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

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

Below is  a portion of a recent email exchange that is instructive as to why the church’s witness against the evil of abortion is so weak.  The name of the receipient of  this email has been changed for privacy reasons.

Hi Joe,

Because of your generous support for our work and your influential relationship with Liberty University, I am sure you will be interested in the note (below) I received from one of our staff.  He has long experience working with students in our Genocide Awareness Project and is very diplomatic in the way he promotes our work, especially when he encounters resistance, which he often does.  It appears that two unhelpful lessons are being taught to students at Liberty: The first is that it is not appropriate to display abortion photos in public (private showings are approved but not public displays) and that criticizing administration policies at the school, even respectfully, is out of bounds.  Both of these erroneous principles are obviously unbiblical.

It may also be helpful for you to be aware that shortly before Rev. Falwell’s death, I met with him on campus to propose that Liberty create an academic major to prepare interested students for professional careers in pro-life ministry.  I explained that secular schools worked hard to inspire and equip students for careers in abortion advocacy but that there is no corresponding attempt by any Christian school to professionalize the ranks of pro-life activists, the vast majority of whom are amateur volunteers.  We met for more than two hours and he responded enthusiastically.  At the conclusion of the meeting he designated one of the administrators who was present to be the point person who would work with a department chairman to form a curriculum committee to begin the process of designing such a major.  I was encouraged by his supportive response but it was very clear to me that none of the administrators in the room shared his view.  As I feared, I later had great difficulty getting my calls taken or returned and the project died a quick and decisive death.

Christian colleges (and seminaries) are staffed by enormous numbers of administrators who view abortion as someone else’s problem and they see attempts to involve the church in the abortion wars as a threat to ministry.  That view is shared by most faculty members and gets thoroughly internalized by students who go on to pastor churches.  There are students at Liberty who are sexually active.  Some of them are getting pregnant.  Some of those who are getting pregnant are killing their children.  Some of those who are killing their children would have carried to term had they seen the horror of abortion.  Almost none of them will attend our director’s talk on abortion.  Almost all of them would see our photos displayed outside the student union building.  The decision to suppress the truth about abortion is so common at Christian schools that we began using aircraft to tow abortion photos over their campuses.  That is what we had to do to Biola when the school told us that we could only display our signs if we turned them to face a wall behind which passersby would have to go to see them.  We can sue public schools which try to ban our pictures but we have to resort to truck billboards and airplane billboards to reach Christian students.  This is why so many Christian students abort and who so few Christian students every become seriously involved in pro-life activism.  I will pray for your conversations with Matt.

This is a very wide-spread problem.  I remember a broadcast of James Dobson’s radio program on which he interviewed six Christian college presidents and he asked them if they had ever seen a pregnant student on their campuses.  To a person, they said no.  To a person they all believed this was evidence that their students were living chaste lives.  James Dobson was incredulous.  I am not.

Gregg Cunningham

Executive Director, The Center for Bio-Ethical Reform

Martyred pro-life hero James Pouillon (white cap) holds CBR sign at Notre Dame Obama protest.----May 2009

See CBR’s official press release regarding the murder of James Pouillon here.

THE CENTER FOR BIO-ETHICAL REFORM CONDEMNS ASSOCIATED PRESS JOURNALISTIC HYPOCRISY

Lake Forest, CA, September 4, 2009:

The Center For Bio-Ethical Reform (CBR) condemns the journalistic hypocrisy of the Associated Press (AP).  The “disturbing” photo of a U.S. Marine dying in combat is not deemed too “disturbing“ for publication because the AP believes it is in the public interest to “convey the grimness of war and the sacrifice of the young men and women fighting in it.”  The AP, however, has steadfastly refused to publish similarly disturbing photos of abortion.  They apparently believe that it is in the public interest to suppress images depicting the “grimness “ of abortion and the “sacrifices” being made by the young boys and girls who are being slaughtered for the convenience of their parents.  The AP publishes bloody photos of the war against the Taliban because they are anti-war.  They censor bloody photos of the war against the unborn because they are pro-abortion.  That is why they will publish this:

But spike this:

1st Trimester, 10 Week Abortion

Here is another related story on which I comment below:

Pictures of war can carry more moral meaning than thousands of words

The US Defence Department may disagree, but the images speak for themselves

TimesOnline

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/ben_macintyre/article6828145.ece

Here are key phrases from this article on the photo of our Marine dying on the battlefield in Afghanistan which I believe have strong abortion relevance are as follows:

“Defenders of the photograph accused Mr. Gates of attempting to sanitize the conflict, by concealing the grim reality of the war at a critical political juncture.” Our adversaries constantly strive to sanitize abortion.  

“The photograph violates one of the oldest taboos, by intruding into the sacred privacy associated with the moment of death. It was published in defiance of the wishes of the dead man’s family and it raises uncomfortable questions about the dividing line between voyeurism and reportage.”  We are constantly being accused of violating privacy rights with our abortion photos privacy means nothing to anti-war activists.

“ … [T]heir [photos’] power to shape our collective consciousness is immense. Knowing this, the authorities that wage war have always sought to control the public image of warfare.”  Image control is the factor which will also determine the outcome of the abortion wars.

“This desire to control the imagery of war reflects the capacity of photography to convey the blunt truth about conflict in a way that no other art form, including the written word, can achieve.”  This is why the political left loves shocking photos when they can be used to make the public anti-war but hates them when we use them to make the public anti-abortion.

“Robert Capa’s photograph The Fallen Soldier similarly evokes the Spanish Civil War: it is irrelevant who the soldier was, and where he had fallen; nor does it matter that the photograph may have been faked, for its power lies in not in the literal evidence it offers, but the greater meaning it conveys.”  We are constantly being accused of “faking” our photos but this writer says the symbolic significance of a faked photo can redeem it despite the fact that it literally untrue.

“The picture’s power lies less in its shock value than its demand for a response:”  The element of our photos which makes everyone on all sides of this issue squirm is that these pictures demand a response.

“ … [D]aily, dirty, arbitrary violence.”  It is the terrible, random, arbitrariness of abortion which makes its violence so “dirty.”

“[H]is [picture’s] influence on history is likely to be profound and lasting.”  We are also using pictures to influence history in a profound an enduring way (as regards public opinion which dictates public policy).      

OF COURSE, NONE OF THIS MATTERS TO A PRO-LIFE MOVEMENT IN WHICH STUPIDITY AND COWARDOUS ABOUND.  IF ONLY OUR PRO-LIFE FRIENDS WERE AS BRIGHT AND BOLD AS THE ANTI-WAR CROWD.

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.

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.