CBR Blog

CBR visits the University of Houston in Texas this week.  Here is an email exchange between a University of Houston student and CBR directory Gregg Cunningham:

Pro-abortion students at the University of Houston protest CBR's Genocide Awareness Project (GAP).

Dear Ms. M,

Regarding your complaints concerning our Genocide Awareness Display at the University of Houston:

First of all, you dispute our reference to abortion as “genocide” and challenge us to “Google” the word “Darfur” to learn what “genocide” really is.  Your invocation of Darfur is clear evidence that you don’t understand the controversy over the definition of genocide in Sudan.  Your assertion that abortion is not genocide perfectly mirrors the Sudanese argument that the ethnic cleansing of black Africans by ethnic Arab militias (and the uninformed military) in Muslim Darfur is not genocide.  Our Congress and our President and our Secretary of State have all declared the mass murder in Darfur to be genocide.  They used horrifying pictures, just as we do, to make their case.  But the United Nations and Amnesty International argue that crimes against humanity in Darfur are not genocide.  History proves that the definition of genocide evolves over time in a process which is often marked by disputation.  People who care about ending crimes against humanity usually call them genocide.  People who don’t care usually call them something else.  Your lack of concern for the unborn closely parallels the Sudanese lack of concern for the black Africans of Darfur.  So neither of you are willing to call these atrocities genocide.

Which brings us to your second point:  You boast that you “were not shocked by our graphic images.”  We acknowledge that we are not “shocked” by your boast.  You define yourself as “100% pro-choice.”  Our images aren’t aimed at people who are fanatical pro-aborts.  They are aimed at people who are open-minded with respect to abortion.  Most pro-aborts are more ignorant than evil.  Showing them who the baby really is and what abortion really does to him/her, is usually enough to change their minds. Our pictures work wonders for those who only lack a fundamental understanding of abortion.  But for those who lack a functioning conscience, the pictures don’t matter because the facts don’t matter.  Their devotion to the Culture of Death transcends mere facts and becomes an article of faith.

As for your third point, the greatest contribution you could have made to the success of our abortion photo display at the University of Houston was to have helped draw attention to it by joining a counter-demonstration, and the larger and louder the better.  Nothing attracts crowds like conflict and the more vigorously you oppose our presence, the more influential you make that presence.  Thank you for amplifying the impact of our exhibit.

Finally, your defiant financial contribution to Planned Parenthood is by far your most anemic rejoinder.  Planned Parenthood’s annual revenue now tops one BILLION dollars.  They are rolling in cash.  They have so much money they can’t figure out what to do with all of it.  Our pictures change everything for everyone with even a rudimentary sense of right and wrong.  Your financial contribution changes nothing.  Our pictures for your donation is a trade-off we will eagerly make any day of the week.

We are praying for you Ms. M and we don’t say that with the slightest condescension.  God loves you and wants to forgive you, if only you will humble yourself, repent and allow Him to embrace you in the Name of Christ.  In your heart-of-hearts, you know that you aren’t really comfortable with your position on abortion.  You also know that all is not right with your life spiritually.  Our prayer is that you will pray about these important matters.

Lord bless,

Gregg Cunningham
Executive Director

From: Ms. M
Sent: Tuesday, November 17, 2009 2:58 PM
To: Gregg Cunningham
Subject: inspired by the GAP project

To the directors and members of the Center for Bio-ethical Reform:

After seeing your presentation at the University of Houston this week, I was shocked into awareness. I would like to share the effects that your presentation has had on me.

However, I was not shocked by your graphic images. What shocked me was your utter lack of respect for women who are put in difficult situations and have to make difficult choices. I was shock by your egregious violations of basic vocabulary, such as genocide. (Google “Darfur” if you want to know what genocide is. Your appropriation of this term to your cause is ludicrous.)

I am now and have been for most of my adult life, 100% pro-choice. I do not usually feel the need to take political action or support groups that advocate for a woman’s right to choose abortion. However, your presentation changed this for me. Not only did I stand with a crowd of people protesting your display, I have signed up to make a monthly contribution to Planned Parenthood.

So here’s the effect your presentation has had on me: not only am I more committed than ever to being pro-choice, I am donating some of my hard-earned money to Planned Parenthood. Looks like the bad guys are winning. And you have only yourselves to thank.

Sincerely,
A pro-choice college senior

CBR’s Aerial Billboards Fly Over Liberty University

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A request recently came to us asking us to reveal the methods and sources we use to acquire our vast abortion imagery archive.  Below is the answer Gregg Cunnigham gave in regards to this matter:

Dear Mr. S,

Your topic is a difficult one about which to conduct an interview because the details of our abortion clinic access agreements are highly confidential.  Disclosing the wrong information could jeopardize the wellbeing of abortion industry workers who collaborate with us and place all future access at risk.

I am quite amazed at some of the ill-considered journalism on the subject of abortion photos.  The New York Times (http://lens.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/10/09/behind-19/) recently conducted an interview with a woman of whom I had never heard who many years ago photographed late term fetuses taken from the refuse of abortion clinics.  When I began doing this work those were the only photos available and they saved a lot of babies but they weren’t very good.  The ages of the babies were far from being representative of most abortions and age matters greatly in the public mind.  The camera formats produced images which were not large enough for billboard use, which greatly limited their utility.

The pictures themselves were often taken on amateur equipment by amateur photographers.  They meant well but many, such as the woman interviewed for the NYT story was not a professional activist and as a consequence, she seemed more focused on depicting the babies in ways which minimized the violence of abortion (a high percentage of late term abortions involve intact deliveries which mute the visual horror of abortion) which made the pictures of little value in convincing the public that abortion is an evil of sufficient magnitude to justify criminalizing the act.  She and many pro-lifers such as she apparently had little understanding of the history of social reform and their pictures reflected that lack of awareness.

Our photo acquisition work is logistically difficult, emotionally draining, financially costly and in some ways, even dangerous.  We often take hundreds of photos to get one truly powerful image. But we now have by far the largest archive of abortion imagery in the world and it is in use by activists in a growing number of foreign countries.  We concentrate on first trimester procedures because 90% of abortions occur during that phase of pregnancy.  A woman who is seven weeks pregnant will often dismiss a twenty week abortion photo as morally irrelevant to her situation because she rationalizes that she would never abort that late in pregnancy.  She wants to believe her baby is not yet a baby and that denial may work for her unless we show her a six week aborted baby and then if she has a functioning conscience, we have her.  That six week baby photo can save the life of twenty week baby but a twenty week baby photo will much less often save the lives of six week babies.

All the best,

Gregg Cunningham                            
The Center For Bio-Ethical Reform

A public service announcement in the UK is using a very disturbing and graphic commercial to teach about the dangers of text messaging while driving.  While the commercial is very disturbing, few if any people are decrying this teaching technique. In fact one news source reporting on this controversy put it this way,

“The use of graphic images to dissuade people from reckless behavior behind the wheel is not a new technique. I remember seeing video in a drivers’ education class in the early 1970s that had a montage of broken cars and gory bodies, some of them still alive and in pain, to warn against bad driving habits.”

Words alone cannot communicate the horror of a traffic accident and the horrible consequences that too often result from driving in a careless manner.  When teaching about abortion the same can be said in that it is impossible to teach in an intellectually honest way the horror of abortion without showing images of it.  Lives are lost when we hide the horror of driving careless and lives are lost when we hide the horror of abortion.

This is another example of the double standard in our education networks and institutions today.  We pray for the day when the same standard of eduction would be applied to education on abortion as is the standard in driver’s education. In the mean time CBR will do its best to educate the world on who the baby is and what abortion does to her. And yes we must do it visually like everyone else.

CBR Southeast in Knoxville, TN is making abortion impossible to ignore or trivialize.  A few days ago we reported on the successful efforts of CBR in Knoxville to stop the expansion of Planned Parenthood in Knoxville.  Click on the photo below to see a sample of what the pro-abortion movement is up against. When the debate is about “Choice” we lose. When the debate is about what is being chosen. We win.

THIS IS THE HORROR WE BRING TO THE SIDEWALKS OF BUSINESSES WHICH SUPPORT ABORTION

To download photos from this display click here.

Dear Andrew (our U.K. regional director),

This little Brit teenager (see web survey below) has just seen the abortion video on our website and is devastated.  has obviously had an abortion over which she feels excruciating guilt. We have just diminished her ability to manage that guilt by rationalizing her “choice.” She says she had “a reason” for her abortion which makes the termination other than “monstrous.” That is an odd word choice unless she now feels like a monster. She says if we weren’t “idiots” who have never been pregnant we might understand her plight. She doesn’t realize that we know many women who have killed the babies they conceived in unplanned pregnancies and they bitterly regret it. She is careful, however, to not state her compelling “reason” for killing her child. She knows full well that her “reason” won’t stand against the horror of our abortion video. She can only justify what she has done if she can dismiss that video as depicting an abortion which wasn’t “legal.” If our video depicts her abortion, she is without defense and she as much as admits this. But if the video abortion wasn’t “legal,” why does she admit that it makes her “feel bad” by demanding that we “stop making people feel bad?” Since she leaves no email address, we can only pray for her but she represents the target audience for our signs, which you are showing all over England. When people try to stop you, remember this sad, little girl. I know I will.

Lord bless,

Gregg Cunningham

—–Original Message—–

Sent: Sunday, July 19, 2009 4:49 PM

From:  CBR Web Surveys

To: CBR Web Surveys Group

Sex: female Age: 16

Hometown: london

Return Email: fuckyou@hotmail.youmum

1) Do you support legal abortion or oppose legal abortion? Support Legal Abortion

2) Has this website influenced your thinking concerning abortion? “no”

– If so, how? It has not i just want to say that you people make me sick. It is womens right to her body you pricks and if she chooses to have an abortion it is for a reason. It is not monsterous . Try being in a pregnant situation yourself you idiots. Stop trying to make people feel bad. That video was obviously not a legal abortion.

3) Had you ever seen abortion images before? “no”

– If so, where?

4) How much thought have you given to abortion? “moderate”

5) How much time have you spent at this website? “0-10″

6) How did you find this website? A answer from yahoo

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.

Recently we received an inquiry from a person regarding the ethics and morals of the process by which CBR has acquired its abortion imagery.  This topic is an important one and that is why we share this discussion below:

Dear Mr. Cunningham,

I am considering purchasing some of your signs for a public demonstration to protest abortion in Massachusetts.  However, before I do so I would like to ask you where your organization got the pictures of aborted babies that you are selling.  I was reading something on the internet that said that at least one of the pictures your organization is using was obtained by paying a photographer to be present while an abortion was being done, with the understanding that he would not try to stop the abortion even though he was in a position to do so, so that he could take the pictures.  This concerns me because we in the prolife movement can never justify the killing of even one child, even if this could potentially save the lives of many more children.  I want to make sure that if I am purchasing any signs to use, that the pictures on the signs were not obtained by using morally objectionable means.  I know that there are prolife organizations that have obtained pictures of aborted babies because they found the bodies of the babies in the trash, which would be a morally acceptable way of obtaining them.  Thank you for your attention to this important matter.

I wanted to thank you for the work that you are doing to fight abortion.  I think that showing people pictures of aborted babies is one of the best and fastest ways we can help to change people’s minds and hearts about abortion, and showing the pictures in a public place makes it possible to reach a large number of people quickly.  This is why I want to have a public protest against abortion where I live in Massachusetts, which desperately needs this message because it is such a liberal and pro-abortion state.  I would also like to thank you and your organization for your work in protesting the scandal of Obama being honored at the Notre Dame graduation.

I look forward to hearing from you,

Sincerely,

Jane Doe

On May 20, 2009, at 11:40 PM, Gregg Cunningham wrote:

Dear Ms. Doe,

Thank you for writing. First of all, we sell our signs for exactly what it costs us to make them so since we make no profit on any sale, we have no personal interest in the outcome of any potential buyer’s purchase decision. We care only about saving babies.

Secondly, it is NOT true that we have ever filmed or photographed any abortion which we had any power to even delay, much less to stop.  That allegation is a lie which was first told several years ago by the prominent leader of a well-known national pro-life organization.  We ultimately had to threaten her with a lawsuit and after a meeting with her advisory board, the board decided to remove the allegation from their website, over the objection of the pro-life leader who persisted in this allegation.  But because with the internet, a lie is forever, this untruth lives on as people repeat it, now as a rumor.  I would greatly appreciate it if you would tell me who is repeating this current libel so our lawyers can contact them with a letter demanding its removal.

Common sense would suggest that any attempt by any photographer to interfere with the performance of any abortion would result in security detaining the photographer until the police arrived to arrest and remove him.  The abortion would then be completed.  No abortion we have ever filmed or photographed could have been meaningfully delayed much less stopped.

We once used imagery of babies retrieved from trash receptacles but we no longer do so because nearly all that imagery depicted later term babies whose abortions are not typical.  Because 90% of all abortions are first trimester procedures, those are the abortions we most need to document and the bodies of those babies were never disposed of in Dumpsters.  In fact, virtually no abortionist now uses outside trash receptacles for tissue disposal.

We have used multiple photographers to document hundreds of abortions in many different abortion clinics and every one of these projects was conducted pursuant to strict ethical protocols.  The most important requirement to which we adhere is that our presence never contribute directly or indirectly to the death of any savable baby.  These standards have been reviewed and approved by ethicists including Fr. Frank Pavone, president of the highly respected organization, Priests for Life.
Gregg Cunningham
The Center For Bio-Ethical Reform