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The Center For Bio-Ethical Reform (CBR) will soon be launching our Key States Initiative to educate voters on the horrors of abortion. We will bring to targeted “key states” a large fleet of enormous “box trucks” displaying aborted baby photos on their sides and backs. This mobile billboard fleet will be accompanied by aircraft towing even larger aerial billboards depicting equally disturbing photos of aborted babies. Both tactics can be viewed on our website at www.abortionNO.org.
We are concentrating our trucks and planes in the largest cities of the biggest states in which abortion will be most intensely debated – and in which ignorance runs highest -- this election year. The most promising opportunities to teach the public about abortion in 2004 will occur in states with high electoral vote counts and in which the popular vote outcomes were decided by the closest margins in the 2002 presidential elections. We obviously want to engage the largest possible audiences in states featuring races which are competitive enough to stimulate high public interest in the political process. We intend to exploit that heightened interest by focusing this heightened voter attention on the plight of the unborn. Equally obviously, we will not waste time and money on states in which abortion is unlikely to be an issue of substantial interest.
In addition to battleground presidential states, we will also target states in which pro-abortion U.S. Senate candidates will be squaring-off against pro-life candidates in competitive races. There are thirteen Republicans and fifteen Democrats campaigning for reelection with six open seats. We have not targeted races whose outcome is a foregone conclusion because these “contests” will attract little voter attention. In many instances we have chosen specific states because they are of interest from both a presidential and a Senate perspective (of the nineteen states on which we will focus, ten will have tight Senate races between pro-abortion and pro-life candidates).
Our truck and plane tactics have shown themselves to be highly effective in tests conducted around the country but never have so many truck and plane signs been concentrated in one city at one time. The press routinely describes pro-abortion candidates as “moderates” and “centrists” while disparaging pro-life candidates in terms which suggest “extreme” or “radical” positions on social issues like abortion. Voters who have seen our aborted baby photo signs are thereafter much better able to decide whose position really is “moderate” and whose is actually “radical.”
Because we are a 501(C)3 educational organization, this project is about education and not partisan politics so we won’t be mentioning particular candidates or political parties but we, nonetheless, believe that people of conscience can be relied upon to reason to the most humane political conclusions after seeing the truth about abortion.
Because we are also concerned about educating future voters, we will be displaying our truck and aerial aborted baby billboards in front of and above middle schools and high schools. Students who are old enough to have abortions are old enough to see abortions. Despite many states’ having enacted so-called “parental notice and consent” laws as a supposed predicate to abortions on minor children, every state is required, by U.S. Supreme Court fiat, to permit abortions behind parents backs when local (often pro-abortion) judges certify that a child is sufficiently mature to understand the risks and kill her parent’s grandchild without her parents’ knowledge. We know that students who have seen an abortion are far less likely to have an abortion. Because Planned Parenthood is permitted to lie to these students, we are going to show them the truth.
Although we go to great lengths in route planning to minimize the numbers of small children who see our aborted baby photos, some unintended exposure is unavoidable. This problem is also widespread with young children seeing shocking photos of airliners exploding into skyscrapers and countless other disturbing images on the covers of magazines at the check-out stands in supermarkets and on the front pages of the newspapers delivered into tens of millions of homes across the country. Then, of course, there are the upsetting images featured on television and in video games, movies etc.
Democracy can flourish only where there is good journalism but with abortion, the press largely suppresses the truth instead of reporting it. News organizations which routinely publish and broadcast horrifying images from crime scenes, battlefields and accident sites, resolutely censor aborted baby photos. If the truth about abortion is to be reported, we must do what the press consistently did with photos of African Americans being beaten to their knees for attempting to register to vote. Those photos were used to dramatize injustice, prick the collective conscience of society and shame America before world. Most Americans weren’t evil, they just didn’t understand racial injustice until they saw the photos. This process changed public opinion in ways which made it possible to change public policy. We intend to dramatize the injustice of abortion with images which will make abortion impossible to ignore or trivialize. If we show aborted baby photos, born children may be traumatized. If we don’t, unborn children will be killed. We care about both but we have no doubt that the latter constitutes the greater evil. We will not be held to a First Amendment double standard.
The progress which we know can be achieved by this important is only possible with your help. The people who are saving these children must be more determined than the people who are killing them. Sadly, that is not always the case. This is a winnable battle and we know how to win it. We just need your help to give these children a fighting chance.
Election 2004 will be immensely important to the unborn and their mothers. As noted above, the probable closeness of the presidential race (as is often the case at this point in a presidential race, multiple polls in early February were already suggesting that at least two potential challengers could beat the incumbent president “if the election were held today”) will ensure high voter participation in this election -- but despite the candidates’ opposing positions on abortion, there is no guarantee that appropriate attention will be paid to the issue unless we force the debate and influence its terms. With God’s help, we have an historic opportunity to make certain that voters cast a truly informed ballot – and save large numbers of babies in the process. |
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