by Gregg Cunningham

CBR strongly believes that a post-abortive woman is abortion’s second victim, and that abortion already punishes women with tragic severity without ever prosecuting them.

We understand experientially that every woman who aborts knows that what she is doing is wrong, but few understand how wrong.  The humanity of the child is systematically hidden from her by society.  The inhumanity of abortion is methodically hidden from her by society.  Women are lied to about prenatal development and abortion by their teachers, the press, and the entire medical establishment.  The pro-life movement and even the church have unwittingly conspired with Planned Parenthood to hide the horror of abortion.

We allow them to be lied to and then some would punish them for believing the lie?  Where is the love in that betrayal?

Countless pregnant women have told us they have changed their minds about “pregnancy termination” when shown the inexpressible evil of abortion.  Countless post-abortive women have told us they would have never aborted had someone shown them that truth before instead of after they aborted.

The Centers For Disease Control report that nearly half of all abortions are performed on women who have already had one or more previous abortion.  Post-abortive women are among those most at risk of aborting, and are, therefore, among those in greatest need of seeing our deeply disturbing abortion photos – lest they do it again!

These women are not without fault, but it is moral fault, not criminal fault.  The remedy is spiritual, not penal.  They are often panic-stricken.  Many are being coerced by threats of abandonment made by boyfriends, fathers, husbands, etc., who say “This pregnancy will ruin your life!”  What they really mean is “This pregnancy will ruin my life!”

It is, thankfully, impossibly unlikely that the public (even the pro-life public) would support the enactment of criminal penalties regarding post-abortive women.  The mere attempt to enact such legislation would forever discredit our movement.

The enactment of such an insensitive penalty would merely be a pyrrhic victory for the most vindictive among us, because police would virtually never be willing to arrest post-abortive women; prosecutors wouldn’t charge them; juries wouldn’t convict them; and judges wouldn’t imprison them.

Society has already entered into a period of shocking lawlessness when authorities are refusing to enforce enormous numbers of laws.  All that would result from the futile prosecutions of post-abortive women would be a black eye for pro-lifers whose lack of compassion would confirm the accusations that we are misogynous bullies who hypocritically claim to care about the suffering of post-abortive women and then brutalize them as savagely as the abortion industry.

Gregg Cunningham is the Executive Director of the Center for Bio-Ethical Reform (CBR) and a frequent contributor to FAB.

The leftist media agrees … CBR is changing the nature of the abortion debate.

As part of a series on the pro-life advances across Europe, NBC News devoted an entire article to the growing use of abortion pictures.  They wrote,

“Graphic pictures of aborted fetuses, prayer vigils and protesters.  It’s no coincidence that the anti-abortion movement looks the same from London to Dublin to Warsaw.”

The other side knows the times, they are a-changin’.  Pro-abort activist Goretti Horgan of Northern Ireland said it this way:

“We knew that they were being supported by the U.S. because of their tactics — they were very, very aggressive whereas the anti-abortion people before that had been very respectable.”

By aggressive, she means “effective”.  By respectable, she means “easy to ignore”.

The article credits Gregg Cunningham of CBR as the driving force behind this strategic advance.  NBC’s article created a fantastic platform in which Cunningham and leaders of European pro-life organizations could discuss the history of social reform and the reasoning behind our strategy and tactics.  It also gives an overview of the scope of CBR’s reach, stating that,

“Pro-abortion activists, providers and seekers in Finland, Sweden, Slovakia, the Czech Republic, Ireland, England and beyond have been confronted with the same photos of dismembered fetuses as American women from Austin to Buffalo.”

NBC News agrees … because you support CBR, the times, they are a-changin’.

Intact abortion, with beating heart.

by Gregg Cunningham

Some in the media have falsely claimed that the intact abortion shown in CBR’s video is actually a miscarriage, not an abortion.

Medical malpractice lawsuits have become so common that OB/GYNs practice defensive medicine.  They protect themselves by over-diagnosing, over-treating and over-prescribing.  No doctor delivering this baby as a preemie in a hospital would fail to provide neonatal intensive care.  Even if he had no compassion for the baby or his parents, the doctor would provide care to avoid being sued for negligence.  Warren Hern, in his book “Abortion Practice,” warns of the difficulty in estimating fetal ages.  A baby moving as vigorously as this one is presumptively entitled to care and would receive it — unless the attending physician is an abortionist, which is the case here.

Miscarried embryos and fetuses are virtually all still births involving a baby who expired in the uterus and was later born dead.  A preemie in a hospital is born alive and given intensive care — not slapped around in a pan as happened here with a baby who survived the abortion depicted at the beginning of the video.

Gregg Cunningham is the Executive Director of the Center for Bio-Ethical Reform (CBR).

Pro-Life Cage Match: The Tussle in Tulsa

It could have been billed as “The Tussle in Tulsa.”

On April 25, Gregg Cunningham of Center for Bio-Ethical Reform (CBR) debated T. Russell Hunter of Abolish Human Abortion (AHA) on the topic of pro-life incrementalism vs. pro-life immediatism.  You can link to the debate here or watch below.

At the heart of Hunter’s position are the notions that (a) attempts to save some babies and moms from abortion by passing abortion restrictions actually amount to a defacto endorsement of the practice (i.e., “abortion is OK as long as it is restricted”) and (b) the babies saved in the short-term by incrementalist measures will be fewer than the babies saved in the long-term if we would all abandon incrementalism in favor of immediatism.

No matter what we may think of the issues, the debate, or the personalities involved, we praise God for Mr. Hunter and for AHA …  If the rest of the “pro-life” church were doing as much, this would have been over long, long ago.

Hunter and AHA have ruffled the feathers of many in the pro-life movement by harshly criticizing their methods and motives.  Of course, we at FAB must always be open to criticism; we ourselves have not failed to challenge those in our movement who reject or even suppress the only strategy that can ultimately win.  As with any debate, the distinction between instructive criticism and destructive divisiveness can often be a matter of whose ox is being gored.

But for the sake of babies, moms, and families, we must always be open to exhortation and correction (2 Timothy 4:2).  Sometimes we receive it, and sometimes we dole it out.  In this regard, most of us have no problem embracing Acts 20:35, where God tells us it is more blessed to give than to receive.

The Tussle in Tulsa resulted from Hunter’s public challenge calling for any pro-life leader to debate him on incrementalism.  Cunningham accepted.  He is widely regarded as the premier pro-life strategerist on the planet.  (Here at FAB, that belief is unanimous.)

The most compelling points made by Cunningham:

1. Martin Luther King was an absolutist in his goal of equal rights, but an incrementalist in his approach to civil rights legislation.
2. Similarly, William Wilberforce fought for the complete abolition of slavery, but he also endorsed incremental laws that would reduce suffering in the short-term.
3. Even God Himself, although an absolutist when it comes to sin, was (is?) an incrementalist when giving the Mosaic Law.
4. There is no conflict between reducing suffering in the short-term and abolishing injustice in the long-term.  They are not mutually exclusive; we can and should do both.

As a side note, Cunningham addressed Hunter’s criticism of those of us who raise money for pro-life work.  He noted (and praised) AHA’s use of abortion imagery obtained by CBR and provided to others in the movement free of charge.  This is made possible only by an enormous amount of fundraising.  Cunningham observed that Russell does raise funds, but “he just lets me do it for him.”  Then he quickly added, “And I don’t mind that.”

One issue that arose during the Q&A was CBR’s policy regarding spiritual discussions vs. social justice discussions in the presentation of the Genocide Awareness Project (GAP).  FAB will address that issue in a separate post.

In the aftermath of the debate, a number of summaries and analyses have been posted, most of them in favor of Cunningham’s performance/position.  Notables:

1. Scott Klusendorf: Debate Between Gregg Cunningham and T. Russell Hunter
2. Jonathon Van Maren:  Four observations from the Cunningham vs. Hunter debate
3. Jill Stanek: Abolition of Reason: Pro-Life Apologists Deconstruct “Immediatist” Ideology as Presented in Cunningham-Hunter Debate
4. Jill Stanek and Clinton Wilcox blog posts:

• Prologue
• Part I: Let babies die today, we can save the rest later
• Part II: There’s only one way to cut down a tree?
• Part III: Social justice history vs TR Hunter
• Part IV: Straw men and the Bible
• Part V: Sacrificing children to the idol of abolitionism
• Part VI: Christians and the legislative process
• Part VII: So fundraising is wrong?
• Epilogue

If Stanek & Co. get their way, the “Tussle in Tulsa” will now and forevermore be known as “The Tulsa Takedown.”  But there were dissenting opinions:

1. Don Cooper: Former Pro-Life Leader Reviews the Cunningham/Hunter Debate on Immediatism
2. AHA Blog: What about these babies?
3. Abolish Human Abortion Facebook Page (scroll down)
4. T. Russell Hunter Facebook Page (scroll down)

No matter what we may think of the issues, the debate, or the personalities involved, we praise God for Mr. Hunter and for AHA, because (a) they are using abortion photos to expose the cruelty of abortion and (b) they are sharing the Gospel of Jesus.  If the rest of the “pro-life” church were doing as much, this would have been over long, long ago.

As to the debate and the issues, you be the judge.  See it here:

by Gregg Cunningham

CBR has produced and posted on YouTube an abortion video which exposes the commercial fraud perpetrated by abortion clinic worker Emily Letts and her employer, the Cherry Hill Women’s Center.  These scammers have been all over the press in recent weeks with headlines such as “Woman films her own abortion to show the world how ‘cool’ it is.”

The problem is that Ms. Letts and the Cherry Hill Women’s Center didn’t “film her own abortion,” they filmed only her own face during what she somewhat dubiously claimed was her abortion.  The camera never reveals what is going on below her waist.  If we assume, for the sake of argument, that she actually did have an abortion, she and her abortion clinic employer obviously didn’t want viewers to see the incontrovertible evidence that abortion is an act of violence which savagely kills a real baby, even early in pregnancy.

Ms. Letts and her abortion clinic employer created their YouTube video as a disingenuous sales pitch and our rebuttal video is a consumer protection device intended to ensure women are not deceived regarding the humanity of their baby or the inhumanity of the abortion which Cherry Hill Women’s Center is trying to sell them.

CBR unmasks the horror of abortion with a video which splices abortion footage into Ms. Letts’ claims that she “… has no guilt” and “recalls the procedure with fondness.”  Those absurd assertions would only seem credible to viewers who have never seen an abortion.  CBR’s parody video will help reduce the number of Americans for whom abortion is a comforting abstraction, always kept carefully out of sight.

Elizabeth Barnes, Executive Director of the Cherry Hill Women’s Center and the Philadelphia Women’s Center, is Ms. Letts’ co-conspirator in this abortion industry infomercial.  She is also on YouTube proclaiming that “… we need to see more images in the media of women who choose abortion and it provides them a pathway to a new and better life.”  CBR replies that what we actually need are more images in the media of dismembered babies for whom abortion provided a barbaric end to life.  And if Ms. Barnes considers suing us for violating the copyright on her sales video, we say “Bring it on”–but we suggest she first read the federal judge’s opinion in Northland Family Planning Centers v. Center for Bio-Ethical Reform.

Gregg Cunningham is the Executive Director of the Center for Bio-Ethical Reform (CBR) and a frequent contributor to FAB.

CBR UK displays abortion photos outside a BPAS abortion facility.  (Click to enlarge.)

Excellent debate between Ann Furedi, CEO of the British Pregnancy Advisory Service (BPAS), the UK’s largest private abortion provider, and Gregg Cunningham, Executive Director of the Center for Bio-Ethical Reform (CBR).

They debated the question of whether it is morally wrong to display graphic abortion images outside UK abortion clinics.  Furedi argued that it is immoral for CBR to show her prospective customers what she intends to do to their babies.  Cunningham argued it is immoral to hide the horror from them.

CBR-UK and Christian Concern, an association of Christian attorneys, co-sponsored this debate, and a capacity crowd filled the Emmanuel Center in Westminster, London.

More on this story:

• Story by Christian Concern: Debate on use of graphic abortion pictures
• Story in CBR Communique:  Historic Debate: CBR graciously demolishes UK’s largest abortion provider

We convert more students at the March for Life than at any other event.

Earlier this year, Simcha Fisher posted her essay entitled Eight Reasons Not to Use Graphic Abortion Images at the March for Life at the National Catholic Register Online.  Center for Bio-Ethical Reform (CBR) Executive Director Gregg Cunningham, perhaps the world’s premier pro-life strategist, responds.

Eight Reasons or No Reason to Put Away Abortion Photos?
by Gregg Cunningham

In a National Catholic Register online essay titled “Eight Reasons Not to Use Graphic Abortion Images at the March for Life,” Simcha Fisher concedes that “Americans are tragically ignorant about what abortion really is …” but then lurches to the non sequitur that abortion photos should never be shown in public, and then only “as a last resort” in private.  The mainstream pro-life movement has covered up the horror of abortion for forty years, and now wonders why the public is still not horrified by abortion.  The result has been a failure to outlaw abortion — anywhere, and at any point in pregnancy — and fifty million dead babies!

Had Martin Luther King displayed lynching photos only in “private,” and only “as a last resort,” black people would still be drinking from segregated water fountains.  Dr. King instead commissioned the making of sickening photos and then urged their widespread publication and broadcast.  The result was the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

The history of social reform is the history of horrifying pictures:  Pictures of slaves being tortured to death; pictures of Native American women and children massacred by the U.S. Calvary; pictures of African Americans beaten to their knees for trying to register to vote; pictures of little children abused in mines and factories.  These pictures traumatized children just like those Ms. Fisher seeks to shelter at the March For Life.  But the imagery also convinced the country that the victims were real people, fully entitled to rights of personhood.  It additionally persuaded the electorate that the injustices depicted therein were sufficiently egregious to warrant criminalization.

Many of the children who attend the March are genuinely devout and authentically pro-life, but others are only nominally Catholic if Catholic at all.  Some are, or soon will become, sexually active.  Some are, or soon will become, pregnant.  More than a few will abort.  Some of them, however, will change their minds because we showed them the indescribable horror of abortion.  We have testimonies to prove this.

Ms. Fisher says we should hide the horror of abortion because post-abortive women attend the March.  CDC reports that nearly half of all abortions are performed on post-abortive women.  Post-abortive women are, therefore, among the women most at risk of aborting.  They are, consequently, the women who most need to see the terrible truth, lest they kill again.  Many post-abortive women (and men) have told us they now realize that visualizing what they had done forced them to stop trying to rationalize it.  Only then were they able to confess and repent, so they could be forgiven and healed.

Ephesians 5:11 commands us to “expose the deeds of darkness,” not to show them only privately nor only as a last resort.  Responsibility for the terrible longevity of history’s most horrific slaughter does not rest entirely upon our adversaries.  We will be judged for our timidity, perhaps as harshly as they will be judged for their barbarity – by history and by Providence.

Gregg Cunningham speaks with Pastor Matt Higa of New Hope Kauai Church at Kapaa, Hawaii.  Watch the entire video below.

Excerpts:

The church response to this holocaust has been tepid, ineffective, timid, and risk-averse.  We are working to change that.

The Church is missing an enormously effective healing ministry [by covering up abortion.]  … We’ve had countless men and women tell us that actually seeing abortion forced them to stop rationalizing what they had done and seek forgiveness and healing.

If what we are doing is socially responsible and Biblically correct when we go onto a university campus to display abortion pictures to students whose professors are covering up the truth about abortion, why wouldn’t we do this on sidewalks outside churches whose pastors are covering up the horror of abortion?

When she sanctions consumer fraud as a means of victimizing abortion customers, she reveals a view of women that is both archaic and repressive.

Gregg Cunningham recently spoke at a church in Stockholm as part of a month-long European tour.  As perhaps the world’s premier pro-life strategist, Gregg is frequently asked to consult with pro-life leaders in Europe and elsewhere around the globe.  This particular talk was attended by Ida Ali-Abdulla Lindqvist, an extremist abortion advocate who posted a one-sided story on the Swedish state television website.  In this essay, Gregg responds.  Note: your browser can translate the links to English (or something like it).

Swedish Abortion Extremist Clearly Frightened of Abortion Pictures
by Gregg Cunningham

Shortly after my antiabortion presentation at a church in Stockholm, Ida Ali-Abdulla Lindqvist posted an extremist abortion manifesto on the Swedish state television website.  She misrepresented her position on abortion to gain access to our meeting (unnecessarily, because we eagerly welcome our adversaries, particularly if they are journalists) and then misrepresented the events which transpired at that meeting.

Mr. Mats Selander and I advocated the public display of prenatal development imagery and abortion photos to ensure that voters, and especially people contemplating elective pregnancy termination, possess the clearest possible understanding of an unborn child’s humanity and of abortion’s inhumanity.  In advanced societies, healthcare professionals are ethically obligated to present patients with disturbing clinical information, even over their patients’ objection.  The same duty should exist regarding abortion.  Ms. Ali-Abdulla Lindqvist, however, demands that this information be withheld.  Why does she fear the truth?   Because she can’t face the facts without losing the argument.

She incorrectly asserts that our “strongest weapon” is the use of “confusion, shame, and guilt.”  But in reality, our strongest weapon is the truth – the truth which must be seen to be understood.  The truth for which no words are adequate.  The truth revealed in our aborted baby photos.  That truth dispels confusion and can only induce feelings of shame and guilt if abortion is exposed as an indefensible act of violence that kills a real baby – which, of course, is precisely the truth Ms. Ali-Abdulla Lindqvist is trying to hide.

Ms. Ali-Abdulla Lindqvist says our abortion photos are “manipulation” and “mental abuse” of the “most disgusting sort.”  But it is Ms. Ali-Abdullah who is the manipulator and abuser.  Nothing could be more manipulative than abusing women by misleading them into abortions they would have rejected had they been shown the horrifying truth.  When she sanctions consumer fraud as a means of victimizing abortion customers, she reveals a view of women that is both archaic and repressive.

Ms. Ali-Abdulla Lindqvist then falsely accuses us of displaying abortion-related imagery which was not representative of most pregnancy terminations in Sweden.  This is not true.  Because 95% of Swedish abortions occur in the first 12 weeks of pregnancy, 95% of our abortion-related imagery depicts embryos and early fetuses of 12 weeks or younger.  A brief look at our website (www.abortionNO.org) proves this point.

She also criticizes what she mistakenly suggests were a set of questionable “statistics,” but which I clearly explained were not “statistics” at all.  They were merely rough estimates being offered for purposes of discussion.

She refers to a question from a young man who asked whether any of our videos depicted miscarriages.  She intimates that my answer was evasive, but all of our abortion imagery was obtained at abortion clinics.  Women go to abortion clinics for abortions.  When women miscarry, they are generally treated in a hospital or their doctor’s office by the obstetrician/gynecologist who treated them during their pregnancy.  All of our abortion imagery depicts abortions.  Anyone who alleges otherwise is placing themselves on the same moral plain as Holocaust deniers who say Jewish death camp photos are fakes.

Ms. Ali-Abdulla’s racism and gender bias and are on full display as she rages against patriarchy generally and white men specifically.  Half the babies butchered by abortion are male and that alone should give men a voice.  But she is also an anti-Christian bigot.  She asserts that the Swedish Lutheran Church will not be perceived as a “modern institution” unless it suppresses meaningful dialogue regarding abortion.  Censoring speech may be a modern institutional value in some parts of the world, but thankfully not in Sweden.  Christianity is committed to timeless truth, not fleeting modernity.

Ms. Ali-Abdulla Linqvist is frightened of these pictures.  We can hear the fear in her voice.  Like most feminists, she wants no debate over abortion.  She understands that abortion photos make that debate more difficult to suppress.  She understands that abortion photos make that debate more difficult to win.  People yawn at words.  No one yawns at pictures.

Dr. La Verne Tolbert recently blogged the claim that “Biola University is pro-life.”

CBR Executive Director Gregg Cunningham replied:

Gregg Cunningham response to La Verne Tolbert

Pastor Clenard Childress, my long-time, highly-valued friend, and a man who has served for nearly twenty years on the board of our pro-life Center For Bio-Ethical Reform (CBR), just forwarded to me your [blog posting], criticizing what you apparently misunderstand to be our attitudes and activities regarding Biola’s punishment of a nursing student who displayed abortion photos on Biola’s campus.  Because your concerns seem to derive from several mistaken assumptions of fact, I believe it might be helpful I offer you a somewhat different perspective on these issues.

To provide some context for this discussion, the public abortion photo display of which you disapprove saved the life of the child of at least one Biola student.  At ArmsOfAudio.com this young mother posted the following:

There are a lot of people bashing Diana right now but first hand I can tell you she did what she was told to do. I am 20. A student of Biola and always claimed to be prolife. I thought that until I got a positive pregnancy test. This came after a night of partying just outside the campus and had a one night stand with a youth pastor in training. I was going to go to Planned Parenthood that day and as I walked through campus her signs made me realize there is a human life in my womb ….  In that moment I went to my dorm room got on my knees and asked that I would have the strength to be my baby’s mom. STOP saying she didn’t follow her stupid rules. God came through for me because of her. And Susan Elliot is a tool of the devil.

First of all, your excellent pro-life reputation precedes you Dr. Tolbert, and we deeply appreciate all you do to defend unborn life conduct youth ministry.

Your important efforts in the fields of abandonment and adoption are also close to our hearts because my wife and I have adopted three little orphan girls abandoned because of disfiguring birth defects.  We are in the process of adopting a fourth who was abandoned because she was born with cerebral palsy.

We additionally share your devotion to Biola.  My wife is a graduate of Biola’s nursing program.  Our Director of Operations has a science degree from Biola.  Our Director of Administration is a graduate of Biola’s Talbot Theological Seminary.  Our International Director has a degree from Talbot.  We are currently attempting to hire a potential recruit who also has a Biola degree.  One of our student interns intends to enroll at Talbot next year.  The accusation that we are trying to discredit Biola is utterly without basis in fact.  We are merely exposing Biola’s discreditable treatment of a student who broke the rules of man when they conflicted with the laws of God.  We are also urging Biola to do more to inspire and equip its students to enter into full-time pro-life ministry.

Equally baseless is your contention that we are accusing Biola of not being pro-life.  Of course Biola is “pro-life,” but that means little when Biola’s ban on the public display of abortion photos is killing babies just like the one Ms. Jimenez saved when she defied that un-Godly ban.  Biola, along with virtually every other Christian school, is helping Planned Parenthood hide the horror of abortion.  Biola — and the rest Christian higher education — is failing to offer an entire major with courses specifically designed to qualify students for full-time service in pro-life ministry.  Occasional lectures and chapel presentations are no substitute for the sort of serious curricular reform without which the pro-life movement will continue to be hampered by undue reliance on part-time, amateur volunteers to save babies — while the abortion industry employs full-time, paid-staff professionals to kill them.

We appreciate your use of a video which includes brief glimpses of two of our abortion photos.  We wish you would have chosen to show it during the Biola Chapel event at which you recently spoke.  I am certain you are aware, however, that Biola students are not required to attend every chapel presentation, and those who most need to see the horror of abortion are the students who are least likely to attend pro-life lectures.  I know this from personal experience because I have delivered multiple pro-life talks at Biola and they were poorly attended, despite the fact that they were heavily promoted.

We did not create the Biola controversy.  Biola created controversy.  We merely exposed it.  What half of the story which you accuse us of omitting could justify the abusive, vindictive bullying of Biola’s administrators and police?

You say the nursing student had several options and your point seems to be that some of those options would not have broken the rules.  As a black woman, you must certainly be aware that Martin Luther King also had several options which would not have broken the rules in Birmingham, AL in 1963.  But none of the approved options would have advanced the cause of civil rights and none of the Biola nurse’s approved options would have advanced the cause of unborn children.  With all due respect, “panel discussions” never ended any terrible injustice.

Your assertion that “…if graphic images were the solution that would end abortion, abortion would have ended 30 years ago!” could not be more incorrect.  Most pro-life organizations and all Christian colleges and the entire church have worked tirelessly to suppress any widespread display of abortion imagery.  That is why we are losing!

Then you accuse us of “defaming Christians” when all we are doing is forcing a debate Biola is attempting to avoid.  Mature believers should have the intellectual honesty to disagree without personalizing differences as “defamation” Your nearly fanatical loyalty to Biola has sadly blinded you to the University’s guilt in shamefully abusing this student.

You question the student’s use of a video camera despite the fact that this officer was trying to turn off so no one would see him exceed his authority.  Thank God we have a record of his misconduct.  Without it there would be no accountability.  That camera might have deterred even worse abuses.  People who are about to do bad things always want to stop the filming.  On September 23, 1957 as the first black students integrated the Little Rock, Arkansas High School, “ … the mob turned its anger on white journalists on the scene.  Life magazine reporter Paul Welch and two photographers, Grey Villet and Francis Miller, were harassed and beaten.  The photographers’ equipment was smashed to the ground.”  (Eyes On The Prize, America’s Civil Rights Years, 1954-1965, Juan Williams, Penguin Books, 1987.)

Here is what really happened at Biola and below the link is my critique of the University’s misconduct:  http://www.jillstanek.com/2013/06/christian-university-retaliates-against-pro-life-student-for-showing-graphic-reality-of-abortion/

Biola is spinning this scandal as reasonable punishment for a student who repeatedly broke the rules.  In Matthew 15:8-9, Christ rebukes religious leaders who teach the rules of man as though they were the laws of God.  Jesus does not love rules more than lives.  In Mark 3:4, Jesus asked rhetorically whether it is lawful to break rules to save lives.  Ms. Jimenez was trying to save the lives of babies, some of whose mothers could only be reached with photos that broke Biola’s rules.  Jesus repeatedly broke rules to save lives by, for instance, healing on the Sabbath.  He criticized legalists who had the hard hearts of Pharisees.  Ephesians 5:11 commands us to expose the “deeds of darkness.”  Diana Jimenez defied the rules of Biola in fidelity to the laws of God.  Lives were almost certainly saved.  May others follow her righteous example.

In Jeremiah 7:1-7 God commanded his prophet to “Stand in the gate of the Lord’s house…” (verse 2) for the purpose of confronting His people over the sin of “shedding innocent blood” in the form of child sacrifice (verse 6).  Jeremiah was terribly persecuted and so was Ms. Jimenez.

Susan Elliott, Biola’s director of nursing, ordered the faculty to deny Diana Jimenez routinely granted letters of reference for use in applying for nursing jobs.  Our lawyers are examining Biola’s active attempts to sabotage Ms. Jimenez’s employment prospects because they believe this sort of vindictive cruelty is not only unwarranted, but it is unlawful.  How is it not a scandal for the administration of Christian college to destroy a student’s career … for holding up an abortion photo?  What chilling message does this send to already risk-averse faculty members?

In more than twenty years of pro-life ministry on hundreds of college campuses, I have never seen pagan administrators at any secular school abuse their authority as egregiously as have the supposedly Christian administrators at Biola.  Vengeance of this sort is more commonly associated with cults, such as Scientology, which retaliate against former members who expose embarrassing church practices.

The administration says it bans abortion photos to create a “safe” place for students on campus. “Safe” from what?  The burden of having to avert their gaze if they don’t want to see a picture which will save a classmate’s baby?  Biola is infantilizing its educational experience.  It is robbing students of coping skills and leadership abilities.  Most other Christian colleges are as bad or worse.  That may be why Christian sociologist and pollster George Barna reports that only 6% of Protestant pastors believe they have the gift of leadership.  Barna has fallen out of favor in Evangelical circles for calling attention to surveys which document the awkward fact that lay people increasingly lack biblical world views because Christian leaders increasingly lack biblical world views.

In Luke 16:20-21, the friends of Lazarus carry this poor, sick, disabled vagrant to the gates of a rich man.  They took him there in the hope that the rich man would take pity on their pathetic friend.  The rich man had attempted to create a “safe” place, behind gates, on private property, in which he and his family would not be troubled by disturbing sights such as hungry beggars dying with open wounds.  Depositing Lazarus at the rich man’s gate made his plight impossible to trivialize or ignore.  This in-your-face gesture was an annoying, disruptive, cry for help.  The rich man would have banned it had he been able.  But Jesus seems to have approved.  It was in that spirit that Diana Jimenez carried pictures of aborted babies to the center of her Christian college campus.

By God’s grace, on public university campuses, our Center for Bio-Ethical Reform (CBR) has saved countless babies (view the testimonies abortionNO.org) of students who told us that nothing less shocking than our abortion photos would have sufficed to dissuade them from aborting.  None would have come to see our photos had they been displayed at some more obscure location.  Many claimed the Name of Christ but mistakenly underestimated abortion’s evil.  There are no words which are adequate to describe the magnitude of the evil abortion represents.  It must be seen to be fully understood.

Biola teaches that abortion is evil but refuses to prove how evil it actually is.  This lapse causes many Biola students to kill their babies under the mistaken impression that abortion is the lesser-of-two-evils.

Many pro-life activists are now accusing Biola of caring more about the feelings of born children than the lives of unborn children, but the issue of children being traumatized by abortion photos is a red herring.  Ms. Jimenez offered to surround her display with warning signs which would have given adults all the notice required to steer children away from her abortion photos.

When Biola helps Planned Parenthood hide the horror of abortion, savable babies are butchered and vulnerable mothers are abused.  The history of social reform, from the abolition of slavery, to the enactment of prohibitions against child labor, to the civil rights movement, etc., is the history of shocking pictures.  Before the display of pictures, words failed to change many minds on any of these issues. No injustice has ever been reformed by covering it up.  Countless black children saw and were horrified by the photos of Emmitt Till’s mutilated body when they were published in the Detroit Defender and Jet Magazine.  But those photos also inspired Martin Luther King and Rosa Parks to start the civil rights movement with a bus-boycott in Montgomery, Alabama.

This university argues that “we’re all pro-life here” and then attempts to minimize this dispute as little more than predictable differences over strategy and tactics.  That’s not true.  Biola’s administration gushes about what it does concerning abortion (largely half-measures offered as fig leaves) in an effort to avoid any debate over what it refuses to do, which is to expose the whole truth.  Biola quotes from its official documents which condemn abortion.  But the priest and Levite who passed by on the other side of the beating in Christ’s Parable of the Good Samaritan would have condemned street violence.  They would have felt pity for victims of street violence.  But they weren’t willing to show pity for victims of street violence.  They refused to take risks and make sacrifices to intervene on behalf of those victims.  Words without meaningful action are as empty as faith without works.  James 2:16 warns that “If one of you says to them, ‘Go in peace; keep warm and well fed,’ but does nothing about their physical needs, what good does it do?”  Biola isn’t doing “nothing” for the unborn, but Biola refuses to do what most needs to be done, which is exposing the horror and inspiring students to fight that horror with their diplomas because doing so would create uncomfortable risk and require painful sacrifice.

Had the Good Samaritan been a Biola grad, he might have preached John 3:16 while the beating victim bled to death.

In 1963, Martin Luther King found himself in a dilemma similar to that with which Diana Jimenez was confronted at Biola.  Like Biola’s administrators, the civil rights leaders in Birmingham, Alabama were insulted by MLK’s contention that they weren’t doing enough.  In reply, they anathematized Dr. King as a disruptive, dangerous outsider and demanded that he stay out of their city.  They resentfully argued that his use of confrontation was counterproductive and that their more diplomatic resort to education and negotiation and litigation was the way forward.  MLK countered that their tepid methods had failed and that invisible violence against blacks needed to be made shockingly visible, or public opinion would never support political reform.

He believed that racists who had been abusing blacks in private needed to be provoked into abusing them in public, where a sympathetic press could make disturbing photographs with which to build support for social reform.  Injustice needed to be dramatized and given a human face and like Ms. Jimenez, he would have to break the rules to save lives.  He understood that blacks would pay a heavy price for these tactics but believed that things had to get worse before they could get better.  And he was willing to pay that price with them.

Birmingham was then America’s most segregated city and it was home to the country’s most violent Klan chapter.  Local racists had coerced the black community into an ugly understanding:  If blacks accepted tolerable abuses, whites would not escalate those abuses to intolerable levels.  MLK’s decision to upset this fragile coalition between the city’s oppressors and its oppressed was opposed by local civil rights leaders, in part, because it was bad for business.  In addition to inviting heightened persecution, it damaged the city’s economy and reputation.  But Dr. King needed horrifying pictures and he was willing to break many rules to get them.  He pushed past local obstructionists whom he derided as civil rights “moderates,” and the outcome was the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

Richard B. Speed’s review of Mark Kurlansky’s book 1968: The Year That Rocked The World, describes this enormously successful use of civil disobedience and disturbing photos.  In discussing the impact of civil disobedience, Kurlansky relates a telling incident that took place during a 1965 march in Selma, Alabama.  Martin Luther King apparently noticed that Life Magazine photographer, Flip Schulke had put down his camera in order to help a demonstrator injured by the police.  Afterward, according to Kurlansky, King rebuked Schulke, telling him that ‘Your job is to photograph what is happening to us.’

CBR’s job is to photograph what is happening to unborn children and, in the absence of a sympathetic press, to display those photos in the public square.

In his seminal “Letter From a Birmingham Jail,” Dr. King addressed these “moderates,” who were represented by a group of local clergy who had publicly condemned his methods in a newspaper advertisement.  He said “I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in the stride toward freedom is not the White Citizens Councilor or the Ku Klux Klanner but the … [civil rights] moderate who is more devoted to order than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says, ‘I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I can’t agree with your methods of direct action ….’”

Dr. King could have been describing pro-life moderates at Biola.

MLK rejected both the appeasement strategy of civil rights moderates and the violence strategy of black nationalists.  History has vindicated the wisdom of his willingness to advance reform through civil disobedience which broke rules to acquire disturbing photographic documentation of injustice which had to be seen to be fully understood.  He used horrifying pictures for the same reason successful reformers almost always use them.  Injustice which remains invisible tends to become tolerable.  A failure of public imagination is inevitable without visual depictions of indescribable injustice.

The first Biola official to confront Diana Jimenez when she appeared on campus with CBR abortion imagery was the Assistant Director of Public Relations and Internal Communications.  She told Ms. Jimenez “You’re making us look bad!”  Ms. Jimenez replied “You’re worried about saving face but I am worried about saving babies.”  The first person to confront me after I posted CBR’s video, which depicts Ms. Jimenez’s shameful treatment by the Biola administration, was the university’s VP for Communications and Marketing.  Biola sees this dispute as a public relations crisis, not an abortion crisis.  When I recently requested a meeting with Biola’s president, I was initially told I could only discuss these issues with public relations officials.  Biola has become a business and abortion pictures are as bad for business at Biola as MLK’s protest marches were for business in Birmingham.  Biola may be profitable but it is no longer prophetic.

Penn State University tried to cover-up the preventable abuse of born children because exposing that abuse would have been bad for business.  Children, and ultimately the school itself, paid a terrible price for this cynical commercialism.  Many senior Catholic clergy, the Boy Scouts, and numerous other institutions have also swept child abuse under the rug, with equally disastrous consequences.  Christian colleges are doing much the same, for many of the same self-serving reasons, but the victims in these cases are unborn children.  Many of these tragedies would be preventable if Biola had the “courage and conviction” to adopt a “women and children” first policy on abortion.

Biola and a small segment of the Christian community have tried to talk America out of abortion for forty years, and public opinion continues to worsen, particularly early in pregnancy, when 90% of abortions are performed.  For thirty years William Wilberforce tried to end the slave trade with essays and lectures and got exactly nowhere, because slavery was as invisible in England as abortion is at Biola.  When the abolitionists began to use disturbing pictures, public opinion began to shift at the levels required to create the political consensus necessary for reform.  It is unlikely that St. John’s College at Cambridge would have threatened to expel Wilberforce, withhold his diploma, or arrest him, had he exhibited the shocking slavery pictures for whose display his life would be threatened later in his career.

Prior to 1964, even public university students were denied basic expressive rights on campus.  That repressive policy began to change when Mario Savio, a student at U.C. Berkeley, was repeatedly arrested for distributing civil rights literature on his campus.  Many of his classmates were willing to join him in handcuffs and eventually Berkeley’s administration wilted under an avalanche of embarrassing publicity.  The student Free Speech Movement quickly overspread the country, but never made it onto Christian college campuses.

CBR is meeting with our attorneys to develop a legal strategy to compel California’s private colleges to grant their students many of the same expressive rights guaranteed by the First Amendment to students at public universities.  In a case titled Robins v. Pruneyard Shopping Center, the California Constitution has been interpreted by the California Supreme Court (affirmed by the U.S. Supreme Court) to extend what amount to First Amendment speech rights to picketers inside large, indoor shopping malls.  The Court’s theory is that large, private commercial spaces have become communities in their own right, maintaining what is essentially a public square in which expanded expressive rights are as appropriate as they would be within the boundaries of municipal corporations.

We believe the same theory can reasonably be extended to private college campuses, which are not only self-contained communities like the towns which surround them, but that are supposedly committed to academic freedom in the marketplace of ideas.  California’s politically liberal court system is obviously hostile to Christian institutions of all kinds.  It could, therefore, be much in Biola’s interest to expand its students’ expressive rights through negotiation rather than litigation.  A negotiated agreement could preserve Biola’s statement of faith as a balanced limit on speech which would no reasonable Christian would find to be consistent with scripture.

In its first week, You Tube has registered more than 12,000 views of our video which contrasts Biola President Barry Corey’s soaring chapel rhetoric with his police chief’s cruel thuggery.  More than 600 comments have been posted on just two social sites and they are running 5-1 against Biola’s expressive rights policies and its harsh (and perhaps unlawful) enforcement of those policies.  That is, indeed, a public relations crisis.

The video is now going viral all over the internet.  We have more videos of this type in production.  The people expressing the greatest anger toward Biola are the kinds of Christians who write donation checks and tuition checks and this is only the beginning.  We are aware of other students whose consciences have been awakened by Ms. Jimenez’s courage and they are prepared to force Biola to arrest them or grant them a level of academic freedom which is limited only by Biola’s statement of faith.

The pro-life movement will continue to lose the abortion wars as long as the church remains essentially on the sidelines.  The church will remain on the sidelines as long as pastors believe that fighting abortion is primarily someone else’s responsibility.  Pastors will remain conscientious objectors in the abortion wars as long as Christian colleges and seminaries refuse to effectively train and inspire their students to fight abortion professionally.

Abortion hides behind its own horror.  Because Christian leaders believe abortion is too terrible to display, Christian lay people underestimate its evil, concluding it is too inconsequential to fight.  Virtually everyone I know who does pro-life work full-time says their first look at abortion photos was the turning point in their professional lives.

Biola is thinking small on abortion. Liberal, secular schools have dedicated entire curricula to preparing feminists to advance the interests of the abortion industry. Not one, single, Christian college offers a major exclusively designed to prepare students to fight abortion as full-time ministry.  While students at secular schools have successfully demanded courses and even majors — in gender studies, and human sexuality, and racial politics, and abortion practice, etc., — Biola students seem blissfully unconcerned that their Christian school (and nearly every other) is trivializing abortion as a sin unworthy of serious academic focus (by which I do not mean occasional lectures or chapel presentations).

In Revelation 3:1-2 we read the words of Christ criticizing the ministry of a church whose agenda wasn’t broad enough:  “I know your deeds; you have a reputation of being alive, but … I have not found your deeds complete in the sight of God.”  In Revelation 3:13-22, Jesus says, “I know your deeds ….  So because you are lukewarm and neither hot nor cold, I will spit you out of my mouth.”  Lukewarm almost perfectly describes Biola’s opposition to abortion.  In Matthew 24:12, Jesus told us that we could expect the end times when “the love of most grows cold.”  Biola’s love for the unborn may not have grown “cold” but it has certainly cooled to room-temperature.

Until pro-life ministry employs as many people working full-time to save babies as there are working full-time to kill them, we have no chance to prevail in this struggle.  Biola could lead on this front if its policy makers were visionaries who, to quote Barry Corey, had the “courage and conviction” to replace inadequate words with empowering policies and programs.  The university says it bans abortion photos because their display is disruptive.  I believe that this ban will prove to be more disruptive than any display.

If we cannot persuade Biola to permit the orderly, public display of abortion imagery on campus, we are prepared to display it at entrances to the campus (and over campus with large aerial billboard photos) every time Biola hosts special events.  Biola students are going to see the horror of abortion, either occasionally (and in ways which improve the school’s reputation) or incessantly (and in ways which damage the school’s reputation).  And it is not we will do that damage.  Biola has proven itself quite adept at reputational self-destruction.

None of this might suffice to soften Biola’s heart on abortion, but three years ago, three weeks of CBR aerial billboards and billboard trucks and hand-held abortion photos over and around Notre Dame University’s campus convinced every other Catholic college in the country that inviting Barack Obama to speak would provoke pickets which would be too disruptive to risk.  The President has not delivered a single commencement address at any Catholic college in the intervening years.  Perhaps the tactics on which we relied to dissuade Catholic colleges from doing evil will persuade Evangelical colleges to do good.  In a world of sane journalism, pro-life picketers, relentlessly on the sidewalks of a supposedly pro-life college, would certainly qualify as a man-bites-dog story.

Two of our senior staff members are Biola grads and another has a Talbot degree. We are also attempting to recruit a recent Biola graduate.  One of our student interns intends to enroll in Biola’s Talbot Theological Seminary next year.  We ARE Biola.  We care about Biola.  But if we can’t halt the abortion cover-up at Christian colleges, we will never persuade prospective pastors to use their diplomas to end the bloodiest mass murder in human history.  And if we can’t stop that cover-up at Biola, at which Christian college can it be stopped?

Images like this educated the public on the evils of slavery. Additionally, they created the kind of tension/conflict that (a) forced the public to think about slavery and (b) created a public forum that forced slave traders to defend the indefensible.

You’ve heard the joke:

Inquisitive son:  “Daddy, what’s the difference between ignorance and apathy?”

Preoccupied father:  “Son, I don’t know and I don’t care!”

To end the slave trade, William Wilberforce had to overcome ignorance and apathy in England.  People didn’t know much about the slave trade and simply didn’t care.  It’s the same problem we have with abortion.

CBR uses graphic abortion images to (1) educate the public about the true nature of abortion, and (2) create the kind of non-violent tension that focuses public attention.  We do this because reformers have always done it.

Reformers like William Wilberforce, Lewis Hine, Martin Luther King, and others never defeated injustice by covering it up.  No, they always exposed injustice using graphic images and, in so doing, created non-violent conflict that (a) focused public attention and (b) created a public forum in which evildoers were forced to defend the indefensible.

Gregg Cunningham, director of CBR’s Research Department and our resident expert on the history of social reform, wrote this essay.

William Wilberforce and Graphic Imagery

Dr. Marjorie Bloy notes in “The Anti-Slavery Campaign in Britain” (HistoryHome.co.uk) that one of reformer William Wilberforce’s greatest challenges in abolishing the slave trade and then slavery itself, was the fact that “… many people were unaware of the horrors of slavery ….”

In his book Bury The Chains (Mariner Books, 2005), Adam Hochschild points out that “… in England itself, there were no caravans of chained captives, no whip-wielding overseers on horseback stalking the rows of [Caribbean] sugar cane.  The abolitionists first job was to make Britons understand what lay behind the sugar they ate, the tobacco they smoked, the coffee they drank.”

Eric Metaxas, in his Wilberforce biography Amazing Grace (Harper San Francisco, 2007), echoes Hochschild in explaining why it was vital for abolitionists to make the privations of slavery real to British voters:

Of the many social problems Wilberforce might have thought needed his attention, slavery would have been the least visible of all, and by a wide margin.  In fact, the answer to how Britain could have allowed something as brutal as West Indian slavery to exist, and for so long, has much to do with its invisibility.  Few British people ever saw the slightest hint of it, for only a tiny handful of the three million Africans who had been pressed into British slavery over the years ever set foot on British shores.  They were kidnapped [in Africa] and shipped straight to the West Indian sugar plantations thousands of miles away.  The sugar and molasses from these plantations came to England but who could have known of the nightmarish institution of human bondage that attended their making?  Who could have known that much of the wealth in their nations booming economy was created on the other side of the world by the most brutal mistreatment of other human beings, many of them women and children.  Most British citizens had never seen anyone branded or whipped or subjected to thumbscrews.  They had no idea that conditions on West Indian sugar plantations were so brutal that most of the slaves were literally worked to death in just a few years and that most of the female slaves were too ill to bear children.  Black faces were very rare in Britain in the late eighteenth century, especially before the 1770s, and any blacks one might have seen would probably have seemed to be treated rather well.

The Telegraph.co.uk, explains the importance of expressing the inexpressible savagery of slavery in a feature article headlined “Am I Not A Man And A Brother?” (11 March 2007).  It reported that “Slavery was undermined by the very thing that kept it going – a brutality unendurable by the slaves or by the awakening sensibility of the British public.”  It was awful pictures which “undermined” it, shifting public opinion in support of abolition when nothing else had worked.

No reformer ever defeated injustice by covering it up. William Wilberforce and Thomas Clarkson knew that in order to end the slave trade, they had to expose its horror.

Artists’ depictions of slavery were just as provocative to Eighteenth Century English sensibilities as abortion photos are in 21st Century America.  But abolitionists used them anyway, because slavery was shocking and voters needed to be shocked.  At BBC.co.uk, in the section titled “Religions, William Wilberforce” (last updated 7 May 2011), we read that “… [T]he abolitionists were brilliant at public relations and devised radical new ways of bringing their cause to public attention.”  The writer says “They had pamphlets full of eye-witness testimony.  They had extraordinary graphics such as the famous image of the slave ship, Brookes, which showed captive Africans packed like sardines in a can.  The potter Josiah Wedgewood struck a brooch that depicted an enslaved man on bended knee.  At the bottom of the brooch was the inscription: ‘Am I not a man and a brother?’”  (Source link)

Metaxas says that this disturbing picture of a tortured slave “… was reproduced on snuffboxes and made into cameos that women wore pinned to their dresses and in their hair.  It was also made into made into a letter sealing fob … so even the wax seals on letters would draw attention to the cause.”

For his confrontational tactics, Wilberforce was denounced as an extremist.  In the book William Wilberforce: The Life of the Great Anti-Slave Trade Campaigner, by William Hague (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2008) quotes Wilberforce declaring, “If to be feelingly alive to the sufferings of my fellow-creatures is to be a fanatic, I am one of the most incurable fanatics ever permitted to be at large.”  At BBC.co.uk, in the section titled “Religions, William Wilberforce” (last updated 7 May 2011), we read that:  “For Wilberforce personally it meant enduring vitriolic attacks in the newspapers; he was physically assaulted, he faced death threats and he had to travel with an armed bodyguard.”  (Source link)

Even Christians have abortions because they have never seen abortion.  How can they see it if nobody shows it to them?  If pro-life churches would simply show the truth, babies could be saved that are now being lost.

Only rarely do we get permission to show abortion video in a pro-life church.  Even pro-life pastors are reluctant to accept the angst that goes along with making people uncomfortable about abortion.  Even when we do get to show the video, we often have to fight for the priviledge.  When we suggest babies lives are at stake, we are called “strident,” “pushy” etc.

But we are often reminded later why we fought so hard.  We just got word this week of another baby saved because we showed abortion video during a worship service.  As reported earlier link here), CBR’s Executive Director Gregg Cunningham was able to show abortion video on a November Sunday morning at Calvary Chapel Pearl Harbor.

We just learned that at least one baby has already been saved as a result.  The mother was not only pregnant that Sunday, she had actually scheduled an abortion for the following day.  This mother had heard sermons against abortion, but had never actually seen abortion.  Gregg had debated the pastor and his wife at some length to persuade them to allow him to show our “Choice Blues” video to the congregation.  To their great credit, they finally withdrew their opposition.

When confronted with the truth, the mother became angry and stormed out of the service – but the pictures haunted her.  She cancelled her abortion appointment and sought the church’s help instead.  Had this pastor rejected Gregg’s pleas to show abortion video, this baby girl, just born, could easily have become another faceless, nameless statistic.

Please don’t withhold truth at your church.  Here is how we showed truth at Calvary Chapel Pearl Harbor:

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CBR Executive Director Gregg Cunningham shows abortion video during worship service at Calvary Chapel Pearl Harbor, Hawaii.

Abortion, which was sold to the American people as a way of liberating women, has become a tool of oppression that men use to victimize women.

The question returns, “Are we taking abortion as seriously as God takes child sacrifice in the Old Testament?”

We start by talking about forgiveness, because [abortion] is an incredibly easy mistake to make … when they are being lied to and they are under a great deal of pressure.

God forgives sin, if we repent of that sin.  That’s what the Gospel is about.

Abortion, which was sold to the American people as a way of liberating women, has become a tool of oppression that men use to victimize women.

Psalm 139 describes our being formed in a secret place, and God has now opened up that secret place and allowed us the technology to actually see what’s going on.

Abortion is happening with the permission of the Body of Christ, in the sense that God has given His people dominion over resources more than adequate to stop abortion, and abortion florishes because the Church is doing little or nothing to stop it.

It’s ironic beyond imagining that our pastors in churches around America dispute that abortion can be analogized to Old Testament child sacrifice at the very time when pagans are outspokenly saying abortion is not analygous to child sacrifice, abortion is child sacrifice.

The question returns, “Are we taking abortion as seriously as God takes child sacrifice in the Old Testament?”  And the answer for most of us is, “No, not really.”

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“Now is a bad time.”

Quote of the week:

I have never heard an abortionist say now is a bad time to kill babies.  But Christian leaders often tell me that now is a bad time to save them.  (Gregg Cunningham, Executive Director, Center for Bio-Ethical Reform)

Centerfold photo in The Sunday Times of London reached a circulation of more than 1 million readers in the UK.  (Click on photo for a better view.)

Great photo in The Sunday Times of London!  This photo of aborted babies was visible to more than 1 million readers!

Link here to article We Will Shock You.  (You will need to pay a subscription fee to see the entire article.)

Notable quotations from the article:

The pictures are stomach-turningly gruesome, the dismembered figure clearly human — tiny fingers and toes visible in a mess of blood.
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By far the most radical group in this country is Abort67, who I joined in Reading. They formed at the start of the year with guidance and resources from one of the loudest and most controversial voices on the American pro-life scene: the Center for Bio-Ethical Reform (CBR).
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The group’s founder, Gregg Cunningham, 65, has been involved in the pro-life movement in America for most of his adult life. In the last four years, Cunningham and the CBR have started to spread their reach abroad. This summer he was in Britain supporting Abort67 and giving talks in churches — his fourth visit to the UK this year.
The CBR does not fund Abort67, but it is providing thegroup’s activists with resources, graphic images and a great deal of guidance. Since the start of the year, the group has recruited around 50 volunteers who regularly protest outside clinics in Brighton, Reading, Taunton and London. They claim they have several thousand supporters and counting.
Their protests are having the most dramatic effect in liberal Brighton.
***
The most serious impact has been on the women attending the clinic. One 21-year-old sports coach, who has asked to withhold her name for fear of repercussions, goes there for weekly post-abortion counselling.
“Sometimes it’s just one person with a banner; sometimes there are 20 of them with their children,” she says. “I’ve seen people burst into tears and say they don’t want to go through with it,” she says.
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[CBR-UK Director Andy] Stephenson is a father of three and, like most of Abort67, a committed evangelical Christian. He is slight, with a dark beard, earnest eyes and an apologetic air; an unlikely crusader, perhaps, but an unrepentant one. “The atmosphere in the UK is changing,” he says. “The abortion lobby has had it easy for too long with no accountability, no consequences and very little meaningful opposition — but there is a new generation of pro-lifers emerging and disillusioned, battle-weary pro-lifers being reinvigorated because theyhave seen the fruits of what groups like ours are achieving with very little resources.”

The article closed with this threat of violence from pro-aborts who are apparently not used to seeing effective pro-life activism:

Brighton Pro-Choice met the week after the trial to plan more radical action against Abort67. One member warned: “If the police won’t stop them, we will have to.”