I once met the late ABC News anchorman Peter Jennings on the
American University campus, in Washington. I can’t remember the
occasion but I took the opportunity to ask him if the TV networks
ever show those graphic pictures of aborted infants. No, they
don’t, he said. They put just about anything on TV, but make an
exception in this case. It’s obvious why. Images of dismembered
infants tell us what is really involved. Therefore they hurt the
“pro-choice” cause. It’s not too much to say that support for
abortion has been sustained, at least in part, by a conspiracy of
silence; abetted by circumlocutions like “procedure,” “reproductive
freedom,” and “clinic.”
This year I decided to join the 39th annual March for Life,
always held on the anniversary of the Roe v. Wade
decision. A couple of days earlier I went to see Missy Smith, who
lives nearby. In October 2010, she ran for D.C. delegate to the
U.S. House of Representatives and lost by a large margin to Eleanor
Holmes Norton, the long-time incumbent. But as a candidate Missy
Smith could run TV ads showing the abortion pictures. Two ads were
shown a total of 250 times, she told me. Under federal law, TV
stations can’t censor the content of political ads paid for by
federal candidates.
Missy Smith’s campaign manager was Randall Terry, who started
Operation Rescue in 1987. Initially, “Rescue” blocked access to
abortuaries, but under the 1994 Freedom of Access to Clinic
Entrances [FACE] Act, opponents of abortion must keep their
distance. Randall Terry is now running for president against Barack
Obama, and is showing some of these ads nationwide. David Lewis is
doing the same in Ohio’s 8th congressional district.
Missy Smith had an abortion when she was young, she told me, but
now has four grown children and 11 grandchildren. What stirred her
activism were news reports that a market for fetal body parts had
emerged. Syndicated columnist Mona Charen was one of the first to
report this, in 1999. In 2000, Planned Parenthood president Gloria
Feldt told the newsman Chris Wallace that the sale of body parts
was “inappropriate”—the weakest criticism possible.
TV stations ran Missy Smith’s ads with disclaimers, sometimes
including her phone number. She took some of those calls, thinking
she might engage in a productive “dialogue.” But the torrents of
rage to which she was subjected made that impossible. “It was
pretty demonic,” she said.
Callers who dislike what they see in these ads should logically
be the opponents of abortion. It is the abortionist, after
all, who dismembers those small bodies. But often they support it,
and their real goal is to “shoot the messenger.” It’s not the sight
of blood that gives offense. TV channels show open-heart surgery,
Missy Smith pointed out. What offends is the revelation that the
supporters of abortion favor something that is indistinguishable
from murder.
She also gave me a video detailing the much higher abortion rate
among blacks, and claiming that Planned Parenthood (founded by
eugenicist Margaret Sanger) deliberately opens new abortion clinics
in inner city neighborhoods. The organization received $363 million
from the Federal government in 2008-09, and performed 332,000
abortions. Blacks, 12 percent of the population, account for about
35 percent of the abortions in America—about five times the white
rate. More than 50 percent of all black pregnancies are
“terminated.”
The Rev. Jesse Jackson was once an anti-abortion activist. But
he changed his mind when he ran for president and saw that a
coalition with feminists would be more remunerative. That illogical
coalition lives on. Feminists provide the rationale (“women’s
rights”) for the policy that blacks vote for that reduces the
number of blacks.
I hadn’t gone far toward the march on the Mall before my legs
gave out. The weather? “Wintry mix.” I needed to sit down so I went
inside the H. Carl Moultrie Courthouse, where D.C. cases are tried.
It’s next to the federal courthouse, a nostalgic venue for ancient
scribes like myself, who recall the Watergate hearings there. That
was a different time, when it was conservatives who wanted to shoot
the messenger.
I headed straight for the coffee shop in the Moultrie basement.
The entire courthouse—corridors, hallways, benches—seemed to be
teeming with black people: defendants, witnesses, jurors. The few
whites looked to me suspiciously like lawyers. I knew I wouldn’t
make it all the way to the march. My wife did, though, and told me
later that few blacks were present.
Two blocks away, on Pennsylvania Avenue, a huge display showed
more of those graphic abortion pictures. Arms, hands, and tiny
fingers placed above U.S. coins showed the scale. Billed as the
Genocide Awareness Project, it is an initiative of the Center for
Bio-Ethical Reform. (Google “GAP abortion” to see them.) They are
putting up these displays on college campuses around the
country.
Included was a 2002 quote from Barack Obama while he was in the
Illinois legislature. He vowed to oppose the Born Alive Infant
Protection Act, then being debated, because “it would create one
more burden on women, and I can’t support that.”
WHAT’S THE ARGUMENT HERE? There’s only one way to get pregnant
and it’s a woman’s prerogative to say “no.” A rejected man who
responds by using force can be charged with rape. If denying a
woman access to an abortion at the last minute is “one more”
burden, what are the others? But yes, it’s a complex issue. Dick
Retta, who was recently charged under the FACE Act for holding
signs outside clinics, tells me how often boyfriends accompany
(propel?) the women who are heading for a (reluctant?) abortion.
The real issue here is the progressive deterioration of Christian
culture.
The GAP display was extremely effective. The article about the
march in the Washington Post next day led with a quote
from a young woman who said when she was 14 she “didn’t quite know
what it meant to have an abortion. But after looking at graphic
images of aborted fetuses in pamphlets handed out at a pre-rally
conference back then, she understood and decided: She could never
support abortion.”
A woman on Pennsylvania Avenue, Leslie Sneddon, was handing out
pamphlets and gave me one. The regional director for the Center for
Bio-Ethical Reform in New England, she told me that she had had
four abortions before giving birth to two sons. She became a
Catholic through seeing Mother Angelica on TV.
A few minutes earlier a car had stopped on Pennsylvania Avenue
and the female driver was furious about the display. What had
bothered her? Leslie Sneddon told me that the woman was “just very
angry at the pictures and the fact that little children would have
to see them. Our experience has shown that sometimes people who are
angry are usually angry at themselves for not realizing what it is
they support! Some may have participated in an abortion and are
angry because they are now confronted with the reality.”
Others may be complicit in friends’ abortions; or may be
Christian or otherwise pro-life and realize they should be doing
more about it. The need to protect children is often invoked, Mrs.
Sneddon said. But a man who walked by with several small children
looking at the pictures said that he wasn’t concerned because the
pictures were “the truth.”
Gregg Cunningham, the executive director of the Center for
Bio-Ethical Reform, tells an interesting story in his latest
newsletter. He spoke to a conference in London sponsored by
Christian Concern. But he soon found that one speaker representing
a “supposedly pro-life organization opposes the use of abortion
imagery in abortion education.” Why? They would never be invited
back into the schools as guest lecturers if they showed those
horrid pictures! But the exchange between them continued, and
eventually at least some timid pro-life Brits were persuaded to be
more courageous.
“We cannot fight abortion by covering it up,” says Gregg
Cunningham. He’s right about that.
