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Joel Belz, WORLD Magazine January 11, 2003 Volume 18 Number 1
Gregg Cunningham, whose occupation and preoccupation is getting in the
face of the American public with grisly billboard-size pictures of aborted
babies, says I'm the only person who has ever accused him of not being
sufficiently dramatic with his message.
Mr. Cunningham heads the Center for Bio-Ethical Reform (CBR), an activist
pro-life organization in Anaheim, Calif. He believes that the pro-life
movement in the United States has largely ground to a halt. Crisis
pregnancy centers have become the focal point of the pro-life cause, and
the target of most pro-life dollars. CPCs are good, he says, but he
doesn't think the statistical evidence shows that they do much to persuade
most women with
unwanted pregnancies to choose against abortion. In Washington, meanwhile,
a generation of lobbying has produced little in meaningful results. Most
pro-lifers, he thinks, are discouraged and think the war has been lost.
The war is lost, Mr. Cunningham agrees, if we think only in terms of
adults. Most have made their peace with abortion, however reluctantly.
But that, he argues, is because they have never really come to terms with
what happens when a baby is aborted. And that's why he thinks the big,
ugly, awful pictures are so important. He's optimistic that America's
young people can be persuaded.
So he plasters those pictures on the sides of big trucks and runs the
trucks up and down the vast freeway system of Los Angeles and next to high
schools in the area. He has created a startling billboard display that he
takes to state university campuses. He even tows flying billboards behind
planes over crowded beaches. And now, in his most controversial venture so
far, Mr. Cunningham wants to take his billboards to the entryways of some
big evangelical churches, where he hopes he'll make some people more
uncomfortable about the issue than they've ever been before.
But Mr. Cunningham is right: I don't think, with all this, that he's
gotten sufficiently dramatic in his portrayal of the case against
abortion.
I say this as someone who is frankly impressed with Mr. Cunningham's work.
I took several hours last month to go out with one of CBR's big trucks. We
toured several dozen miles of freeway, and we drove slowly around the
Woodrow Wilson High School in Long Beach. I watched the responses of the
startled students and a number of adults. To those who say the CBR
approach is crude and offensive, I ask: "And what specifically are
you doing to change people's minds about this bloody crime?"
So when I take issue with Mr. Cunningham's gruesome pictures, it's not
because they are overly repugnant. I take issue because they aren't
repugnant enough. But gripping the heart of the viewer is a subtle matter.
Bluntly, the pictures used by CBR do little to make me think of human
life. They remind me more of common road kill.
Real emotional involvement comes not with an overly explicit portrayal of
death—but with a nuanced portrayal instead of the delicate balance
between death and life. That's why the candid photo of a young Vietnamese
girl running naked down the highway to escape the horrors of napalm
probably had as much influence in the late 1960s as any other single
factor in turning American public opinion against the war in southeast
Asia. When the
photographer snapped that picture, there were almost certainly plenty of
dead
bodies lying around. But what memorably captured the hearts of onlookers
around the world was the reality of a young woman teetering between life
and
death. And that subtlety changed the course of a war.
Such subtlety has generally eluded us in the war against abortion. We came
close, perhaps, in that wonderful and widely circulated operating room
photo a year ago showing a tiny baby's hand reaching up through the
incision in his mother's abdomen. But that very pro-life picture,
breathtaking as it was, said nothing of the terror of abortion.
No photographer, of course, goes out to set up props and then stage the
photo I'm looking for. The greatest photos "just happen." So
pro-lifers who have confidence in God's sovereign providence can pray
together that some amazing yet terrifying image might be captured by a
lens quite unprepared for what it suddenly sees.
When that remarkable picture appears—and I pray it will not be long—I
have no doubt Gregg Cunningham will plaster it all over his trucks, at
campus centers, and across the sky. I also have no doubt that at long
last, countless viewers will finally be compelled to look on and exclaim,
maybe even unconsciously: "Oh, no—I never ever thought about it
that way before." And few will dare to ask how such a picture could
possibly be exhibited in
public.
The following two photos (not included in this article) show the true
horror of abortion. Can anyone really say that the poor little
bodies shown in the images are only "tissue" as many
pro-abortion groups have argued?
The first photo shows a baby boy found in medical waste bags outside a
legal abortion clinic. He was 14 inches long, weighed 2 pounds 2
ounces, and was at 30 weeks gestation (7 months) when he was killed.
His umbilical cord was ripped from his body which also detached his penis.
His buttocks was carved off, a technique which insures death by profuse
bleeding, and also suggests that he was born alive. (copyright Human Life
International, used with permission)
The second photo shows a baby boy aborted by the D&E method. In
an abortion of this type the baby's arms, legs, head and torso are
violently pulled and twisted apart and removed in pieces from the mother.
The procedure is done slowly enough to avoid injury to the mother but it
assures a shockingly painful death for the child.
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