Read Gregg Cunningham’s latest monthly letter about the George Tiller murder and what is the real problem the pro-life movement needs to focus on. Click Here.
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Reports from the field on the the latest Genocide Awareness Project (GAP) happenings in CBR’s July 2009 Communique Newsletter. Read it and pass it on to your friends.
Don
From: Rachel L. Solomon [mailto:rachel.l.solomon@gmail.com]
Sent: Thursday, May 28, 2009 7:45 PM
To: Gregg Cunningham
Subject: Regarding “pro-abortion”
Dear CBR,
My name is Rachel Solomon and I am a student at the University of Washington and a reporter for The Daily, the school’s student newspaper. The Genocide Awareness Project visited our campus this week and I reported on it. I do not wish to comment on the graphic images on display, as my own views are quite contrary to the ones expressed - a fact that, I might add, did not come into play in my unbiased news reporting. Instead, I would like to comment on your groups use of the term “pro-abortion” to describe those who are not “pro-life.”
The activists who oppose GAP and the pro-life movement are not pro-abortion; they are instead accurately described as possessing the opinions of “pro-choice” or “abortion rights.” “Pro-abortion” is a horrible misnomer that implies that these people push for abortions as the only way of dealing with an unwanted pregnancy. Rather, the reality is that this side often views abortion as a last resort. No one advocates FOR abortions. They advocate for THE OPTION to have an abortion.
I would greatly appreciate it if, in the future, you would correctly describe those who hold differing viewpoints from your own. Thank you very much.
Rachel
Dear Ms. Solomon,
Thank you for your note and for your fairly balanced coverage of our Genocide Awareness Project at The University of Washington. My only criticism of your reportage is that you chose to suppress the facts surrounding our dispute with the administration over the location of our display site. School officials wanted to push us into a much more obscure corner of Red Square and only relented after we retained legal counsel and threatened a lawsuit in writing. Those are newsworthy events which your readership will now never know.
But in addition to that indiscretion, I must also take issue with your assertion that our characterization of the pro-abortion position on abortion as “pro-abortion,” is a “misnomer.” Nothing could be further from the truth. Your accusation is intellectually dishonest. Imagine a Nazi having the effrontery to say “I’m not pro-Holocaust, I just don’t think it should be against the law to kill Jews.” Or try “I am not pro-rape, I think sexual assaults against women should only be legal when men commit them as a last resort.” Or “I am not pro-slavery, I merely believe whites should have the OPTION to enslave blacks. At various times and in various places, Jews and women and African Americans were widely viewed as sub-human and were consequently denied rights of personhood. In fact there are still plenty of countries in which it is effectively legal to kill Jews, rape women and enslave blacks.
People who support the right to kill a baby are understandably embarrassed by that fact so they seek to conceal the truth with the same crude, word games played by Southerners who said they didn’t advocate slavery, they advocated States’ Rights. To this day, historical revisionists deny that the Civil War had anything to do with slavery. But the truth is that when a Klansman uses the term “States’ Rights,” he means the rights of states to legalize slavery. You may play head games with your liberal classmates, Ms. Solomon, but not with us. If you think it should be legal to kill babies, you are pro-baby-killing.
Again, thank you for relatively fair coverage of our project.
Lord bless,
Gregg Cunningham
CBR
The Hill, “Abortion foes target..,” Feb. 15, 2007, reported that Mr. Obama’s opposition to “born alive infant” legislation was concerned that protections for babies born alive after botched abortions “… might compromise the relationship between a woman and her doctor.”
TheCaucus.blogs.nytimes.com, “2008 Candidates on the [Partial-Birth] Abortion Ruling,” April 18, 2007, reported that during the Democrat Presidential Primary campaign, Mr. Obama criticized a U.S. Supreme Court decision upholding a ban on partial-birth abortions as displaying “’… an alarming willingness … to disregard … a woman’s medical concerns and the very personal decisions between a doctor and patient’.”
But the Los Angeles Times, June 25, 2009, “Obama discusses deathbed measures,” quotes President Obama at a town hall meeting on health care as proposing that “… one way to shave medical costs it to stop expensive and ultimately futile procedures performed on people who are about to die and don’t stand to gain from the extra care.” He added “’Maybe you’re better off not having the surgery but taking the painkiller’.”
Who will decide whether “you’re better off” without the surgery? Not your doctor but Mr. Obama. Does Mr. Obama really know “who is about to die” and who “don’t stand to gain” from extra care? And what care is “extra?” As usual, Mr. Obama illustrates his point with a very dishonest, false dilemma. Of course you don’t do a hip replacement on his very elderly grandmother whose very aggressive and terminal cancer meant she might not have survived the surgery. But the type of treatment decisions often criticized by rationing radicals are seldom that obvious.
Mr. Obama is willing to interfere in the relationship between a doctor and his patient when the doctor is trying to save a life but not when the doctor is trying to take a life. Is this the most anti-life president in American history?
The American Pet Products Association says that for calendar year 2009, Americans will spend $45.4 billion on pet acquisition and care. And if those numbers don’t impress you, consider that the American Brewers Association says beer has become “more than a $100 billion industry” in this country (with another $50 billion on other alcoholic beverages). The Consumer Electronics Association says we spent $170 billion on gadgets and gizmos in 2008. We spent $2.2 trillion on health care in 2007 (one trillion is a thousand billion) but if we can find hundreds of billions of dollars to lavish on dogs and drinks and flat-panel televisions and countless other discretionary expenditures, do we really need to ration tests and treatment for our parents’ illnesses?
And speaking of health issues, Bloomberg.com reported a story headlined “Obama Invokes His Personal Struggle as He Signs Tobacco Bill,” June 22, 2009, which says “Except for the smoking vice, Obama adheres to a healthy diet and workout regimen….” Then, as though that isn’t enough of a disconnect, the article adds that “He isn’t shy about encouraging staff to live more healthily ….” Health advice from a smoker. But hey, liberals euphemize their own hypocracy as mere “complexity.” And the state-run media are too committed to protecting their investment in the “historic outcome of this presidential election” to point out the gaping inconsistencies in the rhetoric of this president, whose incumbency is going to end up being “historic” but not in the ways his journalistic fan club imagines.
Today, June 24, 2009, The New York Times reported a story headlined “Tapes Reveal Nixon’s View of Abortion,” which quotes late president Richard Nixon as expressing the view that “‘There are times when an abortion is necessary. I know that. When you have a black and a white,’ he told an aide, before adding: ‘Or a rape.’” Ah, as regards the former, that would be Pres. Barack Obama, who “had a black and a white” parent. It is also stunning that Mr. Nixon assessed a bi-racial couple as an evil on the same order of magnitude as a sexual assault. Both, in his view, justified killing the resulting but innocent baby. Earlier in the same conversation he expressed concern that abortion was undesirable because “it breaks the family.” He apparently believed that the need to kill mixed-race babies was so compelling that it justified ”breaking” inter-racial families. I wonder if he would have maintained such a primitive view had he seen our abortion videos? I would like to think not but this troubled man (in whose Presidential Administration I served for two summers as a legislative research assistant while in law school) was certainly capable of jaw-dropping, moral discontinuities.
Dear Ms. Griffiths,
Thank you for agreeing to retract Ms. Paretsky’s outrageously inaccurate allegation concerning the burning of a nurse. There remain, however, additional issues which need to be addressed by your U.K. Guardian newspaper.
You say that Ms. Paretsky’s article “does not identify any individual or organization as responsible” for “violent attacks” at abortion clinics. That is incorrect. She names the “National Council of Catholic Bishops, the National Right to Life Committee, Operation Rescue and other groups opposed to women’s reproductive health and privacy” which she says “are almost all headed by men.” She says that “In the 36 years since the supreme court [sic] decided Roe, followers of these and other groups have performed acts ranging from murder and attempted murder … [emphasis added]” etc. I am a man. I “head” a national pro-life “group.” Ms. Paretsky’s article accuses an anti-abortion arsonist of attempted murder. The law of defamation makes false and disparaging accusations actionable even when those defamed are identified only by implication or as part of an identifiable class.
I appreciate your willingness to correct Ms. Paretsky’s scurrilous and false allegation that someone “poured petrol on a nurse and set fire to her.” But the “correction” you propose is inadequate. Based on The New York Times article on which you say Ms. Paretsky relied in making this allegation, you suggest that the record can be set straight with a revision which will state “… when a protester at a Cleveland clinic poured petrol on a lab technician, spread the petrol around the room and set fire to it.” But the New York Times article doesn’t say the arsonist “poured petrol on a lab technician.” It says the gasoline was “splashed in the face of a technician” in the process by which the arsonist “spread it around the room” and “set it afire ….” The New York Times story doesn’t say the arsonist “set the technician afire.” It says he set the “room” afire. There is nothing in the article which offers any evidence that he was targeting the technician for attack. Falsely claiming that he “poured” it on her creates the misleading impression that he specifically intended to injure her, instead of merely damaging the building. The section of The National Abortion Federation website on “Clinic Violence” which apparently describes this incident, makes no reference to the technician even being injured by the fire. The New York Times article you cite says her eye injuries were only “temporary.” That doesn’t sound, as Ms. Paretsky initially alleged, as though someone “poured petrol on a nurse and set fire to her.”
Even given the facts as they were actually reported by the New York Times, the conduct of the arsonist is indefensible. He was either an imbecile or a lunatic. But that doesn’t license Ms. Paretsky to exaggerate the circumstances of the attack for political purposes. She is either a very careless or a very dishonest journalist. Not only did she make an attack which occurred thirty-two-years ago sound as though it happened yesterday, she twisted the burning of a building into the immolation of a nurse. I need not remind you that defamation is no less actionable because the denigration works though innuendo. Her clear implication is that male-lead anti-abortion groups burn nurses at the stake (or at the clinic, as the case may be).
I insist that you confine yourselves to quoting the New York Times article verbatim, without embelishment, if you wish to avoid judicial review of this matter.
Respectfully,
Gregg Cunningham
The Center For Bio-Ethical Reform
P.O. Box 219
Lake Forest, CA 92609
Office Phone, 949-206-0600
Cell Phone, 714-240-6976
==============================================================================
1John3:8 “The reason the Son of God appeared was to destroy the work of the devil.” Torturing
babies to death is incontestably “the work of the devil.” But by the power of our Lord, CBR is
destroying that work, day after day, around the clock and around the world.
From: Isobel.Griffiths@guardian.co.uk [mailto:Isobel.Griffiths@guardian.co.uk]
Sent: Monday, June 15, 2009 7:11 AM
To: Gregg Cunningham
Subject: Fw: Terror in the Name of Jesus
Dear Mr Cunningham Thank you for your email. It is not clear from your email how you assert that you or the anti-abortion Center for Bio-Ethical Reform of which you are a director are identified in the Article which is the subject of your complaint. Nor is it clear what defamatory allegations you claim have been made against you in this Article. This was a comment piece referring to a number of violent attacks and does not identify any individual or organisation as responsible for them. We note however your comments on the claim made that ‘protesters at a Cleveland clinic poured petrol on a nurse and set fire to her.’ We have checked this with the writer Sara Paretsky who has provided us with a copy of an article that was published in the New York Times about an incident which occurred in the Concerned Woman’s Clinic in Cleveland in February 1978 in which it states that someone threw gasoline at a technician and about the room in which she was in and set fire to it. We attach a copy of the article for your reference. In light of the description of the incident in the New York Times we will amend the article to state that ‘when a protester at a Cleveland clinic poured petrol on a lab technician, spread the petrol around the room and set fire to it.’ Yours sincerely Isobel Griffiths
In-house Lawyer
tel: 0203 353 3878
Guardian News & Media Ltd.
Kings Place,
90 York Way,
London
N1 9GU
This interview deals with the phenomenally improbable apology a now elderly Klansman offered to Rep. John Lewis, for having beaten him at a civil rights rally in the 1960s. I just ran across this quote from a MLK speech which seems almost eerie in its prophetic significance when read against the background of the CNN video. If this man, so full of hatred, can change, perhaps there is hope for even the most hard-hearted advocates of abortion.
“No, we must not lose faith in our white brothers. Somehow we must believe that the most misguided among them can learn to respect the dignity and the worth of all human personality.”
Martin Luther King, Jr., “Eulogy for the Martyred Children,” September 18, 1963, Birmingham, AL.
The June 6, 2009 cover of World magazine depicts the slaughter in Tiananmen Square 20 years ago. Click image to enlarge.
Educators for a very long time have understood that the use of disturbing imagery to teach about injustice is not only effective but is a necessity to see an injustice stopped. Recently World magazine ran a story remembering the 20 year anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre. World magazine understood that without pictures of the atrocity, this terrible event would be trivialized, the current suffering of Chinese citizens would be ignored, and that it would be intellectually dishonest to cover up these very disturbing images when they are essential to telling the story.
It is very sad however that World magazine has not applied this same reasoning to abortion. World magazine is without question pro-life. But like most pro-life organizations in the country, they are more “pro-feelings” than they are “pro-life”. In other words, they are more concerned about the feelings of born people than the lives of pre-born people. If World magazine, were to publish pictures of abortion in their magazine it is likely it would upset some born people, but it is a certainty it would save scores of pre-born people.
Since its founding CBR has believed that the pro-life movement in America made a strategic blunder from the very beginning by allowing the debate over abortion to be about the abstract concept of choice instead of forcing the debate to be about the concrete reality of what is being chosen. Because what is being chosen is an indefensible act of violence against a baby that can be proven by simply displaying a photo of what abortion is and what it does to the baby.
The pro-abortion movement has understood for a long time to never allow these photos into the debate. That is why it is next to impossible to get abortion imagery anywhere in the world. CBR has gone to great lengths to acquire this imagery and only by the grace of God has that been possible.
But the pro-abortion movement has little to worry about when its opposition will carry water for them by refusing to show these pictures. In other words, the pro-life movement will not use the photos so the pro-aborts do not have to do anything really to keep the injustice hidden. Even though God has given the pro-life movement this tremendous weapon, His people have been unwilling to use it and many babies have died as a result.
This latest issue of World magazine is just one example of many that show this double standard in the use of disturbing imagery. However World has taken it a step further in the cover up in that CBR not long ago requested to rent the World magazine subscriber list to which CBR would solicit supporters for its ministry. The mailing would include pictures of abortion not outside the envelope but inside. A far less aggressive approach than their recent magazine cover shown above. Even with our abortion pictures inside the envelope, that was deemed unacceptable by World magazine’s leadership and CBR was denied the opportunity to mail to this otherwise available list of potential supporters. On the rare occasion when World did publish an abortion photo, it was an old, black-and-white picture of a late-term baby who appeared to be peacefully asleep. They have refused to publish color photos of much more typical and violent abortions.
This is not to pick on World magazine however, because we see this cover up in many Christian circles. This refusal to show the truth has been heard from most churches and lay ministries alike for years. Is it any wonder that after 36 years since Roe that abortion remains legal and without any significant restrictions? Is it any wonder that public support for first trimester abortion has increased and remains at an all time high?
We pray for the day that Christians would care more about the lives of millions of pre-born babies than the feelings of some born people. We pray for the day that World magazine, and others like them, would apply the same standard in teaching about abortion, the worlds number one killer at 50 million per year, that they would apply when teaching about other injustices.
“Listen let me tell you something: a struggle without documentation is no struggle at all.” -South African Apartheid Photographer Peter Magubane’s answer to young protesters who feared police reprisals and asked him to not take photographs.
Picture of bloodied chinese citizen that appeared inside World magazine's recent publication. Click image to enlarge.
Image inside World magazine recent publication. Click image to enlarge.
We are often asked if CBR has video footage of the abortion procedure called an “Intact D&X” or more commongly known as “Partial Birth Abortion”. This is a good question but the better question is; “Would PBA video footage even help the pro-life movement in defending the pre-born child?”
Yes, there are videos of partial-birth abortion procedures but they are in the hands of the abortion industry and they are used for training purposes. The trustees protect them more securely than the launch codes on U.S. ICBMs. It doesn’t matter anyway because the overwhelming majority of the American people already oppose PBA and have for years. Why refight a battle we have already won? The real problem is that 2/3s of Americans support first trimester abortion without realizing that it is far more gruesome than any PBA. That is where we need to focus our attention and that is why our organization has spent huge amounts of time and money amassing an archive of first trimester abortion imagery and almost no time obtaining imagery of later procedures.
CBR brought the Genocide Awareness Project to the University of Washington in Seattle this week. Those who act out violently against CBR’s public display of graphic abortion images or deface signs must pay the legal price for their actions. CBR takes these acts seriously to show that violations of free speech anywhere will not be tolerated.
You can read more about pro-abortion violence toward CBR by clicking here: http://www.abortionno.org/GAP/violence/violence.html
