Emily
MikeHow sick is this!! An anti-choice group yesterday and today is having an airplane fly a banner over the city of Lynchburg, VA, promoting its cause. The banner depicts the hand of a human fetus lying on top of a dime. (The photo at the right shows the plane towing the banner over the Liberty University campus. I was not able to find an image that shows a close-up of the banner, but there might be one later today.)
From Lynchburg News & Advance
The group paying for the plane and banner is the Center for Bio-Ethical Reform. The name is meaningless, the group’s website says it works to “establish prenatal justice and the right to life for the unborn.” The group uses graphic images of aborted fetuses to protest the practice of abortions across the country: “CBR operates on the principle that abortion represents an evil so inexpressible that words fail us when attempting to describe its horror. Until abortion is seen, it will never be understood.”
The group’s web site is horrific. When you go there, the home page (after a seven-second delay) brings up an extremely graphic video of what it purports to be an actual abortion. And there are graphics strewn throughout the site. This group spends a lot of time on trying to get its graphic messages seen. (It got me to write about it.) For the purpose of seeing the lengths to which the anti-choice side is willing to go, you might want to look at the site http://www.abortionno.org. (Yes, I continue to believe that “anti-choice,” not “anti-abortion,” is the way to describe that side.)
The group says it chose Lynchburg because of the 4-day event held at Liberty University last week “to unify the student voice against abortion.” The link to Liberty University makes sense because it is a “Christian Evangelical” university founded by Jerry Falwell. Apparently, the event thought that it is good to promote people who have turned against their previous pro-choice beliefs since it honored Norma McCorvey and had as one of its speakers “Carol Everrett, a former owner of an abortion clinic that facilitated 35,000 abortions.”
Unfortunately, I didn’t see any reports about protests held against the banner or during a previous flying of the banner over Knoxville, TN. I think the real action that is needed is to get rid of groups like the Center for Bio-Ethical Reform and Operation Rescue.
Filed under: Abortion Tagged: | Abortion, Center for Bio-Ethical Reform, Liberty University
Do you “think the real action that is needed is to get rid of groups like the Center for Bio-Ethical Reform and Operatin Rescue” is good so that pre-born babies can continue to be exterminated like the Jews were by the Nazis without opposition.
If you are for choice, why not let everyone see what the choice of abortion looks like. Funny, when people saw what the choice to treat black American unfairly, children in factories, American Indians, even animals like the seals who were being bludgened to death looked like, people made Informed decisions to change their “choices”.
Steve Schrimsher
Steve, thanks for the comment. You and I will just have to disagree on the issue of choice. The past decades have shown that people who are on opposite sides of this issue have little chance of reaching accord. However, you are way out of bounds to compare abortion to the extermination of Jews by the Nazis. The entire debate about abortion is (or should be) whether an individual should have a choice to have an abortion. That is entirely different than the decision by the Nazi government to exterminate an entire group of people.
However, you make a good point when you say that “If you are for choice, why not let everyone see what the choice of abortion looks like.” You are correct. Although I personally find repugnant the tactics of the Center for Bio-Ethical Reform to show graphic images, I do think that a woman who is deciding whether to have an abortion should have all of the facts available. Unfortunately, those graphic images may tend in many cases to overwhelm the other facts that are delivered in a more subdued manner and thus result in a woman not being able to effectively process all of the facts she needs to make a choice.
And the video shown on the home page of the Center for Bio-Ethical Reform’s web site clearly is a late-trimester abortion. It therefore only depicts a situation that will apply to a small minority of women who are trying to decide what to do. That video is sending the wrong message to the majority of women and therefore can result in them not making an informed decision.
I think that your comparison to the bludgeoning of seals is valid, maybe even more so than you are implying. The graphic images of the bludgeoning carry more weight than any words that can be written about them. In that sense, the beliefs of people about the seals might not be the “informed decisions” that you mention. And that’s where my personal dislike of the graphic images of abortion gets into trouble, since I am not opposed to the graphic images of the bludgeoning of seals. Similarly, I am not opposed to using graphic images of war (for instance, the images from Vietnam or more recently Abu Ghraib) to show that war is wrong.
And so, as long as the graphic images are fair and are part of the entire set of available facts, I cannot disagree with you. If the Center for Bio-Ethical Reform wants to show a video that depicts what an abortion looks like in the first trimester, I could not argue with that. But what they are doing distorts the information for women trying to make a decision.
I would also like to see them show something graphic about women who have been forced to carry the fetus to term, or had a “back alley” abortion. I know that will not happen because it is the nature of special interest groups to show only the information that helps their side. But it doesn’t mean that I have to like what the Center for Bio-Ethical Reform is doing.