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.

Choice sign exhibiting “1st Trimester (10-week) Aborted Fetus”

We often hear from pro-lifers who question our use of the word “fetus” on our GAP signs, Choice signs, and RCC truth trucks.  “Fetus” is the word used by pro-aborts to dehumanize the preborn child, so why would we want to use their word?

First, it is critical to restore meaning to the words that pro-aborts are fond of using, so that when they use their words in public, our side gets the benefit.   The other side is quite fond of the word “fetus,” because it conjures up something subhuman in the minds of so many people.  They will never agree to use our word, so we must restore meaning to their word.  When pro-aborts say the word “fetus,” people who have seen our signs won’t think of a formless lump of cells; they will remember the picture of a human being with arms and legs and fingers and toes.  If we restore meaning to the word, the other side can’t use it to confuse people.

Second, we only have a few seconds with people as we pass them with our trucks.  When they see the truck, we want them to say something like, “Wow, I didn’t know killing a fetus meant killing a being with arms and legs and fingers and toes.”  If we flash the word “child” instead, people might think of infanticide, not abortion.  It won’t make sense to them.  By using the word that they are most familiar with, we reduce the amount of time necessary to convey the message.

Third, we want to reinforce in people that the word “fetus” is just another stage of life … as in embryo, fetus, infant, toddler, adolescent, teenager, young adult, middle aged adult, senior citizen, geezer, etc.

Fourth, we can’t force them to use our word, so perhaps a form of jujutsu might be more effective.  The other side has all the worldly power behind it (the media, the education system, the news media, the entertainment industry, etc.).   Jujutsu is a martial art in which one seeks to manipulate the opponent’s force against himself rather than confronting him with one’s own force.  We want to take over their words so that when pro-aborts try to use them, it turns to our benefit.

Bottom line:  The other side dehumanized the word “fetus;” we are restoring its humanity.

Can we ever use the word, “child?”  Yes, of course!  Suppose  I am talking to a pro-abort who asserts that abortion may be justified based on poverty, personal choice, etc.  I would first show him a photo of a 1st-trimester abortion.  We have to define that word “abortion.”   Then I would trot out the toddler, i.e., ask if it would be OK to kill a 2-year old child for the same reason.   That way, I can focus his attention on the real issue, which is not poverty, choice, etc.  The real issue is “What is the unborn?”

But later in the conversation, when he goes back to “choice” and “rights,” I might force him back to the main point by saying something like, “A parent does not have a right to kill his own child.”  When I use the word “child,” he cannot dispute the statement, so he has to dispute the notion that the fetus is a child.  But our signs use the word “fetus” because this word, juxstaposed with the photos, helps us make our case that the fetus is, in fact, a human child.

In this way, I am using the word “child” in conversation to do the same thing that we used the word “fetus” to do on our signs.  In both cases, we are refocusing our audience on the key point, “What is the unborn?”

RCC truth truck sign exhibiting “1st Trimester (10-week) Aborted Fetus”

.

In the comments appended to the WBIR story on our Urban GAP at Market Square, Canna asserted that nobody thinks abortion is a great thing:

OMG- NO ONE thinks abortion is a great thing- what an IDIOTIC thing to say. No one I know, including myself, is pro-abortion. However, I AM pro-choice. … The points that others are making here are:
1. that no one (few) are pro-abortion, they are PRO-CHOICE and believe the right to bear an embryo to full term is the choice and a matter of the family alone. not your matter.
2. that nearly everyone is a proponent of life and prosperity, but since we haven’t gotten it right yet, why don’t we help those in need of food and health before we force others to bear life. Rights to the unborn are valid but DO NOT PRE-EMPT the rights of the born.
3. regardless of ANYONE’S stance on abortion, your photos are unnecessarily graphic and DO NOT belong on public dislplay, especially in the presence of children. Not only is this rude, it is not an effective tool. ALSO- MOST abortions occur early trimester, when the fetus looks like a tiny lump of cells- not like in your graphics. Would you display graphic images of dead people in front of a DUI offender’s home for all-including children- to see? Of course NOT! Besides, where is the dignity of the deceased you post so proudly on public display??

Child (at right) looks at abortion photos on Market Square.

The  WBIR story on our Urban GAP at Market Square created a flurry of online comments.  A common theme was the fear that small children would see the abortion photos.  In fact, many did.  We saw a few parents who prevented their children from seeing the photos, but most took it all in stride.  One commenter on the WBIR story wrote:

I would never subject a young child to the images of abortion no matter what. Yes, the images are reprehensible and beyond belief, but to show a child these images borders on being reprehensible as a parent and as a human being it would be deplorable. This is not the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s where abortion was considered against the law. Today, it is a woman’s choice. There are medical reasons that abortion is needed. Also, its one thing to protest but Dr. Armstrong and the rest need to keep it decent and clean when in a public place with children around. If you choose to show these images to your children then go ahead but give the parents of other children the right to do the same and show those images to their children if they so choose. You took away the parents right to decide if they wanted to show their children or not.

He actually confirmed, again, whey we show the pictures when he wrote that they were  “reprehensible and beyond belief.”  People don’t believe how bad abortion really is until we show them.

I responded:

On February 23, 1997, Schindler’s List was broadcast by NBC during the family viewing hour. A mini-controversy arose when Congressman Tom Coburn complained that large numbers of unsupervised children would undoubtedly see the very violent video sequences contained in that movie, including the violence of multiple gunshot head wounds.

NBC West Coast President Don Olhmeyer defended their decision, “I just wonder if Congressman Coburn is aware that there was a Holocaust, that millions of people died and it’s not something anybody should ever forget. . . . NBC is extremely proud of its presentation of this unique award-winning film. We think that Congressman Coburn’s statement should send a chill through every intelligent and fair-minded person in America.”

The overwhelming consensus was that NBC was right to show the movie, including all the scenes of violence, so that people could know the truth about what happened in the death camps, and so that people would commit to preventing such a human catastrophe from ever happening again.

We agree. That is why we show pictures of abortion.

We will not submit to a double standard that says (1) it is OK to show violent images that expose an injustice that happened in another place, at another time, perpetrated by other people, even though children might see those images, but (2) it is not OK to show violent images that expose injustice happening here, and now, and perpetrated by our own people, because children might see them.

CBR United Kingdom Director Andy Stephenson was on The Big Question, a program on BBC One, the flagship TV station of the British Broadcasting Company (BBC).   The Big Question on this day was, “Should abortion be a private matter?”

Andy’s answer was “Yes … if …”   Great sound bites you can use:

• There should be unrestricted access to abortion, if the unborn child is not a human being.
• All we’re doing is showing people what they do.
• Why would the truth be intimidating?
• If abortion is such a good idea, why to pictures of it make people so angry?
• It is not a controversial issue that life begins at conception.  If they want to get rid of us, we will leave tomorrow if they can prove to us, with science, that the preborn child being killed is not a human being.
• On filming:  That’s why we film [our own work]; we knew there would be false allegations.  We knew we had to document our displays.  We invite the police to attend every display we do.

Pro-life activists all over the planet are employing CBR-developed methods of legally educating the public about two key facts:  (1) Who this the preborn? and (2) What does abortion do to him or her?

Check out Andy Stephenson on British TV, saying it like it outta to be said:

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j2NRXWLoA_4