Truck caravan carries anti-abortion message
By Paul Lomartire
© 2001 Palm Beach Post

TAMPA -- Mark Harrington might be the only truck driver in America who prays for congested highways.

Last week, while stuck in morning traffic, Harrington stared ahead at the haze of downtown Tampa and asked: How bad's the traffic in West Palm Beach?

Real bad in the morning, he is told, lots of construction on Interstate 95.

Harrington smiled. "That will give people time to take in the signs," he said.

The signs are 25-foot, color, blow-up photographs of bloody fetuses with the word "Choice" and a dime or quarter pictured for size comparison. They're plastered all over the anti-abortion shock trucks that Harrington and a colleague will be driving today through Palm Beach County.

"Sometimes you see disbelief and shock," says Harrington, 41, the father of three back home in Westerville, Ohio. "And sometimes it's hard to tell what they're thinking."

The two-truck caravan is paid for by the Southern California-based Center for Bio-Ethical Reform.

Before arriving today in Palm Beach County, this mobile anti-abortion movement started Tuesday in Tampa and hit St. Petersburg and Orlando. The trucks head to Fort Lauderdale and Miami later this week.

The Center for Bio-Ethical Reform has tested this urban guerilla campaign on California highways since June, and Florida is the first stop on a national tour. By October, Harrington and his crew of two will have hit rush hours in Michigan, New York, Indiana, Washington, D.C. and New Jersey. They hope people will check out the website on the truck -- www.abortionno.org -- and join the anti-abortion fight.

This truck campaign evolved from the center's use of gruesome abortion photos at information tables on college campuses. At the University of Kansas in 1998 a student rammed his car into the display. That, so far, has been the only violent incident.

But critics have lined up everywhere the photos have been displayed.

"Our right to choose is again under attack by this quote, public information campaign, unquote," says Lillian Tamayo, Palm Beach and Treasure Coast Planned Parenthood president and CEO. "This tactic is not going to work. This is the same group of extremists that opposes the best methods to decrease abortions, affordable birth control and sex education in the schools.

The use of the graphic, gory photos, she adds, "is appalling to me. I speak Spanish and English and sometimes I don't have words to express my sense of outrage."

Harrington has heard all the criticism about the photos and answers, "We know the pictures are powerful but justice has to be seen to be understood, said Mahatma Ghandi; that's a quote."

Before joining this movement, Harrington was a security systems salesman. One day his wife showed him a photo from an abortion.

"The Lord called me," he says, "about three years ago."

He walked away from a weekly paycheck to a job in which he's always seeking "support," cash handouts from family, friends and sympathizers, he explains. During the truck tour, the three-man crew stays at the homes of supporters, who also provide security for the trucks.

The two white trucks, about the size a family would rent for a short household move, are followed by a security "blocking" car. The driving is tedious and bumper-to-bumper boring. Harrington and his crew pass time keeping track of "the digital count" -- either a thumbs up or a finger representing displeasure from the drivers they pass.

On this morning in Tampa, Harrington's red golf shirt is soaked in sweat right down to the waist of his blue jeans. He's thirsty. He eyes a bottle of water in a holder on the dash, but he doesn't drink. He can't afford to make a bathroom stop.

"For security reasons," he says. That means there were no cups of wake-up coffee before he and Dale Henkel, 53, of Strongsville, Ohio, and Bubba Garrett, 50, of Pensacola, outfitted the trucks before sunrise Tuesday.

Glenn Cunningham, executive director of the 11-year-old Center for Bio-Ethical Reform, won't reveal any more details about the fetus photos "for security reasons." That's the same reason he won't discuss his group's budget or staff numbers or the itinerary of the trucks.

The retired Air Force Reserve colonel began his public anti-abortion fight in 1978 during the first of two terms as a Pennsylvania state representative. He swings at critics with an evangelist's zeal.

The photos on the trucks, he explains, were taken at abortion clinics. The age of the fetuses -- seven to 10 weeks -- are verified by medical texts. And he can prove it. He says one pro-choice group in Southern California has been warned by his lawyers that if they play the fraud card one more time, he'll drag them into court.

"What we're seeing here is what Neo Nazi skinhead groups respond with when they're confronted with photos of the Holocaust. They just say it never happened, the pictures are fake," Cunningham said.

But how can he defend busloads of kids seeing the gory photographs as his trucks drive down the road?

"We clearly are more concerned with lives than feelings," the 54-year-old Cunningham said. "No question about that. At the end of the process, we come down on the side of saving babies knowing that the pictures that save babies upset some children."