Pro-life caravan targets Florida - Bloody imagery rolls on highways
By Phil Long
© 2001 Miami Herald

The war against abortion went on the road Tuesday in Florida, with giant images of blood-red aborted fetuses painted on the sides of trucks.

The caravan cruised carefully selected high-density highways in Tampa most of the day and intends to drive to Miami starting Monday.

The campaign is the creation of the Center for Bio-Ethical Reform, a California-based anti-abortion group that has been using shock photos on college campuses for years, explained Gregg Cunningham, the organization's executive director.

Compared to toting similar posters in front of abortion clinics or on college campuses, even on billboards, trucking the message has maximum shock impact.

``Putting an image at eye level in someone's windscreen is much more effective,'' Cunningham said. ``The picture goes off like a bomb in their head. If they have a shred of intellectual honesty, if they have a functioning conscience, they will no longer be able to maintain the pretense, or the fiction that it is not a baby or that it is not an act of violence.''

However, not everyone agrees that the organization's position is accurate.

``It is abortion distortion,'' said Joyce Tarnow, administrator and president of the Women's Clinic in Fort Lauderdale. Tarnow, an abortion provider for 25 years, said at least 85 percent of the women who come to her clinic are less than 12 weeks pregnant, the majority less than eight or nine weeks.

What is removed looks nothing like those pictures, Tarnow said.

``Their ignorance is profound,'' said Patricia Baird Windle, a retired Central Florida abortion clinic owner and author of a book on abortion rights. ``Sometimes the pictures will upset youngsters, but grown women will say, `Oh, isn't that disgusting,' and they'll go on their way,'' Windle said.

Why Florida? Why now?

Cunningham says that with the upcoming gubernatorial race and the debate over stem cell research, the time is appropriate.

``You have Janet Reno now contesting the gubernatorial race, favored in her primary, against Jeb Bush. You couldn't have two gubernatorial candidates who are more polar opposites on this issue,'' Cunningham said.

``When people see graphic pictures of tiny broken bodies, they become educated on what `choice' means,'' he said. ``All we are doing is what social reform groups have done for years.''