The "Art" of Abortion display at Artscape 2011 was visible to thousands.

This report from CBR Maryland Directors Kurt and Samantha Linnemann:

Artscape is the largest art festival in the country, bringing 350,000 people to Baltimore over a 3-day weekend.  We were strategically located in the center of the festival, where thousands upon thousands of people walked past our display.  In addition to 4 GAP signs and 3 hand-held “Choice” signs, we also displayed a banner that said, “The Art of Abortion, The Slaughter of The Innocent.”  All of the signs featured graphic pictures of abortion.  CBR volunteers handed out pro-life literature to passersby.

When we showed the signs, the Baltimore City Police threatened to arrest us.  We simply asked what we were going to be arrested for.  Knowing they had nothing to charge us with, they backed down.  Fifteen police officers stood by and watched our display go up and stay up for the following 3 hours.

Our photos precipitated many meaningful conversations.  But more importantly, thousands of young people, many of whom said they support abortion, were faced with the reality of what abortion does to an innocent human being.   Many were challenged to re-evaluate their pro-“choice” position.

Click here to view pictures from Artscape 2011 

The "Art" of Abortion at Artscape 2011 in Baltimore

Let me get this straight …

• We’re going to be “given” a health care plan
• that we are forced to purchase,
• and are fined if we don’t,
• which purportedly covers at least ten million more people,
• without adding a single new doctor,
• but provides for 16,000 new IRS agents,
• was written by a committee whose chairman says he doesn’t understand it,
• passed by a Congress that didn’t read it,
• but exempted themselves from it,
• signed by a President who smokes,
• with funding administered by a treasury chief who didn’t pay his taxes,
• for which we’ll be taxed for four years before any benefits take effect,
• by a government which has already bankrupted Social Security and Medicare,
• and financed by a country that’s broke!!!!!

What the hell could possibly go wrong?

Michele Bachmann and me

I’m in Washington, DC today a meeting of pro-life leaders from across the USA.  I’m here with CBR Executive Director Gregg Cunningham representing the Center for Bio-Ethical Reform (CBR).

First up was Congresswoman Michele Bachmann.  She’s just as feisty in person as she is on TV!

Later this  morning, Gregg and I will be talking about our latest initiative, the Corporate Accountability Project.  More about that later!

A plea to the pro-life church.

I sometimes have the occasion to visit with pro-life pastors on behalf of the 1.2 million children being killed by abortion annually.  My plea is always the same: We can help you stop abortion in your church; we need your help to stop abortion in the culture.  The result is almost always the same: “No, thank you, we’re doing enough already.”

After one recent e-mail from a pastor, I wrote back (edited):

Thanks for getting back to me.  I wish that I could just delete your e-mail and go seek help where I can find it, but I feel as if it’s my duty to respond.

I don’t know much about your ministry, so some of what I have to say might not apply, but I would ask you to consider how much of this, if any, might be useful to you.

In all candor, I have to tell you that abortion is happening in America with the permission of the “pro-life” church.  We say we believe abortion is systematic murder, but we don’t act like we believe it.  I don’t know what you are already doing on behalf of unborn children at your church.  I can’t know all that you are doing.  But I can tell you that when we look at what the “pro-life” Church is doing as a whole in this country, it all adds up to almost nothing.  The lone exception is the network of pregnancy support centers that are run by Christians.  They do heroic work.  They are woefully under-funded, under-staffed, and under-visited by Christian couples who, in large numbers, patronize abortion clinics instead.

According to the Guttmacher Institute, 1 in 5 women having an abortion identifies herself as a “born-again” or “evangelical” Christian, and the rate of abortion among practicing Catholics is almost the same as the rate of abortion in the general culture.

Christians are aborting their babies in staggering numbers and Church is not doing much at all to stop the killing, neither within the walls of the church nor in the culture at large.  Christians are complicit and/or complacent, in large measure, because nobody has shown them pictures that prove abortion is an act of violence.  They know only what the abortion industry has told them: that the preborn child is a blob of tissue and abortion is just the removal of some cells.  If we don’t show pictures of abortion in our churches, then babies are dying that might have been saved.

If we don’t show pictures of abortion in our communities, then babies are dying that might have been saved.  Every pro-life Christian leader with whom we converse believes that he, his ministry, and his church are doing everything they should be doing.  They are doing everything that God is calling them to do.  They make these claims despite the fact that they are not even warning their own young people of the horrifying truth of abortion.  Nor are they doing very much at all, if anything, to stop the killing outside the church.  This compels us to one inescapable conclusion: Either (1) God doesn’t care about abortion and truly is not calling His church to respond, or (2) God is calling His people to be a witness against evil, and His people simply are not answering His call.

We believe the latter to be the case.  In your e-mail, you mention that there are “widespread concerns about the approach” that we take to educating people about abortion, yet you never articulate what those concerns are.  I am particularly perplexed when I reflect on the fact that we are taking the exact same approach as William Wilberforce, Thomas Clarkson, the abolitionists of the 1800s, Lewis Hine, and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.  In fact, even Jesus Himself used a horrifying graphic image to help us understand the consequences of sin.

Not trying to be flippant here, but what did all these guys do wrong?  If anybody on your leadership team would be willing to meet with me to discuss that question, I’d welcome the opportunity.   Frankly, if I’m wrong, I’m desperate to know that I’m wrong, so that I can change.  But if I’m right, then babies are dying that could have been saved.

If there is any progress to be made, I’m open to whatever next step you suggest.

This offer is open to all pro-life pastors.  Please contact me here to see (1) how we can help you stop abortion in your own church and (2) how you can help us stop abortion in the larger culture.

It is time for the new game, “Who Said It?”  I will give you a quote and you have to guess what great American said it.

A.  “Let me be absolutely clear.  Israel is a strong friend of Israel’s.”

1. Barack Obama
2. Dan Quayle
3. Sarah Palin
4. George W. Bush

B.  “I’ve now been in 57 states, I think one left to go.”

1. Barack Obama
2. Dan Quayle
3. Sarah Palin
4. George W. Bush

C.  “On this Memorial Day, as our nation honors its unbroken line of fallen heroes, and I see many of them in the audience here today.”

1. Barack Obama
2. Dan Quayle
3. Sarah Palin
4. George W. Bush

D.  “What they’ll say is, ‘Well it costs too much money,’ but you know what? It would cost, about. It it it would cost about the same as what we would spend. It. Over the course of 10 years it would cost what it would costs us. (nervous laugh) All right. Okay. We’re going to. It. It would cost us about the same as it would cost for about hold on one second. I can’t hear myself. But I’m glad you’re fired up, though.. I’m glad.”

1. Barack Obama
2. Dan Quayle
3. Sarah Palin
4. George W. Bush

E.  “The reforms we seek would bring greater competition, choice, savings and inefficiencies to our health care system.”

1. Barack Obama
2. Dan Quayle
3. Sarah Palin
4. George W. Bush

F.  “I bowled a 129. It’s like – it was like the Special Olympics, or something.”

1. Barack Obama
2. Dan Quayle
3. Sarah Palin
4. George W. Bush

G.  “Of the many responsibilities granted to a president by our Constitution, few are more serious or more consequential than selecting a Supreme Court Justice. The members of our highest court are granted life tenure, often serving long after the presidents who appointed them. And they are charged with the vital task of applying principles put to paper more than 20 centuries ago (2000 Years?) to some of the most difficult questions of our time.”

1. Barack Obama
2. Dan Quayle
3. Sarah Palin
4. George W. Bush

H.  “Everybody knows that it makes no sense that you send a kid to the emergency room for a treatable illness like asthma, they end up taking up a hospital bed, it costs, when, if you, they just gave, you gave them treatment early and they got some treatment, and a, a breathalyzer, or inhalator, not a breathalyzer. I haven’t had much sleep in the last 48 hours.”

1. Barack Obama
2. Dan Quayle
3. Sarah Palin
4. George W. Bush

I.  “It was interesting to see that political interaction in Europe is not that different from the United States Senate. There’s a lot of, I don’t know what the term is in Austrian, wheeling and dealing.” (In case you don’t get it, there is no Austrian language.)

1. Barack Obama
2. Dan Quayle
3. Sarah Palin
4. George W. Bush

J.  “I have made good judgments in the past. I have made good judgments in the future.”

1. Barack Obama
2. Dan Quayle
3. Sarah Palin
4. George W. Bush

The answers to Questions A – J are all the same.  Barack Obama.  How did you do?

But remember, according to the media, George W. Bush et al. are supposed to be the village idiots, while Barack Obama is the “brilliant genius.”

Here’s an interesting quote.  FAB agrees with all of it except the last sentence.  Contrary to this person’s lament, we actually deserve the politicians we get.

“The fact that we are here today to debate raising America’s debt limit is a sign of leadership failure.  It is a sign that the US Government can not pay its own bills.  It is a sign that we now depend on ongoing financial assistance from foreign countries to finance our Government’s reckless fiscal policies. … Increasing America’s debt weakens us domestically and internationally.  Leadership means that ‘the buck stops here.’  Instead, Washington is shifting the burden of bad choices today onto the backs of our children and grandchildren.  America has a debt problem and a failure of leadership.  Americans deserve better.”

— Senator Barack H. Obama, March 20, 2006

For many months, we have celebrated the conversion of Abby Johnson from abortion clinic director to pro-life activist.  Her conversion is highlighted in her new book, UnPlanned.  We’ve noted here that her conversion was based on seeing pictures of ultrasound.

Despite her support for using graphic image displays (like GAP and the JFA exhibit)  to educate college students about abortion, she has spoken against their use outside abortion clinics.  She reasons that the photos had no effect on her, nor on the women who saw the photos and had abortions anyway.  Of course, this reasoning fails to account for the women who saw the photos and never came into the clinic at all.

We were intrigued by this statement that she made on her Facebook page:

It wasn’t the graphic nature of the ultrasound that turned me away from abortion.  I had seen graphic images before. … I had worked in the lab where the body parts of babies were reassembled.  It was the humanity.  Seeing a child suffer and die, a child who should have been protected.  Humanity is present from the moment of conception.  We must fight to protect it!

This reminds us of something that Joel Belz (World Magazine) wrote a few years ago that we all thought was quite strange at the time:

… when I take issue with Mr. Cunningham’s gruesome pictures, it’s not because they are overly repugnant.  I take issue because they aren’t repugnant enough.  But gripping the heart of the viewer is a subtle matter.  (Not dramatic enough, Joel Belz, World Magazine, January 11, 2003)

Nobody but Belz had ever suggested that our abortion photos were not dramatic enough.  But he was hoping for an image that would capture the precise moment between life and death, the kind of image that Johnson saw on that ultrasound screen.  He went on:

Real emotional involvement comes not with an overly explicit portrayal of death—but with a nuanced portrayal of the delicate balance between death and life.  That’s why the candid photo of a young Vietnamese girl running naked down the highway to escape the horrors of napalm probably had as much influence in the late 1960s as any other single factor in turning American public opinion against the war in southeast Asia.  When the photographer snapped that picture, there were almost certainly plenty of dead bodies lying around.  But what memorably captured the hearts of onlookers around the world was the reality of a young woman teetering between life and death.  And that subtlety changed the course of a war.

Such subtlety has generally eluded us in the war against abortion.  We came close, perhaps, in that wonderful and widely circulated operating room photo a year ago showing a tiny baby’s hand reaching up through the incision in his mother’s abdomen.  But that very pro-life picture, breathtaking as it was, said nothing of the terror of abortion.

There were two other images from Vietnam that he could have mentioned (source):

1. The “Burning Monk” photo, taken June 11, 1963, when Thich Quang Duc sat down in a busy Saigon intersection and set fire to himself to protest the South Vietnamese government.
2. The “Tet Execution” photo, taken February 1, 1968,  captured the precise moment that a Viet Cong prisoner was executed at point-blank range by the chief of the South Vietnamese National Police.

Both of these photos also capture that moment between life and death that Belz was talking about.  We’re guessing that’s why these three photos were perhaps the three most influential photos of the Vietnam era.  Belz hoped that our movement would capture a similar image of abortion.

But until somebody takes that photo, we’ll keep showing the ones we have!  And to be fair, it would be wrong to assume that most people who see our pictures are operating at anywhere near the level of denial that Abby Johnson exhibited when she was running that clinic.  Her case is very atypical and not at all like most people we encounter.  Most people who see the photos, particularly young people, have not yet had one abortion, let alone run a clinic where thousands were performed.  They cannot sustain, at least not for very long, the level of denial that Johnson conjured up each of the many times she looked at abortion pictures outside, and dead bodies inside, that clinic.

Further, we’re convinced that Johnson’s seeing the abortion photos could have had a subconscious effect that actually did contribute to her eventual conversion.  That’s conjecture on our part, but it is quite possible that the photos played a role at the subconscious level that even Johnson doesn’t fully appreciate.

This is scary.  Link here.  Seems that George Soros and his friends have concocted a scheme, which they’ve been working on for 5+ years, to manipulate elections in key battleground states.

Two things we know for sure:

1. We’ll never read about this in the MSM.
2. If any conservative people/groups did this, the MSM would work overtime to “expose” the “scandal.”

Full story here.

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John Kerry voted for it before he voted against it.  Anthony Weiner lied before he told the truth (but only because he had to).  And now Planned Parenthood told the truth in private while lying in public.

What?  PP told the truth?  Say it ain’t so, Joe!  That’s stunning news.  But if they’re lying and truthing at the same time, do they really deserve partial credit?

Earlier today, Live Action released a video in which callers to Planned Parenthood clinics in Indiana actually told the truth.  YIKES!  PP admitted, truthfully, that patients on Medicare need not depend on PP, but can obtain the services they need from other health care providers in their communities.  This during an ongoing national campaign in which PP falsely claims that  poor women in Indiana will lose access to vital health care services if they cannot go to Planned Parenthood.

From the Live Action website:

In an official press release, Planned Parenthood CEO Cecile Richards claimed that Indiana’s defunding of Planned Parenthood would “take away health care from thousands of women in Indiana.” Last week, Live Action’s undercover investigators called 16 of the 28 Indiana Planned Parenthood clinics posing as women on Medicaid concerned about where they could receive services if Planned Parenthood’s funding was not restored.

Planned Parenthood staffers at all 16 locations admitted that Medicaid women would still have access to medical care after the defunding. Staffers suggested local health clinics or state-assigned primary care physicians for Medicaid patients: “Your primary care doctor should be able to do [a Well Woman exam,] I mean, that’s what they’re there for,” said a Planned Parenthood in Michigan City, while the Merrillville Planned Parenthood said of a local community health center, “They have the same services we have.”

“According to Planned Parenthood’s own statistics, their 28 clinics serve less than 1% of Indiana Medicaid patients, yet they do more than 50% of Indiana abortions,” notes Rose. There are over 800 other Medicaid providers available to these women in the counties with Planned Parenthood clinics alone.”

Click here for more on this story.  Check out the video here:

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UqLL-v0JpY0

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After seeing the images on the truck, she said, "I knew I had to choose life for my child."

We hear from lots of supporters (including my own mom) who tell us, “I love your work on campus, but I’m not so sure about your truck!”

Well, Mom, this baby’s for you!

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

Judge Tanya Walton Pratt of the US District Court, Southern District of Indiana, has upheld a key provision of an Indiana law that requires requires women to be informed that “human physical life begins when a human ovum is fertilized by a human sperm.”

The court disagreed with Planned Parenthood’s argument that the statement is “misleading.”  From the court order:

Here, the mandated statement states only a biological fact relating to the development of the living organism; therefore, it may be reasonably read to provide accurate, non-misleading information to the patient.  Under Indiana law, a physician must disclose the facts and risks of a treatment which a reasonably prudent physician would be expected to disclose under like circumstances, and which a reasonable person would want to know.

Well, DUH!

In another part of the order, Judge Walton temporarily suspended a provision of the law that defunds organizations like PP.  The Alliance Defense Fund believes that this injunction is likely to be appealed.  For more details and links, click here.

Update:  Reuters reports that Indiana has already filed the appeal.

Abortion Warning Label

You may have heard about the new regulations on tobacco packaging that have been promulgated by the US Department of Health & Human Services.  They are saying what we have said all along.  Pictures work!

Here are some points and counterpoints.  Please comment.

Frequency.  21% of Americans smoke.

• 43% of women have abortions.

Deaths.  Smoking and other tobacco use is the “number one cause of preventable death” in America, claiming more than 440,000 lives a year, according to HHS Sec. Kathleen Sebelius.

• Actually, abortion is the number one cause of preventable death in America, claiming more than 1.2 million lives every year.

Verbal warnings not effective.  HHS believes current verbal warning labels are not as effective as they need to be, because they are ignored.

• Debates and speeches will not end abortion, because they are ignored.

Knowledge.  “With these warnings, every person who picks up a pack of cigarettes is going to know exactly what risk they’re taking.” (HHS Sec. Kathleen Sebelius)

• When people see abortion photos, they will know exactly what they are doing.

Gross factor.  “They are [really gross].  We want kids to understand smoking is gross, not cool.” (HHS Sec. Kathleen Sebelius)

• We want kids to understand killing preborn children is gross, not cool.

Immunity.  People have become immune to the old labels and really didn’t see them anymore. (Thomas Glynn, American Cancer Soc.)

• People don’t think about abortion in any kind of analytical way. Even “pro-life” Christians have become complacent about abortion and really don’t pay any attention to it.

Reminder that smoking kills.  “For smokers, it’s a new and very visible reminder that smoking can harm them, harm people around them, including children.” (Thomas Glynn, American Cancer Soc.)

• For abortion-vulnerable parents, abortion images are a very visible reminder that abortion kills their children.

Images are for everyone.  “For nonsmokers, it’s a reminder that smokers need their help and concern as far as quitting. The labels are not just for smokers, the labels are for anyone interested in public health.” (Thomas Glynn, American Cancer Soc.)

• For people not personally at risk of abortion, graphic images are a reminder that women and families need their help in choosing life. The images aren’t just for mothers, the images are for everyone interested in any mother’s wellbeing and that of her children.

People responding.  The American Lung Association says that calls to their stop-smoking hotline have spiked since the publicity over the new images.

• The first time abortion images appeared at the University of Tennessee, 9 women chose life (that we know about).

Staring them in the face.  “For decades, Big Tobacco got away with slick marketing campaigns that fooled the public into thinking smoking was glamorous – and now we’re turning the tables on them. Each time a smoker reaches for a pack of cigarettes, the deadly truth will be staring them in the face.” (US Sen. Frank Lautenberg)

• For decades, Big Abortion got away with slick marketing campaigns that fooled the public into thinking that abortion was not a horrific act of violence, and now we’re turning the tables on them. Each time an abortion-vulnerable person sees one of our signs, the deadly truth will be staring them in the face.

We’re glad this young lady is on our side!

We first became aware of Lia Mills about a year ago (link to previous story/video).  Here’s another one of her gems.  These are all very good arguments that we incorporate in our own Pro Life Training Academy.

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

Can you tell the difference between a conservative, a liberal, and a progressive?

When a conservative wants to buy your vote, he puts his hand in his own pocket and pulls out some cash.  Maybe a pint of whiskey.

A liberal sticks his hand in your pocket, looks you right in the eye, and promises to fight for “your fair share.”

A progressive

1. insults you,
2. grabs your money from the liberal,
3. borrows even more from the Chinese,
4. hands the bill to your children, and then
5. sneers at you as he walks away.