Exposing the Global Culture of Death
Dear Pro-Life Friend,
Thank you so much for helping us save another baby on May 29, 2008. The mother is a twenty-two-year- old woman from Detroit, MI, and here is what she said about abortion when she e-mailed us after seeing our aborted baby pictures: “I am pregnant and people including the father want me to have one. After watching these pictures I refuse to.” What she saw changed her mind. Our pictures proved to her that abortion was much worse than she had imagined and as a consequence, her baby will live. Praise God! These are the same pictures we show on the signs we display on college campuses and on the sides and backs of our billboard trucks. This is the sort of conversion story we hear all the time at CBR.
On May 27, 2008, we received an e-mail message from a twenty-four-year-old woman from Williamsburg, KY. She had found one of our abortion videos on YouTube.com after seeing another woman refer still another woman to it in a discussion which took place on Yahoo Answers (Answers.Yahoo.com). She said: “… I cannot believe what I saw. It was way worse than I ever expected. I think everyone should have to watch this. Maybe then their opinion would change.” Way worse indeed.
So many people are taking our photos and video from our website and copying them for placement elsewhere on the Internet that it is no longer possible to track the locations of our materials. On May 21, 2008, a sixteen-year-old girl from New Zealand found our website through a Google search. After watching the new abortion video on our homepage (abortionNO.org) she said: “It made me realize how serious it is.”
On that same day, another sixteen-year-old girl, this one from half a world away, in Perth, WA, expressed the same astonishment even more forcefully: “…[A]fter seeing all those lifeless fetus pictures, I can’t stop crying ….” She went on to add: “Thanks for truly opening my eyes.”
We are opening eyes both directly and indirectly because many of the young women who see our pictures share the terrible truth with their friends. Just one day before we heard from the teenagers in New Zealand and Washington, a fifteen-year-old from Oceanside, CA, told us that “I know someone who’s totally had like 3 abortions in the last year and a half. I think she’s stupid. I WILL show her this.” She added that she had been guided to our site by another friend of hers. Here again we saw our visitors contributing to the exponential increase in CBR’s influence. This multiplier effect is a truly life-saving chain reaction.
Abortion is much worse than the public has been led to believe. Society underestimates this social evil because there are powerful institutions working to suppress the embarrassing truth. There is also a strong tendency for people to resist such a painful disclosure.
Canada’s National Post newspaper reports just such pressures and tendencies in a May 28, 2008 story titled “York University student union calls for ban on anti-abortion groups”:
In response to a series of controversies over abortion debates on Canadian campuses, the student government of York University in Toronto has … [imposed] an outright ban on student clubs that are opposed to abortion.
Gilary Massa, vice-president external of the York Federation of Students, said student clubs will be free to discuss abortion as long as they do it ‘within a pro-choice realm,’ and that all clubs will be investigated to ensure compliance.
‘You have to recognize that a woman has a choice over her own body,’ Ms. Massa said. ‘We think that these pro-life [oops!], these anti-choice groups, they’re sexist in nature…. The way they speak about women who decide to have abortions is demoralizing. They call them murderers, all of them do…. Is this an issue of free speech? No, this is an issue of women’s rights.’
* * *
Robert J. Tiffin, York’s vice president of students, said he was ‘disappointed’ the policy was being enacted when virtually all of the student body has left campus for the summer.
* * *
‘What is happening is anti-choice groups coming onto campus under the guise of debates or through student clubs, to promote anti-choice sentiments, and then student unions responding to it, and then receiving very organized backlash …. A lot of these groups are funded and organized under a larger organization,’ Ms. Massa said, citing the Genocide Awareness Project, a university-targeted poster campaign of the Center For Bio-Ethical Reform, a privately funded U.S. organization with a Canadian branch in Alberta.
The situation at York came to a crisis in March, when a speaker [CBR-Canada’s own Jose Ruba] from that organization … came to debate abortion with a member of the school’s Free-thinkers, Skeptics, and Atheists club.
The York Federation of Students (YFS) executive, fearing the effects of gruesome imagery and hostile argument, hastily voted to cancel the event ….
* * *
Meanwhile, similar controversies are unfolding across Canada, with anti-abortion groups at Capilano College, the University of British Columbia-Okanagan, Lakehead University and Carleton University stripped of official club status and funding, at least once by a fiat of a single member of student council. Some clubs have regained status while others appealed their cases to human rights commissions.
It is the pictures Ms. Massa most fears because the truth is so “demoralizing.” Mr. Ruba intended to debate abortion by using “gruesome” images to prove our point that abortion is a gruesome business. The pictures cancelled the debate. But I know of no pro-life group which calls aborting mothers “murderers.” I know many, however, which rightly use that term to describe abortionists. The term “murderer” requires what lawyers call “scienter,” which is Latin for knowledge of wrongdoing. That knowledge is much more complete in the doctor slaughtering the baby than it is in the mother lying on the table.
Ms. Massa knows that she can’t win the argument against our pictures because our pictures settle the issue. So she will do all in her inordinate power to eliminate the argument by eliminating the organizations which proffer the threatening pictures. No one is going to blow the whistle on abortion at her college on her watch. What she doesn’t realize is that our pro-life student groups don’t need her bureaucratic imprimatur to hold up aborted baby photos at York. Imagine how scary this young woman could become if she grows up and gets real power.
The May 31, 2008 issue of the National Journal magazine carried a story titled “China’s Cyber-Militia,” and “CHINESE HACKERS POSE A CLEAR AND PRESENT DANGER TO U.S. GOVERNMENT AND PRIVATE-SECTOR COMPUTER NETWORKS AND MAY BE RESPONSIBLE FOR TWO MAJOR U.S. POWER BLACKOUTS.” The military threat from China is much worse than most Americans realize. In addition to experimenting with systems which would blind our defense satellites, the Communist Chinese are working hard to hack into all manner of computer systems and bring down our power grid:
Tim Bennett, the former president of the Cyber Security Industry Alliance, a leading trade group, said that U.S. intelligence officials have told him that the PLA [People’s Liberation Army]in 2003 gained access to a network that controlled electric power systems serving the northeastern United States.
* * *
Bennett, who now works as a private consultant, said he decided to speak publicly about these incidents to point out that security for the nation’s critical electronic infrastructures remains intolerably weak and to emphasize that government and company officials haven’t sufficiently acknowledged these vulnerabilities.
Mr. Bennett’s tacit criticism of negligent American officials is vital to our national security but in many parts of the world (Canada, or at least York University?) he would have been silenced before he could ever have blown the whistle.
On May 17, 2008, London’s Daily Mail newspaper featured a story called “Russia: A totalitarian regime in thrall to a Tsar who’s creating a Fascist empire.” Whistle-blowers in the age of Putin have short life expectancies:
In the heady days immediately before and after the collapse of the Soviet empire, editors and reporters competed to challenge the mighty and to uncover scandal and corruption.
Now they cower from the wrath of the state and its agents in the police and the security services.
That diminishing number who have the courage to investigate or speak out against the abuses perpetrated by the rich and powerful very soon find themselves out of a job – or, in an alarming number of cases, on the receiving end of a deadly bullet.
Some 20 Russian journalists have been killed in suspicious circumstances since Putin came to office. No one has yet been convicted for any of these crimes.
CBR has stopped counting the number of times our lives have been threatened for blowing the whistle on abortion but Ms. Massa does seem to be a budding Vladimir Putin. I wondered how much force she might be willing to use to silence her critics if she worked in Moscow’s Kremlin instead of York’s student union. Then I read Mark Steyn’s May 31, 2008 column in the Orange County Register and the light bulb went on in my head. He was writing about Ms. Massa:
…[T]he York University Federation of Students wants a campus-wide ban on any pro-life student clubs.
* * *
Nothing unusual there. A distressing number of student groups are inimical to free speech these days. But then I saw a picture of the gung-ho abortion absolutist; Gilary Massa is a young Muslim woman covered in a hijab.
But of course! Ms. Massa may not fully embrace Communist ideology but radical feminism shares many of its police-state methods, which, in turn, closely resemble the repressive tactics of the Taliban, or al Qaeda, or Hamas, or Hezbollah! Perhaps she is trying to turn her university into something resembling a brain-washing madrassa. An end to free speech is also the foundational principle of Sharia law. Her threats to “investigate” student meetings in a crack-down on politically incorrect, pro-life murmurings is consistent with the meddlings of the most radical Wahabi mullahs. This has nothing at all to do with Islam. It is about the mentality of radical Islamo-fascism. And it is almost as bad in the U.S.
On February 21, 2008, we received a threatening e-mail message from a student at Florida State University. We had just visited his campus with the huge aborted baby photos of our Genocide Awareness Project:
I was disgusted by the signs you put up and hope to not see them again. As such, we have gone before our Senate and condemned them for allowing you onto the campus in such a manner and asked that you not be allowed back for overstepping your bounds in regards to free speech.
Abortion is much worse than this young man had imagined and he intends to sweep that fact under the rug. On May 28, 2008, word reached us that a pro-life student group at Jackson State University (Mississippi) had applied to the Student Organizations Committee for university recognition of their association. After making their case in a meeting with the committee, the pro-life students received no decision on their application until they pressed the matter with an administrator who informed them that their application had been rejected on grounds that their new organization “would create too much conflict.” Our students were then patronizingly told that they should focus more on health issues. No written notice has ever been provided. We have notified our attorneys and are preparing to sue if the university doesn’t reverse its policy immediately.
Babies are being saved because CBR is here to fight the global culture of death. Our involvement in this battle would be impossible without your help. May I ask further that you go to our website at www.abortionNO.org and download the file for this letter so you can send it to your e-mail address book? May I also ask that you and your spouse find a larger place in your lives for the unborn by remembering CBR in your estate planning? We are preparing the next generation to fight this fight long after all of our current activists have gone home to be with the Lord. These new fighters are an amazingly impressive group but we also need to make certain that they have the funding to carry on the battle!
Lord bless,
Gregg L. Cunningham
Executive Director
P.S. On May 27, 2008, a twenty-three-year-old woman from Phoenix, AZ, said: “Graphic images show what the practice really is. Pro-choice arguments are easily dismissed by reasoning through the real facts on abortion.” And nothing establishes those facts as convincingly as our photos and video. As is so often the case, she added that a friend had e-mailed her a link to our website. In the process, her friend took the donor dollars you sent to fund our website and multiplied them by forwarding our links. She and countless young people just like her have essentially made themselves volunteer CBR staff members! Thanks for making that miraculous link possible! Who knows when or where it will stop being sent as it literally circles the globe — or how many lives will be saved before it does!