Thanks to protesters, children saw horrifying images

Pittsburgh Post-Gazette ^ | April 27, 2002 | CAROL BENDER- letter to editor

[syriacus]

I was driving with my 3-year-old daughter Monday morning down West Liberty Avenue, when we had no choice but to gaze out the car windows at a variety of 5-foot placards depicting extremely graphic photos of aborted fetuses. My daughter asked me, "Mommy, why are those people holding signs of scary monsters?" In shock myself as to what I was seeing, I did not know what to say.

[potlatch]

I was born three months early and made it.

I had to lay in bed, flat on my back for 4 months to keep from loosing a baby. He was born at 7 months and weighed 2 1/2 lbs! He stayed in the hospital 2 months, and when he was 4 months old we found him dead one morning. They said it was S.I.D.S. But I knew I had done everything I could to save him. I could never live with myself if I had an abortion!

[wcbtinman]

I truly see your point. And your position being adopted by most of the anti-abortion proponents is the only reason the baby killers are still alive and in business.

I do however think that you base this on the automatic assumption that the pro-lifers would lose the battle/war. On that I don't agree.

It seems that the root of this is the acceptance of when life begins. If you believe that life begins at conception, then any opposition to the termination of such life can be justified.

[FreedomFriend]

You're blowing things out of proportion. You act as though a child would be traumatized for life. Think common sense. The child may be a little scared for a day, perhaps a week, but it isn't going to last very long, for that's the way most children are; they go onto the next thing. The enjoy being kids.

Furthermore, you're making this into a kids debate. The images are, more than likely, meant for adults who happen to be passing by the site. Of course you can't prevent children from seeing it, for they're part of the general population. However, they're not the intended audience.

People need to be struck with reality, and if it includes showing the aweful, good to honest truth, I say they should do it. Doing this wishy-washy, vague concept stuff, of which you're advocating, does not help the Pro-Life Cause. Why? Because it doesn't shock people out of their brainwashed, propagandized minds. Seeing the actual thing gets people thinking. It reveals the horrors to people, and it IS effective.

I'm surprised that a Conservative, particularly one who calls himself "Pro-Life" would reject this method.

[supercat]

The trouble is that so many people have fooled themselves into thinking that when one of these beauties is "eliminated," it is as innocuous an event as eating cotton candy.

The problem is that they don't think it's one of those beauties that's being eliminated. That's why I think the pro-life ads which focus on the beauty of life are much better than the bloody-fetus pictures.

Actually, I think the bloody-fetus pictures may be backfiring even beyond the fact that they induce those who see them to attack the messenger rather than the message. In the bloody-fetus pictures, the fetus is made to look horrible and inspire revulsion; the effect on the viewer is that the viewer wants it gone. That the fetus's grotesque state is the product of the abortionist won't register nearly as strongly as the notion that the fetus is grotesque.

[FreedomFriend]

Good parallel.

[dheretic]

Well said! You hit the nail right on the head. There are so many other ways this could have been done that would have been more effective. I don't mind anti-abortion protestors. I mind any protestor that crosses the lines of ethics the way these did. There's just one thing that needs to be said again and again, why can't the protestors let these kids grow up a little before they see these sorts of things? This smacks of an attempt to brainwash rather than educate.

[Jeff Gordon]

ou actually feel that showing a picture is the moral equivalent of killing a human being for convenience.

Once someone crosses certain lines they are all in the same catagory of subhuman species.

I do not care if the pictures are of murdered babies or of children being molested. The people who spread kiddie porn are just as bad as the abusers of children. The people who spread the pictures of murdered babies are just as bad as the people who murder the babies.

And that's a fact Jack!

[antidisestablishment]

You are sick if you think sending a human being to a gas chamber when they are fully conscious and aware of what is happening to them is on the same level with pulling the plug on a pregnancy sucking a viable human being apart with a vacuum, dismembering a child with forceps, filling a conscious child's lungs and body with saline or outright poisoning them — all without anesthetics in its early stages.

Let's get it right please, coward.

[HiTech RedNeck]

the effect on the viewer is that the viewer wants it gone

So show both!

[dheretic]

Maybe that person has some ethics, did that ever cross your mind? Why on Earth are you encouraging your side of the debate to commit political suicide? Why not emphasize the loss of a beautiful thing, rather than the discarding of the remains of a bundle of cells? Most people would initially be no more sympathetic to that "child" than they would to a dead rat that had been stepped on until its entrails covered the floor immediately around its corpse. The response would be the same, "get that nasty picture out of my face, a$$hole!" That isn't exactly a good way to win people over and influence political enemies.

[supercat]

This smacks of an attempt to brainwash rather than educate.

More to the point, it creates exactly the wrong reaction (as I finally figured out in my last post): the viewer's reaction is that he wants the pictured object [the mutilated fetus] GONE; by contrast, a better-designed pro-life message [showing a beautiful picture of an intact fetus, followed by a picture of jars] would inspire a reaction of wanting the fetus BACK. I'd suggest that a photo of the jars is probably more effective than a photo of a mutilated fetus because in the latter case, even when juxtaposed with the live-fetus picture, the reaction of wanting the mutilated one GONE could overpower that of wanting the live one BACK.

[dheretic]

Coward? I am soooo hurt. Your comment hit me so deep that I think I should take a prozack to nip this depression it caused in the bud.....

[patton]

I am truly sorry for your loss. May God be with your child, and may you find comfort - I would be screaming in pain still.

[potlatch]

Being Catholic, the thought is that conception has already taken place, and the pill is just an early abortion.

[dheretic]

What IMO would be more effective would be a picture of a doctor tossing a bag that looks like it could be a cloth diaper into a dumpster behind a building. That makes a clear statement without being utterly repulsive in the process

[FreedomFriend]

Yeah, and if you support the butchery of children, you're a whacko, although you may be a misguided one.

[ValerieUSA]

Lisa Mathis is a fool. Children understand right away that abortion is WRONG if they are taught early. The wrong time to teach them is after they started having sex and are confused and pressured and scared and hearing plenty of other "sides" to the story. If you teach children how precious little babies are, so that their hearts are tender, then perhaps they won't be so eager to do the business that creates babies before they are prepared to take proper loving care of them.

[patton]

Why are the lives of post-partum persons worth more than those in the womb?

[antidisestablishment]

Please don't respond to the facts, just the name calling.

Yes, all these procedures are equivalent in their inhumanity. It's not "pulling a plug;" it is premeditated, inhuman and tortuous. Go tack a couple more "prozacks."

[potlatch]

Thank you. This was some years ago, but you never forget.