The first category of organizations that are making a difference in the fight to eliminate abortion in America is those that directly educate the public. This is a particularly difficult job because the public does not want to be educated. The organization that I know of that is the most effective in bringing the reality of abortion into the minds of people who are actively suppressing the truth of that reality is also the most controversial.
The Center for Bio-Ethical Reform (CBR) seeks to change people’s minds by presenting the reality of abortion through graphic images.
The images are horrifying. The images are deeply offensive.
There is one reason for this.
It’s because what is taking place is horrifying and offensive. It’s easy to hide behind words like ‘privacy’ and ‘choice,’ but one cannot hide from the reality that these images portray. And these images change people’s minds.
CBR entered into controversy with their Genocide Awareness Project, where they put up a presentation on college campuses where they juxtapose images of various genocides (the Holocaust, Cambodia, etc.) with images of aborted fetuses.
They now run trucks and fly airplanes with these images through major cities.
As you might expect, the pro-abortion forces are outraged by what CBR is doing. The irony is that they are not outraged by the thing that the pictures are of.
I am unsettled by what CBR is doing. But in the end, I am more unsettled by what they are fighting against. And I believe that what they are doing is effective, so I support them on a regular basis.
A couple of objections to the tactic…
1. It’s kind of voyeuristic.
2. I wouldn’t want my kids to stumble across this stuff.
3. There is an extent to which it degrades the image of God. (You could argue the reverse, though.)
4. It is somewhat exploitive and perhaps trivializing to the other acts of genocide they use for comparison.
With that said, there is no way to drive home the truth of what is going on without these images, and for that reason, I can’t bring myself to say it’s a Bad Thing.
I wonder how the CBR folks might respond to the objections I’ve raised. I haven’t looked; maybe they have published responses to similar concerns already.
More thoughts…
Last year we saw “outrage” over the explicit violence in The Passion of the Christ, but no similar outrage over the violence in the rest of 2004’s cinema fare.
The difference was that Passion depicted violence that actually happened; 1993’s Schindler’s List and 1998’s Saving Private Ryan opened to similar controversy.
The images we usually see are like anaesthetic… but then images that actually depict reality hit us like smelling salts.
Our image-driven culture is accustomed to the use of images to form calluses on our souls. When images like these come along to rip them off, it hurts…
The subversive in me loves it.
However I do agree with Hugh’s second objection. While I distain censorship and encourage the images to be viewed, it seems more appropriate to give fair warning about disturbing content.