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Recall the E-mail describing the pregnant Ohio State student who attempted to avoid our GAP exhibit. She believed that she could maintain the fiction that abortion is morally acceptable - if she could just avoid the pictures. She could deflect the truth as long as it was kept abstract by the fuzziness of mere words. She knew that she was not among the few who can be turned against abortion through the use of rhetoric and like most Americans, she knew just enough to know she didn't want to know more. She felt so threatened by these images that she went out of her way to keep them out of her head. She intuited that it takes only a glance for visual truth to crash through psychic defenses. That is precisely why the abortion industry has always been terrified of pictures. The lies of abortion apologists are instantly refuted by pictures; at least for viewers with a functioning conscience.
We know this because the campaign to enact legislative prohibitions against "partial-birth" abortion has forced the press to publish and broadcast gruesome pictures. Public support for late-term abortion has plummeted accordingly. But support for first trimester abortion persists at high levels in every poll. Because the nation is still ill-informed about early abortion, it is much easier for Americans to trivialize the embryo and early fetus as inconsequential "blobs of tissue." The term "partial birth" abortion now evokes vivid images of grisly horror but public perception of "first trimester" abortion remains willfully murky and therefore, morally ambiguous.
Even physicians rely on denial to justify the "termination" of early pregnancy. The first trimester abortionist views his victim only remotely, as a grainy image on an ultrasound monitor (which medical texts have long warned him to turn away from the baby's mother, "Warns of Negative Psychological Impact of Sonography in Abortion," Dorfman, Ob. Gyn. News, Feb. 15-18, 1986). He is further detached by the vacuum pump which mechanically shreds the baby (whose dismemberment he would have had to accomplish manually in an earlier time) and whisks its remains discretely out of view. The soul-numbing job of reassembling the corpses is left to subordinates.
The remoteness of executioner from victim will be increased further still (along with ease of denial) when abortionists merely write abortifacient prescriptions, filled by amoral pharmacists, for lethal pills to be ingested by aborting mothers, in the privacy of their own homes. The babies will be younger, smaller and some will argue, possessed of even less compelling claims to rights of personhood. And their tiny bodies will splash into their mothers' toilets, far from the offices of their abortionists, to be flushed into sewers running red with the blood of our children. And as if to prove this point, a recent survey predicted an increase in the numbers of physicians who will begin performing abortions when they can do so by chemical means (Will 1999 Be The Year For Mifepristone (RU-486)? And, An Update On Women's Other Options For Very Early Abortion, The Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation, September 16, 1998, http://www.kff.org).
Chemical abortion will also increase denial among "patients." An article entitled "Reactions to Medical Abortion Among Providers of Surgical Abortion: An Early Snapshot," Family Planning Perspectives, January/February, 1999, reports the following:
Some providers have discovered, in the course of counseling medical abortion patients, that some women do not consider the procedure a "real" abortion. At a national meeting on medical abortion, counselors from clinics already providing such procedures told of women who call clinics saying: 'I ... don't believe in abortion. But I can't be pregnant. Can you give me that pill that will make me stop being pregnant?'
* * *
Abortion providers now have a methodology [chemical abortion] about which there is much patient misinformation, and which - given that it seems to induce a miscarriage - can allow some women the illusion that an abortion has not taken place at all.
Chemical abortion "patients" may see "their" procedure as morally superior to vacuum aspiration abortion in part because it is committed earlier, on younger, smaller (less developed) babies and in part because the method of killing is less direct. This is exactly the erroneous moral distinction most Americans make between vacuum aspiration and "partial birth" abortions (vacuum occurring in the first trimester versus "partial birth" in the second and third, with vacuum being a method of killing that is more direct than chemical but less direct than "partial birth"). Denial is a willful ignorance of the facts which makes it possible to rationalize the unthinkable as appropriate, necessary or even indispensable.
As the baby and its fate become more abstract, we must work harder to make both more concrete.
UNBORN AND NEWBORN
Denial is now so pervasive and persuasive that it is even used to rationalize literal child-sacrifice. Newsweek magazine, April 19, 1999 in its coverage of the discovery of the bodies of three children, sacrificed in the Andes to "mountain gods," by Incas who drugged and buried them alive, quotes Mario Lazarovich, director of cultural heritage in the province of Salta, concerning the children's deaths: "They exude an air of tranquillity .... Their death was not violent, and this allows us to see the ritual from an Inca point of view: this was not a time of terror and horror but of peace and worship." No right. No wrong. Just cultural relativism.
We are losing so badly on abortion that devotee's of darkness aren't merely rationalizing past infanticide, they are emboldened to urge it here and now. Princeton University has named infanticide advocate Peter Singer to a tenured chair at its Center for Human Values. Forget the unborn child, Singer doesn't believe that a newborn child merits rights of personhood until 28 days after birth. During the first month outside the womb, Singer says parents should have the right to "choose" to kill a baby if it is "disabled." Disability, of course, means different things to different people. Children born female are killed as "disabled" in many cultures. In his book Practical Ethics, Peter Singer, Cambridge University Press, 1993, professor Singer asserts that "Killing a disabled infant is not morally equivalent to killing a person. "Very often it is not wrong at all." He adds, "When the death of a disabled infant will lead to the birth of another infant with better prospects of a happy life, the total amount of happiness will be greater if the disabled infant is killed."
Mr. Lazarovich romanticizes child killing as an act of "peace and worship" while Dr. Singer purrs that it produces "happiness." These sentiments are manifestly perverse.
If we can no longer protect the born, what hope can we have for the unborn? Evil of this magnitude must be resisted with more than tactful platitudes and abstract expressions of easily ignored disapproval. We've got to get in people's faces; respectfully but with audacity appropriate to the calamity which has befallen us.
TACTICAL PROS AND CONS
Pro-life tactics which break the law (Rescue, etc.) are of dubious merit because they teach no facts about the baby or abortion, they are costly (arrests, etc.) and the press heightens the impression that they are "extreme." (It is encouraging that Rescuers are now using pictures.) We will never be blessed with news coverage as objective as that of the civil disobedience conducted by civil rights activists, which was reported as "heroic." On the other hand, pro-life tactics which are typified by the broadcast of timid TV commercials won't be received at "extreme" but they are very costly, teach no facts and the opinions they express are so vague that it's hard to grasp that they are even pro-life. These ads may save some lives, but they assume too much prior knowledge and they underestimate cultural resistance to truth.
Another popular pro-life tactic involves billboards which offer pregnancy tests. They attract callers who don't realize the number displayed is pro-life but many will never end up in the CPC's offering the tests, because the great majority of these women don't want help getting through a crisis pregnancy, they want help getting out of one. The pregnancy test project has definite value where it gets abortion vulnerable women into a CPC equipped to dissuade them from killing their babies. But unfortunately, another weak link in this progression is that the majority of participating CPC's use video (tapes, live ultra sound, etc.) only to teach about the baby, if at all. The vast majority refuse to use any graphic images to teach about abortion. This is tragic because, as we have noted ad nauseum, abortion is an evil which is trivialized when we attempt to describe it with words alone.
Life Chain, the placement of miniature crosses on lawns, picketing, marching, etc. have long been staples of pro-life activism and are neither costly nor perceived as "extreme" by most observers. But these projects frequently fail to change behaviors because they merely state conclusions (and often state them too abstractly) instead of teaching the facts which compel those conclusions.
Then there is GAP. It is far less costly than TV ad campaigns or criminal misconduct. It teaches pivotal facts instead of merely stating (or worse, vaguely suggesting) unpopular conclusions. It doesn't rely on the willingness of a reluctant public to consider our message - we go to them instead of vainly hoping they will come to us. It also reaches large numbers of people in a very short time. It is nearly impossible to ignore. It is and always will be perceived as "extreme" by those who confuse the medium with the message. Our message is extreme ("abortion is an act of violence which kills a baby"). Our medium (abortion pictures) is extremely effective at communicating this extreme message. Any other medium would be less extreme but less effective. Any other medium would dumb-down the message. This perception of methodological extremity is unavoidable if we tell the whole truth about abortion and that perception is a reasonable price to pay for unmasking that truth.
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