Nicole and Stephanie at Open Mike.

As I reflected on the range of emotions from our GAP excursion to Florida, the opening lines from Charles Dickens’ great novel came to mind:

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness … it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair …

Hope that’s not too literarial for all you people in Rio Linda.

Anyway, I am hopeful for the future when I think about the team of young people who accompanied us to the U of North Florida (UNF) and Florida State U (FSU).  They gave of themselves so freely, so that others might live and live more abundantly.  I was blessed to be with them.

But I can’t escape despair when I reflect on some of the students we encountered – students who believe that unrestrained sex (anywhere, anytime, with anybody) is another “entitlement” to be demanded, rather than a curse to be avoided.  They don’t know about — indeed, they don’t want to know about — the physical, emotional, and spiritual dangers inherent in the lifestyle they’ve embraced, not only for themselves, but for others as well.

The ups and downs of the week were personified by two young women we met along the way, Julie and Brandi.

“I cried until I couldn’t breathe.”

We had been to UNF in 2009.  As with every GAP, many students had said our pictures had changed their minds.  But we didn’t know about Julie.  She was a freshman at the time.

Fast-forward to February 21, 2012.  CBR staffers Nicole Cooley and Stephanie Gray had been holding “Open Mike” for nearly 2 hours.  They had withstood an intense barrage of pro-abortion artillery.  Just before they were about to close it down for the day, a young lady stepped forward and asked for the microphone.  She remembered when we came before.  She had been pro-choice.  She had been really angry.

“I thought your pictures were disgusting,” she said of that first encounter, “but they followed me home.  They followed me for several days.  And I went online and looked up a video of abortion.”

After seeing that video — likely the Choice Blues video featured on AbortionNo.org, a CBR website — she said, “I cried until I couldn’t breathe.  I changed at that moment from pro-choice to pro-life.”

What a blessing to hear those words!  On this day (in 2012), Julie had actually left campus for the day but had come back to complete a forgotten errand.  She parked where she doesn’t usually park.  She didn’t know why.  She walked a route she doesn’t usually walk.  She didn’t know why.  Then, she saw the Open Mike and decided to speak.  I told her that God had arranged it for her to come and give us much-needed encouragement!

She said we were changing many more hearts and minds than we could imagine. See Julie tell her story in the video below!

“That’s what vaccines are for.”

At FSU, it was clear that Brandi is quite intelligent, but like most of us, she struggles to blindfold her own prejudices, even for a few minutes.  She was much more interested in lecturing than listening.  Nothing I had to say could possibly be worth considering.  I’ve been around teenagers before, so I’m familiar with the disorder.

She did, as I recall, accept our position that preborn children deserve protection in the 3rd trimester, but I don’t think she ever told me what morally relevant criteria makes it OK to kill a 2nd-trimester child.

It is difficult to advance a coherent argument when you’re being interrupted at every turn.  We think it was their plan to come out en masse and interrupt each of us in mid-sentence so that nobody could hear us finish a complete thought.  Most of the time, she was interrupting to lecture me on things I had already tried to say myself.  Finally, I interrupted her, “Brandi, I’ve got a PhD in engineering, I know the difference between science and philosophy.  I know the difference between facts and conclusions.”

She asserted that even though the preborn child has structures you can see, they are not persons because the cells are yet undifferentiated.  (Which isn’t true, by the way.)  Anyway, the obvious question, which I did manage to get out, was, “Why should we accept your assertion that personhood should depend on degree of cell differentiation?”  I got no answer.

At that point, she changed the subject to contraception.  (CBR takes no position on contraception, but we do oppose any agent that acts as an abortifacient.)  She asked why we don’t hand out contraceptives, as if they are the silver bullet that would end abortion, if only we would distribute our fair share.  I replied that 54% of all abortions were performed on women who used contraceptives in the month in which they got pregnant (source).  People at FSU have ample access to inexpensive (if not free) contraception, but they still get abortions.

She countered with the unsubstantiated claim that the 54% reported by Guttmacher were largely people who ran out of contraceptives mid-month and could not afford to buy more.  [Note how silly this is: people are too poor to pay for a $1 contraceptive, but they can afford a $500 abortion .]

I told her that contraceptives fail, and it is not our goal to merely reduce the number of abortions.  Our goal is to get rid of the whole bloody mess.  And besides, I said, we have no desire to encourage people to put themselves at risk for deadly STDs.  Condoms fail, and even when they work properly they are only marginally effective against some diseases, particularly human papillomavirus (HPV).

That’s when she said, “That’s what vaccines are for.”

I was surprised by her candor.  “Brandi, is that the best you can do?  Counsel people to put themselves at risk for deadly diseases and depend on a vaccine for protection?”  As any safety engineer will tell you, the first rule for minimizing risk is to remove the hazard altogether.  But Brandi would encourage teenagers to engage in potentially deadly behaviors with only a thin layer of latex as protection.  Oh yes, the latex and a vaccine.

Or is it 25 different vaccines?  When I was Brandi’s age, there were really only two STDs.  It had been that way for centuries.  Now, a mere 40 years later, I’m told there are more than 25 different STDs.  The Associated Press reports that 1 in 4 teen girls has at least one.  What changed?  More contraceptives?  More Planned-Parenthood-style sex education?  More reckless and deadly behaviors?  Yes, yes, and yes. Of course we don’t oppose truthful education, but we do oppose encouraging teenagers to engage in reckless and self-destructive behaviors.

Perhaps latex and vaccines are the best Brandi can offer.  People on the Left apparently believe that people are so helpless, they cannot possibly control themselves where sex is concerned.  So instead of addressing reckless and deadly behaviors, they insist on latex and vaccines.

And they insist on it, not only for their own children, but for ours as well.  And the rest of us should pay for it.  And when our children get sick anyway — many will — too bad.  And when they get pregnant anyway — many will — the rest of us should pay for the abortions.  No thanks.  Leave me and my family out of it.

Our culture has become a cesspool, deadly for some, and I fear that the worst is yet to come.  Our only hope is a miracle.  Fortunately, God is in the miracle business.  If we pray and fast and sacrifice much, who knows what He will do?

Perhaps the Brandi of today will be the Julie of tomorrow.

Notes:

1. Wikipedia reports that the typical failure rate for condoms is 15%, and the perfect-use failure rate is 2%.  Those numbers are for pregnancy prevention over a 1-year period, not the prevention of STD transmission.  A woman can become pregnant only a few days a month; a person can contract an STD on any and every day of the month.  The more times a person engages in sex, the more opportunities for condom failure, so a person’s cumulative risk for catching an STD increases every time.
2. Since returning from Florida, I have run across a 2011 paper by Peter Arcidiancono (Duke University), Ahmed Khwaja (Yale University) and Lijing Ouyang (Centers for Disease Control).  They concluded, “Programs that increase access to contraception are found to decrease teen pregnancies in the short run but increase teen pregnancies in the long run.” (Source)  More good information here.

CBR's staff member (and our hero) Sarah Cleveland speaks to group of FSU students with Edmund Burke on her back. Now that's heavy!

Day 1 of the Genocide Awareness Project (GAP) at Florida State University (FSU) was a huge success.  Large crowds gathered to view the signs and listen to our team explain the facts about prenatal development and abortion.

Media coverage here (includes video) and here.  Both stories implied that “hundreds of students” were “fired up” and “outraged,” but compared to recent trips to FSU, it was pretty tame.

I was able to pray with one student who had been abused as a child.  I prayed that God would reveal himself to this young man in a powerful way.  As an atheist, he was probably skeptical, but he let me pray for him nonetheless!  I hope you will pray for him as well.

The FSU crowd was large and engaged, but peaceful.

She looked at the pictures and exclaimed, "You came to my school! You sure changed my mind."

I’m in the Jacksonville Airport, headed back to Knoxville, wrapping up my 4th week on the road.  We’re getting ready for our campus outreach (GAP) at the U of North Florida (UNF) and Florida State U (FSU) later this month.  Lots of enthusiasm for our Pro Life Training Academy on February 19.

Thanks to God for all the families in Jacksonville and Tallahassee who will house and feed our traveling team of 26 missionaries, including 14 Canadian students who will be learning how to win hearts, change minds, and save lives.

After I landed in Jacksonville, Kenyana fixed me up with a rental car.  As she filled out the paperwork, she asked, “What brings you to Jacksonville?”

I told her, “I’m a radical right-wing lunatic troublemaker.”  I gave her my card.

She looked at it, “Pro-life.”  Then I showed her the photo of our GAP project on the back of my card.  She got excited, “You came to my school!”

“Where did you go to school?” I asked.

“UNF!”

“Yes, we were there about 3 years ago.”

Without any coaxing at all, Kenyana offered, “Well, you sure changed my mind.  I didn’t have any idea what abortion is.  None of us did.”

Seth Drayer

We are indebted to CBR’s Seth Drayer for sharing this encounter with a student at Florida State University.

“She called me up and told me she was pregnant, that she was going to keep the baby. Two weeks later, she called and told me she’d gotten rid of it.”

I looked at the young man standing before me. “How do you feel?” I asked.

“Oh, man . . . I don’t want anyone to feel what I feel.”

Moments before, I had withdrawn from GAP to catch my breath. The verbally violent protestors, the student playing the accordion loudly in front of me to stifle conversation: all of it was choking my love for the students at Florida State University.

After reflection and prayer, I returned to the display. And then I met Chris.

“Do you have pictures of an 18 week-old?” he asked.

Immediately, I knew why he was asking. “Yeah, follow me.” I led him to our prenatal development sign and pointed to the 18 week image: a close up of the baby’s face. “Is that how old your baby was?” I asked cautiously.

Chris nodded. His eyes began to water. “It’s not right,” he said. “I’m the kind of guy who always protects. And here, the one person I was supposed to . . .”

And then he asked me a question I did not want to answer: “Did he feel it?”

I wanted to tell Chris that the baby felt no pain during the abortion, to mask the barbarity of it and lessen Chris’s own suffering. But, he needed the truth. When I shared it with him, he could only shake his head in defeat.

Then, I told him that I know what it feels like to be a father stripped of his duty. I shared with him the empty powerlessness I had felt when Aubrie and I lost our own child by miscarriage. Fathers are meant to protect their children—yet neither Chris nor I had been able to do so.

“Remember this, Chris,” I told him, “you are and always will be a father.”

Chris returned the next day. His countenance had changed completely. He told me he had accepted the reality of his pain. He had brought a friend to show him the picture of “his” 18 week baby. He was even smiling.

Chris had needed someone to validate his pain. I had needed someone to remind me why I was there. I praise God for allowing us to meet.

Winning hearts, changing minds, and saving lives at Florida State University

CBR’s Florida GAP tour continues.  Wednesday and Thursday, GAP made it’s 3rd appearance at Florida State University.

Media:  FSU Student Newspaper