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Last Wednesday, the Center [CBR] facilitated a program at the Hale Black Cultural Center to explain to [black] student leaders that these images aren't meant to be racist, [Joseph Gilkes, president of End Time Ministries, a sponsoring organization] ... said.
[CBR note: We took this invaluable opportunity to show pre-natal development and abortion videos which will be remembered long after our words are forgotten.]
But that still did not convince all members that the project's imagery is acceptable.
'I think that this project is more of a shock treatment and sensationalism because abortion affects everyone, not just African-American,' said Lawrence Williamson, director of the Hale Center. 'I am not in favor of what they are trying to achieve with their shock treatment.'
Jeff Capell, president of the OSU College Republicans, said this is an excellent event to start a campus debate about abortion.
'It's really no worse than what you find in a history book or a network prime time TV show,' Capell said. 'An honest picture of a brutal event is going to be graphic and if you want to be honest about it, you can't sugar coat,' he said.
[CBR note: Because Jeff's College Republican club was one of those co-sponsoring groups, he E-mailed us to say that a small faction of his membership tried to impeach him as a result of CBR's visit to OSU. He adds, however, that 'we easily beat them back' Jeff is our kind of guy and someone from whom you will no doubt be hearing more.]
'I passed a woman who was actually weeping. I felt like doing it too,' said Lillie Jenkins Carter, a doctoral student majoring in communications. 'The pictures are startlingly graphic.'
Perhaps Lawrence Williamson would have been one of those civil rights moderates who condemned Dr. King's "shock treatment" and "sensationalism." He sounds like a "pro-life moderate" but we suspect he's just a pro-abort. It is sometimes hard to tell the one from the other. Thankfully, many of the black students he advises thought for themselves and rejected his point of view.
Ally Berson of the Genocide Awareness Council may be "extremely offended" and wonder if there can't be "a better way for us to get our point across" but we use pictures for the same reason she does. She uses them to condemn one form of genocide and we use them to condemn all forms. So Ms. Berson isn't really rejecting our methodology, she is rejecting our message. She denies the validity of the comparison between abortion and the Holocaust. She is wrong.
Lawrence L. Langer writes the following Holocaust observations in The Atlantic Monthly magazine, November, 1998:
Recently I watched the testimony of a survivor of the Kovno ghetto, in Lithuania. He spoke of the so-called Kinderaktion, in which the Germans rounded up all the children (and many of the elderly) and took them to the nearby Ninth Fort - a killing site outside Kovno - for execution. The witness was present in the room when an SS man entered and demanded from a mother the one-year-old infant she was holding in her arms. She refused to surrender it, so he seized the baby by its ankles and tore the body in two before the mother's eyes.
How is this atrocity morally distinguishable from Martin Haskell's description of the "dilation and extraction" abortion procedure in which he essentially "seizes the baby by its ankles" as he prepares to crush its skull ("Dilation and Extraction for Late Second Trimester Abortion," Martin Haskell, MD, Presentation, National Abortion Federation Risk Management Seminar, September 13, 1992)?
Or consider parallels to Warren Hern's "dilatation and evacuation" abortion which also "tears the body" into parts. On page 142 of his book, Abortion Practice, Warren Hern, MD, Alpenglo Graphics, 1990, he explains "As the calvaria [skull] is grasped, a sensation that it is collapsing is almost always accompanied by the extrusion of white cerebral material [brain] from the external os [cervical opening of the uterus]." At page 143, he recommends the "Hanson maneuver" with which he presses his hand against the mother's lower abdomen to locate the baby's head, which he then forces " ... down to the lower uterine segment" where it can be " ... grasped more easily." At page 153, Hern cautions that "Grasping and collapsing the calvaria [skull] are often difficult. "Stripping the calvaria of soft tissue [tearing off the baby's face and scalp] is sometimes the first step in successful delivery of this part, followed by dislocation of parietal bones [crushing the baby's skull]." On page 156 he instructs that "The operator uses a forceps with a small blade and powerful grip, such as the small Sopher or small Hern; an 8-inch curved Mayo scissors is used to dissect fetal tissue a little at a time [tear off bits of hands, arms, feet, legs, etc., small piece by small piece]."
The comparison between abortion and the Holocaust is further strengthened by the section of Langer's Atlantic Monthly article which documents an even more horrific scene (were that possible). This incident is recounted by a witness who observed the following in Poland, in the woods of Kazimierz Biskupi:
[The Gestapo] ordered the assembled Jews to strip - first those who were standing near the large pit. Then they ordered the naked people to go down into both pits and jump into the larger pit. I could not describe the wailing and the crying .... Some mothers jumped in holding their children, some were throwing their children in .... [T]wo Gestapo men began to pour some liquid, like water on the Jews .... Apparently, because of the slaking of the lime, people in the pit were boiling alive. The cries were so terrible that we who were sitting by the piles of clothing began to tear pieces off the stuff to stop our ears.
This sickening tale is hauntingly reminiscent of the amnio infusion (saline installation) abortions commonly performed on second trimester babies in the 1970s and 1980s and still legal today. The child is killed by chemical burns which leave victims looking as though they have been "boiled alive." The poison is so toxic that its incautious administration could (and sometimes does) kill the mother. The baby simultaneously swallows and inhales the scalding solution. It destroys the mucus membranes of the respiratory and digestive systems. This agonizing death finally culminates with widespread vasodilatation, edema, congestion, hemorrhage and shock ("Fetal Pathology and Mechanism of Death in Saline Abortion, Galen et al., Amer. Jour. of OB & GYN , vol. 120, pp. 347-355, 1974). How "terrible" would be the baby's "cries" if they could be heard?
Of final comparative interest is Langer's mention of the medical experiments performed on victims of the Holocaust:
A doctor at Mauthausen, in training to serve at the front as a physician with an SS unit, liked to amputate the arms or legs of Jews to see how long it would take them to bleed to death. After all, this would be useful medical information ....
On May 23, 1999, The Los Angeles Times reported a story entitled "Ethics Panel Supports Human Embryo Study."
A presidentially appointed ethics panel has decided to recommend that the federal government begin funding some research on human embryos, saying the moral cost of destroying embryos in research is outweighed by the social good that could come from the work.
Ms. Berson no doubt rejects these indisputable comparisons because she is conptemtuous of the personhood of the human embryo and fetus. PERSONHOOD IS WHAT GENOCIDE IS ALWAYS ABOUT. This is the same contempt with which SS men would have dismissed her personhood, had she been savaged by Nazi "choice" in some squalid death camps.
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