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Trucks show nation reality of 'choice'

Greg Cunningham and the Center for Bio-Ethical Refonn are  playing pro-life hardball on America's highways.

They do it with tractor-trailer­sized trucks plastered, sides and back, with giant photos of 10- and ll-week­old aborted babies next to the single word, "CHOICE."

The trucks roll along the thoroughfares of America's urban centers every business day during rush hour, says Cunningham.

On a typical weekday. in May, they were cruising the streets of Atlanta, Los Angeles, the San Francisco Bay area, Honolulu, and Columbus, Ohio.

"We also operate them on university campuses, and we are beginning to target high schools and middle schools," says Greg.

Cunningham, a former assistant U.S. Attorney and Pennsylvania legislator, says the anti-abortion truck project evolved fi:om trial-and-error efforts to break through the main­stream media blackout that has kept visual images of abortion in all its bloody reality fi:om public view.

"We realized that we had to create an alternative mass medium," says Greg.

The Califomia-based Center for Bio-Ethical Reform (CBR), which Greg founded in 1990, started off with a video on abortion that was "extremely graphic and extremely disturbing. But there was no venue for it no way we could show it," he says.

So they followed up with the Genocide Awareness Project, a hard­hitting program that has toured col­leges and universities for 5 years with huge photo displays that compare abortion to the Jewish holocaust and racial lynchings.

Two years ago CBR launched the truck project, officially titled the Reproductive Choice Campaign. The trucks have been on the road ever since, moving all over the country.

The predominant reaction to the mobile displays is astonishment, says Mark Harrington, director of CBR's Midwest Office.

"It's 'shock-and-awe' -the gaping mouth, the bulging eye, the hand to the mouth; you can tell people are not accustomed to seeing this kind of thing," says Mark.

"People are stunned; their jaws drop. It's a revelation to them--­they've been told it's just a blob of tissue," says Russ Edmondson, CBR's Northern California Office director.

Kalei, who heads CBR's Hawaiian operations, recalls a time when he was driving his truck down Waikiki Beach while 2,000 teenagers were headed to some event.

"They're looking at the truck-they're just aghast!" he says. "The pictures relate 'Choice' to dead, chopped-up babies. Once the kids see them, they're done!"

When people see the photos, they can no longer think of abortion in the comfortable abstract, says Greg: "We've got the pictures into people's heads; we've accomplished our purpose."

Of course, reactions are mixed. They range from very hostile, with screamed obscenities and middle finger extended, to "thumbs-up." Mark calls it "the digital divide.

"We've had things thrown at us--food, stones, bottles-but that's rare," he adds.

The trucks, which CBR owns, have automatic transmissions, so that the mixed groups of paid staff and vol­unteers, about eight to ten drivers in each geographic area, do not need a special license to drive them.

"They're like large rental trucks," says Greg.

Following behind each truck is a driver in a "security car," an unmarked car rigged up with a camera.

"We record all the runs we make," says Russ, who is a retired police officer.

"We let people know that all their actions are being watched; that helps keep people in line. It's come in handy on a few occasions."

"We do get death threats in our e-mail and voice mail," admits Mark, who operates out of Columbus, Ohio.

But he shrugs them off.

"Nothing has happened, no one has been injured."

It takes "some" courage to drive the truck, he says. "But I don't see it as a great, courageous thing to do. It's a logical step to protect innocent life.

"I don't believe that unborn babies should be put to death. As a man, I think we should protect the defenseless."

"We've had death threats, stuff thrown at the truck; that's how I know it's working," says Kalei with a laugh. (He asked that his full name not be used for security reasons.)

But he knows they have saved babies' lives because he has received e­mails from women who decided not to abort their babies after seeing the pictures .

The Hawaii Office has also managed to infuriate the local Planned Parenthood. Women are cancelling appointments, and Planned Parenthood blames the trucks, says Kalei.

Kalei's truck is specially rigged with electrically driven tarps that come down and. cover the signs, "so we can go buy gas without a hassle," in ultra-liberal Hawaii, he explains.

The truck project has generated dozens of stories in mainstream newspapers and TV throughout the country.

The coverage always includes the usual muddled and somewhat incoherent comments from local Planned Parenthood spokespersons, who grudgingly admit that the truck signs are protected under the First Amendment.

But the stories generally allot a fair amount of space to CBR spokesmen to state their pro-life case.

Greg points out that there is plenty of precedent for the truck project's visual, in-your-face tactics.

"Early reformers learned that people try to ignore or trivialize injustice in which they are complicit and for which they feel ashamed," he says.

The invention of the camera gave early reformers a powerful tool, which they used to end child labor abuses, a practice in which, like abortion, a lot of people were involved, but which they wanted to Ignore.

"The reformers took cameras into mines, mills and factories and forced people to look at something they didn't want to see."

The civil rights movement, anti-Vietnam War activists and environmental groups have also used photographs to make their case.

Yet, says Greg, "Pro'-life activists at the national level have been uniform in their conviction that we shouldn't use these pictures because they just get people angry, and people won't like us!

"People vilified Martin Luther King for showing pictures of lynchings. But King said there would have been no civil rights movement without the horrifying pictures."

Greg believes the pictures of aborted babies will have the same effect on the pro-life movement.

"They have a huge impact. Kids tell us that when the trucks drive around their school, that's all that gets talked about all day.

"And I can bury you in e­mails and voice mails from women who say what an effective impact these pictures have made on them! We get them from women who say, if someone had shown me these, I wouldn't have had my abortion.

"If you want the crisis pregnancy centers to work, if you want women to flock to them instead of to abortion clinics, the first step to convince them is to show them that abortion is an act of violence, that it's a baby, not a blob of tissue."

There is a sequential progression to the fight against abortion, says Greg.

"We're doing Step 1: who is this baby and what does abortion do to him?

"The pro-life movement wants to skip Step 1 and get to the easy stuff, the stuff they're comfortable with. Step 1 is the hard part­the part no one wants to do."

But it takes only a tiny handful of people to do what has to be done to succeed, says Greg.

And, he says, "This is the single most effective thing we've ever done."

See www.abortionNo.com for more information on CBR and its truck project.