I got an e-mail from a friend of mine.  I’ll call him Josh, because … well … that’s his real name.  Anyway, Josh was preparing for a presentation and he wanted to confirm that abortions exceeded live births in Washington, DC.  Josh is a great guy, but he needed me to tell him why abortion statistics, even if correctly remembered and dutifully repeated, do nothing to change anybody’s mind.  Here’s my reply:

Thanks for being in touch.  This answer to your question is that I don’t know. I just don’t latch onto that kind of data because I’m not really sure it matters. If you were able to get somebody to learn that fact (the ratio of abortions to births inside the DC city limits is greater than 1.0), I doubt it would change anybody’s behavior very much. You’d get a few nods from people in the room, but that’s about it. When we get all worked up about explaining the sheer numbers of abortions (1.2 million a year, 3300 a day, 1 of every 3 or 4, etc), we start to sound like anti-tax/anti-deficit activists who talk about stacking dollar bills to the moon and back. That stuff gets nods from people who are already care, but it doesn’t change their level of participation and it makes everyone else’s eyes glaze over.

Think about it this way. If “only” 5 million Jews had been killed in the death camps, would it have been any less horrifying? For the million who didn’t die, I suppose it would be. But for most of us, the fact that death camps existed pegs our horror meter already, and the statistic (whether 6 million or 5 million or 7 million) makes no difference in our response to it.

The problem with most people’s response to abortion is not that they are insufficiently horrified about millions of abortion. The problem is that most people are insufficiently horrified about every single abortion. In the minds of most people, abortion is a nominal evil, or the lesser of evils, or a necessary evil, or an evil that is so entrenched in society that nothing can be done about it anyway. Many Christians think it’s just another “cause” or “mission activity” among many, all of which cry out for their attention.  Until this changes, we have no hope of winning.

To give you an idea of how the lack of horror about abortion affects our response to it, consider the budgeting of money, staff time, and volunteer time at almost every “pro-life” church.  They spend vastly more resources on professional music presentations every Sunday (led by paid staff), church-run sports programs (organized by paid staff), etc., than they spend on stopping the killing of our own children.  They might send a couple of thousand dollars (out of a multi-million dollar budget) to a Pregnancy Resourc Center (PRC)—money well-spent, to be sure—but not much else.  People who attend those churches are having abortions in astonishing numbers.  And why are the members so complicit and/or complacent?  Because nobody has ever shown them the truth of abortion.  So they rationalize their way over to the clinic and hope the memory of it goes away.  Or they just do nothing.  They give a little money to a PRC and think nothing more about it.  What would happen if these “pro-life” churches started acting like they believe abortion really is killing a baby?  What if they were horrified?  What if they assembled as many people to pray in front of the abortion clinics every week as they assemble for choir practice?  (What if they held their choir practice at the clinic? … Now there’s an idea.)  They will never do this until they are sufficiently horrified about every single abortion that takes place.  Pictures are more important than statistics.

I can tell you that if the average “pro-life” church were as dedicated to stopping abortion as they are to promoting their church choir, this would have been over long ago.  That is why it is so important to force Christians and others to look at a picture of a single abortion. When people get a grasp of how horrifying each single abortion truly is, only then will the statistics start to mean anything.

Would Jesus Show a Bloody Picture?

A crowd gathers during class change at UNC Charlotte.

Every day’s a great day when you’re doing God’s work.  We took our ProLifeOnCampus display to UNC Charlotte (UNCC) earlier this month.  A grandmother taking classes at UNCC asked our White House volunteer Kathy Hardin for some extra brochures.  (Kathy is from White House in 10EC, not DC, for all you people in Rio Linda.)  She said her granddaughter had gotten pregnant and considered abortion but the grandmother told her not to do it if she expected any help from her.   The granddaughter is now 5 months along and keeps asking if she did the wrong thing by keeping the baby.  The grandmother said, “I want some pictures to show her what the wrong thing is!”  The next day the grandmother came back and asked for more brochures to show to the teens at her church, because she said everyone else pretends like none of them ever have abortions.  She said she wished she could bring everyone to see the pictures.

The Truth Truck passes the student center as Caleb displays a "Choice" sing and Abigail hands out pro-life literature. It's a triple whammy!

While the GAP display was set up at the Belk Tower in the middle of campus, our Truth Trucks, “Choice” signs, and educational brochure helped us project pro-life power (the power of the pictures) far beyond the display itself.  Both days during lunchtime, the Students for Life and the Hardin children (Caleb and Abigail) took four “Choice” signs and a hundreds of our “How can you compare abortion to genocide?” brochures down to the UNCC Student Center.  At the same time, our Truth Truck was circling the campus.  One student walked out of the Student Center, saw the signs and the trucks and the brochures and exclaimed, with a mixture of disgust and admiration, “They’re everywhere!”  Which is exactly where we want to be, by God’s grace and with your help.

Please help, because this is a tough economy and some have lost their jobs.  If you still have yours, would you give for yourself and for another?  Thank you so much.

Jana Tutkova, founder of CBR Slovakia, traveled to North Carolina to help this student learn how abortion denies rights of personhood.

We recently returned from taking our ProLifeOnCampus display in North Carolina.  We were invited to Western Carolina University (WCU) by the WCU College Republicans.  There’s currently no pro-life group on campus, but we’ll be working to start one.

Knoxville volunteer Debbie Picarello was able to share the love of Christ with many post-abortive women.  She also spoke with many nominally pro-life Christian students who became committed pro-lifers after being shocked and awed by our huge abortion photos.  They had never seen abortion in their pro-life churches, which explains why 1 in 5 women who abort their babies identifies herself as a “born-again” or “evangelical” Christian.

We also spoke with a number of pro-life students who are now interested in starting a new pro-life student group on campus.  Such groups can have a huge impact on public opinion among their fellow students.

Western Carolina is a major university, but it’s in a rural part of Western North Carolina.  We found few pro-lifers who were able to help us defray the costs of this visit.  Please consider a special gift of $50, $100, or $500 to help defray the costs of this campus visit.  Thanks.

ProLifeOnCampus at the University of Tennessee

I told you it was working.  Here’s yet more evidence.

Dr. Jon Shields of Claremont McKenna College, writing for The Witherspoon Institute, cites our campus outreach project (GAP) as an important causative factor in changing attitudes about abortion among Americans 18 to 29 years old. Click here for his column.

In his column, Dr. Shields cites an essay by political scientists Clyde Wilcox and Patrick Carr in Congressional Quarterly’s Understanding Public Opinion, in which they report that American 18-29 year-olds are not only “less pro-choice than any other age group,”  but “also markedly less pro-choice than [the 18-29 year-olds] in any previous decade.”

Citing these findings, Dr. Shields attributed the growing pro-life consensus among young Americans partly to

“an innovative and massive pro-life campaign on college campuses that has been organized by groups such as Justice for All and the Center for Bio-Ethical Reform.  Collectively both groups have visited well over 100 campuses (many more than once) and drawn large crowds thanks to huge displays of aborted embryos that they set up on university quads.  As I have found in my own research, such images clearly shock many of the students who pass by and draw many others into philosophical conversations with pro-life activists.  These efforts excite precisely the sort of tension between our common cultural belief in the special worth of human organisms and approval of permissive abortion laws.”

It’s working!  If you want us to do more of it, please click here to help me as generously as you can.  Only 20 people can send me and my team to a major college campus every year if they support us as faithfully as they support cable TV.  Please click here to help me and my team visit one more school where babies and moms really need us! 

More information:

• Barak Obama, Abortion, and the Democrats
• Shifting Attitudes on Abortion
• Generational Differences on Abortion Narrow
• Support for Abortion Slips

ProLifeOnCampus at University of Arizona

Here we are at the University of Arizona.  Check out the editorial in the student paper.  They don’t like us — surprise, surprise, surprise — but there is opportunity for you to comment on the editorial.

More trips to major universities are planned for this Spring, but we need your help.  If you want to win hearts, change minds, and save lives on campus, please consider a special gift of $50, $150, $1000, or more.  Click here to invest in this life-saving project.  Please consider stretching yourself a bit, because another baby’s life is at stake.

Check out this analysis by Michael Barone.

To summarize his major points, a fairly large number of Democrats (especially the thirty-seven who opposed ObamaCare in November) represent districts in which the bill is unpopular to wildly unpopular.  Forty-five of their districts went for John McCain.  Mr. Obama and Mrs. Pelosi are whipping these congress-people to go to the wall for ObamaCare but their constituents are pounding them to pull the plug on ObamaCare. 

We don’t have to get the “undecided” Members to announce their opposition to ObamaCare, we just have to keep them from pledging to support ObamaCare.  And in that pursuit we have the tactical advantage of trying to get these guys to do what comes naturally to them:  The cowardly thing!  Nothing at all!  They just want this to go away without having to vote “no” and getting punished by Mr. Obama and Mrs. Pelosi, or “yes” and losing their seats.  If enough of them stick together and refuse to commit, vote counter Rep. Jim Clyburn (the Dem Whip in the House) can’t tell Mrs. Pelosi that she is now within the six or so vote deficit that would embolden her to bring the bill to the floor and then water-board the weakest half-dozen resisters till they caved.  Mrs. Pelosi thinks she can brow-beat five of these guys into submission with the question called and the vote board open but she knows she can’t brow-beat twenty-five.  And she doesn’t want to risk a very humiliating, televised (C-SPAN) defeat.  That is why Mr. Clyburn (who, remember, is the guy actually counting these votes) says the vote could slip till after Easter. 

 Every day we can keep the “undeclared” from “declaring” worsens the odds for Mrs. Pelosi because there is limit to how long even she and Mr. Obama can tie up the entire mechanism of government on this bill. Our trucks and planes clearly foster indecision and as an obscure Air Force Colonel once observed, “He triumphs who merely escapes defeat till his adversary runs out of gas – or becomes progressively more spooked by the scary mid-term elections which are coming nearer by the day.”  Delay is our friend.  It should be the real focus of our prayer.

Please keep praying.  Try fasting  too.  And please keep calling, e-mailing, facebooking, and twittering (see posting below).

• Terre Haute, Indiana
• Terre Haute, Indiana
• South Bend, Indiana
• Indianapolis, Indiana
• Evansville, Indiana

We can’t do this by ourselves.  Your gift of $300 will buy a tank of truck fuel, enough to drive two full days.  Click here to help.

Praying and fasting wouldn’t hurt either.  The bill before the House would set back the pro-life movement for decades.

Goverment health care would deliver a lower quality of health care to your family at a much higher cost to you.  What a concept.  Make no mistake — the purpose of this bill is to destroy the system we have, so that people will later cry out for the Government to come back in and “fix” it.  Read Alinsky’s book and other writings of his disciples (Barak Obama being one of them).  Look at how TennCare pushed a lot of people out of private insurance onto the public dole.  Now the government can’t sustain it, leaving people worse off than they were.

Example Blue Dog Truck Sign

Fox News has reported that another US Congressman targeted by CBR’s Blue Dog Campaign has announced that he will not vote for the current version of ObamaCare.  Rep. Joe Donnelly (D-IN) announced that he “would not vote for it” because it funds abortion.  This report came just hours after CBR announced the next phase of it’s campaign urging voters in selected districts to call their representatives and oppose taxpayer-funded abortion.  Rep. Donnelly was one of those targeted.

This is the fourth such announcement by Blue Dogs in the House which have been targeted by CBR’s ongoing campaign.

The campaign features a fleet of billboard trucks bearing large abortion photos to remind voters that abortion is not health care and consequently should not be taxpayer-funded, either directly or indirectly.  The “truth trucks” will continue to operate until the final vote on ObamaCare is taken.  Click here to see the press release.

CBR can do this only through the generous support of people like you.  Click here to help.  Your gift of $100 would buy fuel for a single day of driving.  $600 would buy fuel for a week!

With Rep. Donnelly’s announcement, this next phase of CBR’s campaign will now focus on these representatives:

• Rep. Brad Ellsworth (D-IN)
• Rep. Baron Hill (D-IN)
• Rep. John Boccieri (D-OH)
• Rep. Bart Gordon (D-TN)
• Rep. Dennis Cardoza (D-CA)
• Rep. Chris Carney (D-PA)
• Rep. Tom Periello (D-VA)

President Obama wants to pass this thing next week. Please help today, because every day counts.

Sharing the healing and hope.

Last night I attended the first fundraising banquet for Deeper Still, a post-abortion healing ministry based here in Knoxville.  Karen Ellison and her team are doing a great job over at Deeper Still.  I first became aware of their ministry when former client and now team member Debbie Picarello volunteered to help with our campus outreach ministry at the University of  Tennessee (UTK).  Debbie is a poster child for what they are doing at Deeper Still.  After experiencing the healing that comes from confession and forgiveness, she is taking that same healing to others.  At UTK, Debbie wore a sign on her shirt that said “I’ve had an abortion; ask me about it!”  Her witness helped us reach post-abortive and other students at UTK in ways we never could have otherwise.  In the following weeks, Debbie took the same message to the students at the University of California at Berkeley.  Hope and  healing are an important part of what we are doing at CBR through our campus outreach project.

First, support CBR’s effort to pressure Blue Dogs to reject ObamaCare with abortion funding. To support, click here. Please do it today; CBR’s trucks are standing by, but I can’t drive them without fuel. One tank of fuel costs $300. Designate for Reproductive Choice Campaign or just e-mail me at Fletcher@ProLifeOnCampus.com.

Second, make 30 phone calls. Please call these 30 Blue Dogs whose votes are up for grabs. Don’t just call your Congressman; call all of them. Source: DickMorris.com. Tell them that the current Senate version and the President’s version both fund abortion, and you oppose funding abortion.

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Abortion Billboard During Rush Hour (Poland)

We just got this message from Mariusz Dzierzawski of the Right to Live Foundation in Poland:

I had been involved in pro-life activity in Poland since 2000. After some years I was a little frustrated due to lack effect of our activity. In December 2005 Gregg Cunningham of CBR came to Poland. I attended meeting with him. His speech was clear and moving, although the proposals were astonishing.

   

After some weeks of thinking, our group decided to follow the way of CBR. The effects are also astonishing. Number of abortion supporters in Poland has dropped rapidly, number of abortion opponents grow rapidly. Today is real possibility to ban abortion in Poland totally. I hope we will exploit the possibility. We are big debtors of CBR.

Click here to see the billboard detail.  Every single time you help us, you help pro-lifers all over the world so something very simple.  Just show people the truth.  What can be more powerful?  Click here to make some pretty amazing things happen all over the world!

The Dem leadership is ratcheting up it’s effort to force ObamaCare into law and pay for every abortion with your money.  Our Blue Dog project has forced several Blue Dog Dems to publicly pledge to oppose any health care bill that fails to prohibit public funding for abortion.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S2MS16qUBAc&feature=player_embedded#

Although successful at getting public declarations from some of the Blue Dogs, there are others whose votes are still up for grabs.  We must force the issue.

Stopping ObamaCare will take all of us.  Please click here to help.  I absolutely need your help.  Your gift of $300 would purchase a tank of fuel to drive this truck.  Your gift of $1,000 would buy fuel for a whole week of driving.

CBR’s campus outreach program is already creating a stir at Florida Gulf Coast University. We haven’t even set up yet, and already there are three items in the Opinion section of the student paper! You may add your comments to any of them.

My interview with Barbara Dooley (regarding the Tebow Super Bowl advertisement) is up.  I taped this interview a couple of weeks ago, but it was actually played today.