attempted to dehumanize a pro-life student leader, one of the co-presidents of Carolina Students for Life, and how she felt bullied.  Edie also reflected on how we encourage pro-life students for the long term. She wrote about the UNC incident:

Now I look at our role in a different way.  So many pro-life students and adults felt intimidated by the pro abortion-choicers and whispered as they walked by, “Thank you!”  We bring a strength to our students.  We give them the foundation to stand up for the unborn.  They may go out alone sometimes, but I think the level of their impact and the level of confidence in coming face-to-face with evil is stronger with us.  I see us as spiritual, physical, and emotional bodyguards so the pro-life students will blossom into strong advocates for the pre-born children.

And if you think the pro-life UNC student leaders were discouraged by the ill treatment they received, consider what Julie and Emily Ascik, the co-presidents of Carolina Students for Life, wrote after GAP in their letter recommending the project for other universities:

It really is scary and was scary for us to bring the GAP Project to our very liberal, very pro-choice campus.  But it was also probably very scary for Martin Luther King and William Wilberforce to speak up about their causes, especially towards the beginning when they were alone in their stance and when people were afraid their tactics would offend people.  Abortion IS horrible and seeing the pictures of it is horrible, but we must make sure other people know what is happening thousands of times daily in our society.  As William Wilberforce once said, “You may choose to look the other way but you can never say again that you did not know.”

We actually rejoiced when some UNC students staged a counter-protest; it meant they were thinking about abortion.  Contrary to what most people think, having people talking about abortion, even if they are angry and insulting, is a good and productive thing to do.  Yes, it hurts when they say hate-filled and incorrect things to and about you, but as Gandhi once said, “First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.”

Next time, I’ll share some UNC stories about how GAP changed our audience.

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

Lincoln Brandenburg talking with a UNC student
(Click to enlarge.)

by Mick Hunt

“Leftists claim to be the voices of tolerance and diversity; however, the universities they control are the most intolerant and monolithic institutions in American life.  Their notion of diversity is to cover the range from extreme leftist to downright nasty leftist.”  (FAB)

In my experience UNC offered the largest reaction against GAP when we previously appeared in 2005. (But see the positive article on our 2005 GAP on page 13 of the Carolina Journal.)

Then, some 200 students and faculty members surrounded the display with their backs turned away from it, symbolically rejecting its truths, while additionally preventing others from seeing it for themselves. Had they kept this up for longer than 10-15 minutes, police might have taken action, as would have CBR. As it was, we took advantage of the situation by placing our handmade signs throughout their midst, signs that said, “Face the Truth. Choose Life.” After their protest broke up, many of the students stayed to talk with us and view the display.

This past spring (March 31 & April 1) the “pro-choice” response was different. The drum beating and dancing—that sort of thing—we’ve seen the like of it before, but this time our opponents offered something more alarming: Meanness.

Someone at UNC lit our brochure on fire.
(Click to enlarge.)

I’ll list incidents that I personally witnessed.

 A visiting alumnus shouted at CBR’s Georgia State Project Director Lincoln Brandenburg, called him a number of coarse names and shook his finger in Lincoln’s face. Later, without provocation, he challenged me to a fight and offered to hit me across the head with a baseball bat. When I reported this to campus police, they said I need to fill out a warrant for his arrest. I told them they needed to stand closer to him in case he tried to hurt someone.

 Two male students stood along a busy sidewalk, wearing black wetsuits (supposedly condoms) while holding signs featuring explicit, hard pornography and an absurd, filthy “scientifically inaccurate” slogan.

 A black female Planned Parenthood representative mocked a black male student for being a “30 year old undergrad.” (He responded by saying he had served two tours in Iraq.)

 When one of the co-presidents of the student organization that hosted us was standing in front of our display while holding a CBR “Choice” sign, a group of “pro-choice” students surrounded her to pose for mocking pictures, like she was some sort of inanimate object. This was so insulting and I felt bad for her. She is from Asheville and I know her family.

 The worse incident of all is described by Edie Benchabbat, CBR Project Director for North Carolina:

“Emily is co-president of the pro-life club at UNC-CH. She was holding a choice sign and the pro-aborts surrounded her and scared her. Someone from CBR noticed and came to her aid. I was on the other side of the quad so didn’t know what happened. I walked back to get more brochures and noticed her sitting down on the ground behind our display with knees bent and hunched over. She was trembling and crying. I went to her and held her to make her feel safe. She told me what happened. We prayed together. 2 other women joined me and we prayed for her. After 20 minutes, she was settled and ready to go out again with someone around her.”

The meanness I’ve described is only one aspect of doing GAP, probably the hardest part. GAP is always intense, but not often as bad as this. UNC has been the worst that I remember. It wasn’t only the specific incidents, but the entire atmosphere. In summary, we should never believe that it will be easy being a part of transforming our culture into one that values and respects the lives of preborn children.

Next time: Changing lives at the University of North Carolina.

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.

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.

Laurice Baddour shares the Love of Christ everywhere she goes.

Pray for students who need healing.  A young woman walked past, then turned around and came back.  She asked of Ohio volunteer Laurice Baddour, “What would you do in the case of rape, and you had no other choice but to have an abortion?”  Laurice: “Were you raped and had an abortion?”  “Yes, when I was young.”  (She is still so young!)  So they talked.  Laurice shared with her our “Ask the Victim” handout, told her that there are resources for healing, and said that maybe one day she will have regrets and want to access some of these resources.  She walked away abruptly, but as she left Laurice said “Please know I truly care about you and am here for you.”  She looked back, listened, then sadly and quietly walked away.  Such women often suffer great pain and are unable to engage in civil conversation.  God had prepared her heart for a seed of truth.  Pray that this seed will grow and produce the fruit of healing.

The whole family needs healing.  Missie was looking at the photos, at a distance, crying.  Massachusetts volunteer Marie went to see what she could do.  “My boyfriend’s brother’s girlfriend (Susan) just had an abortion and we are all devastated and angry at her.  We all would have helped her and she didn’t let us.”  Missie took information on Rachel’s Vineyard and promised to give it to Susan as soon as her own emotions had calmed down.  She believes Susan will be hurting sooner rather than later.

Bryan McKinney came all the way from Virginia, along with his wife Christie and 17-month-old daughter Elizabeth, to save babies and moms at Michigan State.

Let us follow Paul’s example of praying for the lost.

Brothers, my heart’s desire and prayer to God for them is that they may be saved.  (Romans 10:1)

Pray for students who believe lies.  As is always the case, pro-aborts asserted that the pre-born aren’t human.  Honest students, even those neutral on abortion, were surprised that pro-aborts would base their arguments on something so blatantly false.  (When Does Human Life Begin?)  Pray that these students will come out of denial.

Pray for students who know the truth but lack courage to face it.  Virginia volunteer Bryan McKinney spoke with two female students for a good bit of time.  She answered the usual questions.   Both young women were quiet for a long time and looked up at the pictures of children who had been decapitated and dismembered.   The next day, Bryan saw one of the women standing with the pro-abortion protesters.  When their eyes met, the young woman looked away.  She knew what she was doing was wrong.  Pray that this student will have courage to accept the truth.

Written on our free speech board at Michigan State University: “Intense images … really forced me to think.”

The Genocide Awareness Project (GAP) created such an uproar at Michigan State University (MSU), the Students for Life (SFL) President Lisa Jankowski was elected Chairwoman of the College Republicans!  Congratulations to Lisa!  The CRs know what works, and they want it.

The tension surrounding GAP is not a negative we must overcome.  It is a positive we should embrace, for two reasons.  First, it is an indicator that people are uncomfortable when faced with the status quo.  Isn’t that how we want them to react?  Second, it is a facilitator of social change because it draws more attention, forcing people to think about abortion who would rather not.

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.  (Martin Luther King)

The pro-life students at MSU understood this.  SFL Vice President Vinny Szczerowski wrote

By bringing [GAP] to MSU, we achieved greater interest in our growing Students for Life organization.  The attention given to the uniqueness of this project gave our group a new reputation for being a strong advocate for pre-born children.  Though we were met with fierce criticism, the amount of additional support given to the project and our organization made the efforts all worthwhile.

Why do so many students embrace this project?  Because it works.  Szczerowski wrote

… students even completely changed their once-held pro-choice mentality and began to see what an atrocity abortion truly is.

In other words, GAP works.  People can see it.

Tension compels people to think about abortion, even if they would rather not.

.

Here are just some random comments made by passersby at Oakland University:

“It’s crazy; can I take a picture?”
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“I appreciate what you are doing.”
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“I want to punch you in the face.”
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“I am disturbed; I don’t know what to think.”
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“They are freaking terrible.”
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“You should have been aborted.”
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“That’s really blunt.”
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“Thank you.”
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“It’s just really disturbing.”
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“You guys are just disgusting.”
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“It’s all God’s creation…I don’t know how people can say this is normal, but we have a pretty crazy humanity right now.”
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“Not allowing abortion legally won’t stop it.”
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“I am glad you are doing this and I pray it gets changed in your country.” (Muslim woman)
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“If my girlfriend gets pregnant, she’s going to have an abortion.”  [CBR: “That doesn’t sound like ‘choice’ to me.”]  “I don’t care.  I would make sure she had an abortion.”
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“[Abortion is a] very bad thing; I think it is a loss.”

Silent No More on campus.  Shirts say, “I regret my abortion: Please ask me about it.” When you come and open yourself up to college students, you can help them in ways the rest of us never can.

Tyler, a young man at Oakland University was angry at us.  His girlfriend had been raped and had an abortion.  He told us that when she saw the GAP display, she was quite upset and unable to do anything but sit in her dorm room and cry.  He wanted me to remove the GAP display, and he wouldn’t be satisfied with anything less.

I probably didn’t handle it correctly.  I’m human, too, so I fumble the ball sometimes.  But in the final analysis, Tyler really didn’t need to hear from me.  He needed to hear from somebody he could listen to.  He needed to from a woman (or man) who could relate to the pain of having aborted a child.  Maybe he needed to hear from you.

We must show the truth, because everyone, including women who have been raped and are pregnant, need to see the truth before it’s too late.  We were too late for this couple, but not for others.

But we also need to show compassion.  If you have experienced abortion, please join our team.  Please go with us, so you can explain to folks like Tyler how God loves us in spite of our sin.  You can explain how God can forgive us and heal us from abortion, just as He can forgive and heal us from any other sin.  You can tell them that you know this is true, because you’ve been there.

One post-abortive rape victim told us, “When you talk, I want to punch you in the face.”  If you are post-abortive yourself, I’m willing to bet you will get a different response.

At every university, they basically tax conservative and neutral students (through exorbitant student activity fees) to subsidize left-wing student activism on campus.  They take in millions of dollars in mandatory fees every year, with almost none of it going to conservative events/projects, but huge amounts going to left-wing propaganda events/projects.  A local example is $20,000 of student activity money spent on (Perverted) Sex Week at the University of Tennessee, but that is only the tip of the iceberg.

But occasionally, they do throw us a bone.  At Oakland University (OU), the Students for Life (SFL) applied for and received the funding necessary to pay for GAP.  This happens rarely … very rarely.

As conservatives, we need to be coaching our students to apply for and get money for conservative activities, just like the leftists do.  (We actually pay professors to coach leftist students how to apply for and get this money, but nobody is coaching our students.)  When they apply for money and don’t get it, we should go to court and sue universities over and over again until they are forced to level the playing field.

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.

CBR volunteer Mark Wolf from Columbus, Ohio describes how advocates of genocide often use words to dehumanize their victims.

We encounter many foreign students who know what genocide is.  They know what dehumanization looks like.  That’s because many of them have experienced it … or their families have.

A group of three Armenian students at Oakland University (OU) had lost family members in the genocide in Turkey (1915). They understood it at a personal level, and believed those family members would agree our message of genocide.

She started her life in China. She was a second child, so she started her life as an unwanted child. Most such children in China are killed, but her mother had been brave to save her life. Eventually, she found her way to America, where she was adopted by an American family. As a former unwanted child, her response to GAP was to join the Students for Life and volunteer to help!

Abortion apologists say that abortion is simply a “choice” and its victims are subhuman. This is one of many ways they mimic genocide apologists throughout history.

GAP highlights many ways in which abortion is comparable (although not identical) to other forms of historical genocide.  One similarity is the language used to justify the killing.

For example, pro-abortion protester Lauren Catoni was quoted in the Oakland Post (the OU student newspaper), “It’s actually horrifying that they’re comparing this to genocide because genocide is a widespread movement to eliminate people and abortion is a medical procedure people have when they need it.”

Perpetrators of genocide almost never “eliminate people.”  No, they exercise their “choice” because they “need” to.  Perhaps Ms. Catoni should complete her sentence: Genocide is a widespread movement to eliminate people and abortion is a widespread medical procedure people have when they need to eliminate people they don’t want.

OU SFL President Michelle Anderson changed her mind and brought GAP to Oakland University.  After GAP, she wrote to thank us, “GAP is the perfect project …”

The Oakland University (OU) Students for Life (SFL) opposed the use of abortion victim photos … until they attended the Students for Life of America (SFLA) National Conference in January.

They heard Stephanie Gray of the Canadian CBR describe how social movements have used victim images not only to change hearts and minds, but also to move people to action.  They called us, and because of your support, we were able to answer that call.

OU SFL President Michelle Anderson wrote:

My fears suddenly seemed so minuscule after hearing Stephanie’s talk.  We needed to do this at Oakland University.  There was no way around it.  We are extremely happy that we decided to go through with this campus-shaking project.  The large-scale influence that this project has had on our campus is immeasurable!  We are constantly doing pro-life activities on campus, but there hasn’t been something as grand as the GAP project.  It reached more students in two days than we would while tabling for one hour in the student center every day for two semesters.  Even then, we wouldn’t be able to tell students why abortion is wrong in 3 seconds.  With the GAP project, you don’t even need to use words because the “picture is worth a thousand words” cliché truly applies here.

With your support … only with your support … we can help pro-life student heroes like Michelle change the campus culture, win hearts, change minds, and save lives.

At Virginia Tech, a male student asked what should a couple do if they can’t financially provide for a child.  We talked about community resources and adoption options.  We talked about adopted children who are thankful to be alive.  He was visibly moved, we wondered if he is the father of a pregnant woman’s child.

It occurred to me that our culture is telling young people two contradictory things.

First, they hear a steady stream of flattering remarks about how smart they are.  Stuff like, “You are the smartest group of students ever to attend this university.”  Teenagers already believe they are much smarter than everybody else.  That’s part of being a teenager, but this generation believes they are smarter than George Washington and Thomas Jefferson.

On the other hand, they believe themselves to be so weak and helpless, they can’t possibly take care of themselves, much less take care of their own children.  It has never occurred to them that parents less well-educated and less wealthy than themselves have been raising children for thousands of years.

This kind of thinking is the staple of the political party who promises to (1) provide for their every need, and (2) preserve their the right to kill their own children.  If people figure out that they are plenty strong enough to take care of themselves and their children, the party of dependency and death would become less relevant.