Frequently Asked Questions about the Reproductive “Choice” Campaign

Q1. What is the Reproductive “Choice” Campaign?

A1. The Reproductive “Choice” Campaign is a project designed to both educate and stimulate public dialogue about abortion. This mobile-billboard campaign involves placing factual images of aborted embryos and fetuses on the sides and rear of box-bodied trucks which are then driven through populated areas.

Q2. Why are you running this campaign?

A2. We are conducting this campaign for a number of reasons. First, abortion is rampant in our country. Statistics Canada reports that there are over 100,000 abortions every year, but few Canadians are aware of this ongoing slaughter.

Also, abortion advocates have for years misled Canadians regarding abortion. Using carefully crafted language such as “reproductive freedom”, abortion advocates have created a climate of confusion in which the general public is unclear about who the unborn child is and what abortion does to her.

As an example of this confusion, many people mistakenly imagine that abortion, especially when done in the first trimester of pregnancy, is a benign procedure that merely removes a small mass of tissue. Our images dispell that confusion because they reveal a very different reality: first-trimester abortion is a brutal act of violence which kills a baby.

There are babies alive today because pregnant women considering abortion saw these kinds of images and changed their minds about killing their babies. Also, these images have helped other women acknowledge the trauma of a past abortion experience, which in turn has allowed them to seek counselling and healing.

More broadly, the history of social reform is characterized by examples of graphic images being used to dramatize injustice and shock the conscience of the culture. Campaigns to end slavery, child labour, civil rights abuses, and other systematic oppression involved showing the public the humanity of the victim and the inhumanity of his victimization.

Q3. Where can I find help for a friend who’s facing an unplanned pregnancy or who’s struggling with the trauma from a previous abortion?

A3. Please refer your friend to the toll-free number 1-800-395-HELP (4357). This is a 24-hour helpline run by an organization which is unrelated to the Canadian Centre for Bio-Ethical Reform and which has no involvement with our Reproductive “Choice” Campaign. Please also review our document “If Someone You Know is Considering Abortion.”

Q4. What about children who see the horrible images on the trucks?

A4. You may be relieved to know that we aren’t directly targeting children with our campaign—they aren’t the ones perpetrating this injustice nor the ones complicit in it. Therefore, we won’t knowingly go to an area where only children are present, such as a preschool or an elementary school. The reality, however, is that it is impossible to reach the masses in society where no children will ever be present.

If parents with young children see the images, they can practice parental discretion and distract their children as they would if there were a dead deer on the side of the road, or they can seize it as a teaching opportunity. They can gently explain to their children that some people hurt babies but that the people driving the trucks are trying to stop that. Furthermore, parents can reassure their children that they will never be hurt like the babies have been hurt because “Mommy and Daddy love you and will keep you safe.”

Sadly, parents sometimes use their children as an excuse for why the images shouldn’t be shown. The reality is that they don’t want to see the images. They may have guilt from past abortions and they don’t want to come to terms with their mistake. After all, children have consciences and they love babies. When children see the images they see a hurt baby and they want to know, “Who hurt the baby?”

It’s worth observing that the parent’s reaction will often determine the child’s reaction. An irate, swearing guilty parent will have a frustrated and confused child. But a calm, rational parent will have a calm child. Such was the case with a 5-year-old who saw graphic abortion images. Her teenage sister gently explained the situation and although the little girl cried, she was moved to pray during family prayer time “…that the doctors will stop killing babies.” Another child, a 9-year-old, who saw a graphic abortion photo went directly to his mother and said, “Mom, I want to stop abortion.”

In 2006, the Calgary Herald newspaper wrote about a 10-year-old homeless advocate who was inspired—at an even younger age—to form a charity to help the homeless. The paper reported that it was her seeing injustice that convicted her to act:

When Hannah Taylor was five years old, she was struck by the unfairness of something she saw that makes most others turn their heads. [Emphasis added.]

As she watched a homeless man dig for food in a trash can in Winnipeg, she decided no person should ever have to go without food or a home.

Notice that people are not complaining that young Hannah was victimized by seeing such an injustice. On the contrary, people are inspired by her willingness to do what she can to help the less fortunate and by her refusal to make excuses for their plight. But where is that same attitude towards other children’s seeing the injustice inflicted upon the unborn?

Children have functioning consciences. The question is: do we? If we think we care so much about children, where is our care and concern for the lives of the over 100,000 unborn children who are killed each year in our country?

If you were walking down the street with a 2-year-old and saw a 5-year-old being killed in front of you, would you complain about your 2-year-old merely seeing the injustice, or would you intervene to stop the injustice itself?

Q5. Why should I have to see this while driving in my car?

A5. Is there any place where you wouldn’t object to viewing these images? We have found that in many cases when people complain about seeing the images in public, they don’t want to see them in private either. Many people would prefer that these images be “out of sight” because then they would be “out of mind.” And that’s the problem: precisely because the horrible truth of abortion is out of most people’s minds is this injustice happening. The reality is that while people drive in their cars, babies are being killed. We intend to make sure that as long as society tolerates this injustice, society will see what it looks like.

Please don’t make the mistake of thinking that we like these images—we don’t. But human rights abuses don’t end on their own, no matter how much we turn a blind eye. They end only when a society stands up and demands change. And our society will only stand up and demand change on abortion when it is convinced that abortion is a terrible injustice. What better way to convince our visual culture of this fact than to show them what abortion does? After all, a picture is worth a thousand words.

Q6. How dare you force your views on me?!

A6. Where on the trucks is any “view” being forced? It shows a picture of an aborted baby next to the word many associate with abortion: “choice.” If you look at that and conclude that our view is that abortion is wrong, what’s really happening is that, upon viewing the evidence of what abortion does to an innocent person, your conscience is telling you that abortion is wrong. As Gregg Cunningham says, “If something is so horrifying we can’t stand to look at it, perhaps we shouldn’t be tolerating it.”[i]

Q7. Why don’t you hold presentations and debates in a hall where people can choose to receive the message?

A7. A society in the midst of committing and permitting an injustice does not willingly or easily admit its own wrongdoing. People rarely acknowledge evidence of their own complicity in injustice; even fewer seek out such evidence. The people who need to see this message simply will not go out of their way to view it in large enough numbers to stop this injustice. So we must go out of our way to bring it to them—we must make abortion impossible to ignore or trivialize.

Such is the case with any social reform movement. As the great civil rights leader Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. once said, “…freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed.”[ii] But because unborn children cannot speak for themselves, we will demand their freedom on their behalf.

Q8. Why don’t you show positive pictures of babies, both in and out of the womb?

A8. There is definitely a place for fetal development imagery in educating the public about who the unborn are. In fact, new technologies, such as 3D and 4D ultrasound, are a benefit to the pro-life movement.

Pictures of babies after birth, however, are not nearly as powerful a tool because people see babies all the time, whether in person or in images. They can rationalize killing the unborn, even with exposure to the beauty of born children, because they do not consider the two to be equal. In fact, they may look at a born child and think, “I need to have an abortion before it becomes that, because then there’s nothing I can, or would, do.”

And although fetal development imagery helps humanize the unborn child, such photographs do not dehumanize the act of abortion. International pro-life speaker Scott Klusendorf expands on this idea:

When it comes to moral persuasion, many times images of death work better than images of life.

To cite a parallel example, the modern environmental movement got its start with graphic pictures in the late 1960’s. As activist Jerry Mander points out in his book Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television, initial attempts to mobilize public support for preservation of the giant redwoods produced a giant public yawn. Breathtaking photographs of majestic trees, though inspiring, did little to incite public anger at the timber industry. So, activists took a lesson from the Vietnam War. Instead of showing pictures of pre-cut trees in all their glory, environmentalists began circulating before and after photos. “We started carrying around photos of acres of stumps where hundreds of redwoods had been cut down. I don't know if you have ever seen a field of tree stumps, but it is a horrific sight, not unlike a battlefield.”

The public outcry was immediate. “At that moment,” Mander concludes, “I realized that death is a much better subject for television than life. Images of life—whether of trees themselves or the finely-tuned Vietnamese culture—accomplished nothing. They only put people to sleep.”[iii]

The same can be said of abortion. The use of graphic pictures is not manipulative, but consistent with other mainstream campaigns of social reform. Shocking pictures have traditionally been used by social reformers to dramatize the injustices of child labor, racial violence against African-Americans, U.S. military involvement in Vietnam, etc. What has changed is that for the first time in recent history, political conservatives are using this tactic in an effort to reform an abortion-tolerating public.[iv]

This tactic is appropriate, given we live in a culture that thinks and learns visually. As Neil Postman points out in Amusing Ourselves to Death, with the advent of television, America shifted from a word-based culture—with an emphasis on coherent linear thought—to an image-based one where thinking is dominated by feeling, intuition, and images.[v]

Postman’s point (and mine) is that visual learners have short attention spans. They make decisions based on intuition, feeling, and images. That doesn’t rule out the presentation of facts and arguments, but it does change how they are communicated. It means we must change how people feel as a predicate to changing how they think.[vi] Disturbing images change feelings in ways that words cannot.[vii]

Q9. What if a woman who has had an abortion commits suicide upon seeing your trucks?

A9. In the seventeen years CBR has been using graphic abortion photos in the public square and in the five years CCBR has, we are not aware of one incident where a woman has committed suicide after viewing graphic images.

But for the sake of argument, let’s suppose a woman does kill herself. That would be utterly tragic, but it would not mean the exposure of the truth was in any way invalid. The image isn’t what made the woman feel guilty, it was the act that she committed in her past. The image simply brought that pain to the surface, just as any number of things could have: a pro-life billboard or bumper sticker, a friend’s miscarriage, or the familiar sound of a suction machine, etc.

When people are convicted of their mistakes they can do one of three things: deny their responsibility, acknowledge their mistake and resolve to change, or despair. Obviously, one hopes that no one chooses the first and third options. If, however, someone falls into denial or despair, those who are proclaiming the truth are not responsible for that.

The same could be said about a drunk driver who kills an innocent pedestrian and is able to avoid criminal punishment. Should he later be convicted that he made a mistake—and is filled with so much grief that he kills himself—would Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD) be responsible for his suicide with their many advertisements condemning drinking and driving?

Q10. Do you shoot abortionists and bomb clinics?

A10. Absolutely not. CCBR condemns all forms of abortion-related violence and will not collaborate with groups or individuals who fail to condemn such violence.

For further information related to CCBR’s use of graphic visuals, please read the FAQ about the Genocide Awareness Project (GAP).

Acknowledgement:

This document was revised for CCBR based on the original Frequently Asked Questions provided by the Center for Bio-Ethical Reform (www.abortionno.org). Special thanks to Gregg Cunningham.