Angry of tactics by anti-abortion activists

Disclaimer: This is not meant to be a discussion of whether or not someone "believes" in abortion. Just to state that I think this time the campaign has crossed the line.

I was driving through downtown Charlotte, NC this morning. It was beautiful. The skyscrapers were all tinted pink and orange in the glow of the rising sun, the air was crisp with spring time smells. Glorious, to say the least....and then out of no where I see 3 huge moving vans coming up to my vehicle with large pictures painted on the sides and front..."What are those pictures of?" I ask myself...they looked like some bloody image from the latest horror flick.

Then I figured them out. I almost vomitted. On the sides of the trucks they had plastered these huge images of dead fetus, one was what looked like a still born babe. I thought for certain that I was going to jump out of my car and beat senseless who ever happened to be operating these vehicles...but then I thought would it be right to murder someone in there 120th tri mester...would anyone post pics of the mangled body on the side of a truck to stop the insane amount of killing happening in urban areas around the world?

I am still taking this in and chewing on it. My degree of anger is ebbing and flowing...but if I had children and they happened to witness that visual of a mangled fetus or a still born bloody baby on the side of a truck...what would I say to them?

Just venting

Admittedly gross, but obviously a very effective attention getter.

I have a signature for you...I want a neighbor whose spine I cannot put my fist through or...
"Approaching forty, I had a singular dream in which I almost grasped the meaning and understood the nature of of what it is that wastes in wasted time." Cyril Connolly The Unquiet Grave: A Word Cycle by Palinuris

Sigh, well I want a neighbor who is a nymphomaniac. Can't always get what we want.

hehe sorry found another one ohh and I want one of those too so if ya find a theme community with that in place sans the spinning neon strip clubs with streaming sound...lemme know

I would have wanted to ask the drivers of those scare tactic vans how many children they've adopted. How many malnourished crack babies have they taken in? Righteous indignation is worth nothing. It serves no one but the indignant. When there's no longer enough resources to go around how much will they give up so that others can eat or have room to breathe or a place they don't have to share with 20 other people? I think a lot of these people rail against abortion because it serves their own selfish purpose and deep down has absolutely nothing to do with the welfare of children.

Chip that is exactly what I was thinking...isn't overpopulation the largest threat to human existence...I didn't want to get into my personal beliefs but I have to. We live in a society that thinks it is fine to selectively kill deer due to the fact that our need for expansion has caused a concentration of density in the deer population which leads to disease, lack of resources and just plain over population. But deer have a limited breeding cycle. Humans on the other hand have no predators and breed at will with the option to do so every month. But people think that the way to stop the problems of unfit parents is to stop abortion...WHAT...and by showing mangled babes on trucks!!!! No...NO...NO...I am sorry but if they start selective breeding I want the people who started this campaign off the list! What gives them the right to show that sort of perverted, twisted and vulgar image when Howard Stern get fined for saying the *gasp* S word!

Rambling...sorry anger is peaking the more I think about this...I am gathering friends now to start picketing downtown against this nastiness...ohhh btw I also live in the city that banned the Angels broadway production because someone runs across the stage nude....

Astarte,

That sounds like extremely poor taste, in my book. And I'll bet you $20L that those same people who thought this up and were parading the van around were part of the same group who were aghast at the millisecond Janet's nipple stared us down.

Puh-leeze.

Making abortion illegal will not stop abortions, only make them more dangerous.

Oh ya.. and, I know this isn't what this thread is about, but I feel men should stay the f*&k out of the abortion issue. You know that if there was some talk in Washington about government regulation over *mens* genitals.... well, it just wouldn't happen, now would it?

Yes they most likely are the same lot Juro...and just for the record...nipples are not genitalia!!! Never has anyone been impregnated through the nipple...they are glands and fatty tissue and if every construction worker south of the mason dixon can show off his nipples all summer then what the heck is the problem with women showing theirs!! I want a toppless across the world day!

And of the subject of back alley abortions...you are right they will happen again if abortion is taken away...as will the proliferation of more unwanted children who's life expectancy will be cut short due to the inability of the parents to nurture them in a manner which will allow them to flourish.

Perhaps you could say to your children I support that.

I can't understand or fathom how people would find it so gross and disgusting yet still support it. Most pro abortion people I know will not even look at the fetus pictures when i'm trying to argue with them. Why? because its a human form! It dispells their happy ignorance in thinking they can't recognize an aborted fetus.

Ignorance is bliss, what you are feeling when you see those trucks is your ignorance being ripped away.

JV

What...ohh and btw I didn't realize that I was signed in as my roomie..but this post was actually started by Aliena Serpentine...Jon number one, no I am not ignorant, I am actually a person who sees very clearly both sides. I understand that abortion as a method of birth control is crude and archaic but on the other hand where did these fetus pics come from? No one will tell me...are they from medical journals where the abortion was necessary to preserve the life of a mother? And what is the use of showing people aborted images is it only to sicken people...I have lived a clean life and have done everything possible not to concieve to this point but I do not abstain from sex...I just use every method of protection at my disposal...to say that I am ignorant of problems facing the human populus is ignorant on your part as over population is one of the most looming problems...so you would rather that child be born with birth defects which cause him to die at a young age or even worse to be left in institutions his entire life...Who are you to tell people what is right and wrong when many animals kill weak babies to preserve the gene pool...what makes us any better and don't quote the bible because infanticide was huge during those times...I am not saying that people should go out and abort every child that they have but walk a mile in someone elses shoes before you spout off your little diatribe on morality...nobody wants to see dead babies...it is sick and perverted and there is no way around it...bottom line and this is coming from someone who has never had an abortion, but upholds the American right to do what you believe is right for your body, mind and spirit...this is not the taliban...Christian morality have no place in the constitution only ethics and this is unethical bottom line!

ohh and btw I really have never met a pro- abortionist...though I have met many pro-freedom activitsts who say the federal government and "moral" authority have no rights over my womb or my eggs...seeing as how I let a potential human go every time I begin mensus...

excellent I knew everyone would assume i'm a christian or trying to force my christian morality on people.

I am actually agnostic-athiest (somewhere in there).

I believe in human morality not religious morality.

Losing a child is the worst thing in the world, my good friends 2 year old son just died and he is a wreck. Now taking that line of thought, what about the fathers? everyone just assumes that this decision is purely the womans because unfortunately it involves their body. I for one if anyone ever aborted my child would then kill them. I am not a violent person, nor do i like to fight or see lives ended. But if my child (even if it were alive) was murdered I would seek revenge.

Its the same thing. Parents who want children and lose them during pregnancy are a wreck, so for a father who wants his child more than anything and his GF, or ex, or even wife aborts the child, he has lost something that he had every right to have.

that being said I am not so naive to think we can completely eliminate abortion. I believe in times where the woman will die its ok, or if the child will liver a horrible life, maybe (I say maybe because there are many kids with diseases and bad sicknesses that live their lives to the fullest while they are able and would prefer to live a short life than no life at all).

As to the ignorant comment, what i really meant was a generality, most proabortion (I hate prochoice because its just a tagname to make it sound better, its all politics) people do not want to think or look at those pictures, out of sight out of mind. I think we need to be confronted with the realities of abortion and look at those pictures everyday and see if we really believe that allowing people to have abortion on demand is right.

I truly hate anyone that kills a child out of selfishness and not wanting to disturb there happy little lives for 9 months.

And by the way I am pro-choice, the choice not to concieve in the first place (whether by birth control, condoms, or abstinence). You take the risk when having sex that you might get pregnant, LIVE WITH THAT CHOICE.

The downfall of our society will and is not being held responsible for your actions. People sueing McDonalds because they got fat, people sueing machine companies because they took the safety items of the machine, people murdering perfectly able children because they had to have sex and don't want the responsibility.

the Lack of responsibility for your own actions is the worst thing that we can allow in our country.

JV

Your stance is exactly what...you believe that it is ok for the anti abortionists to drive around with dead babies on their vehicles....ok so what if I drove around with dead heroin addicts plastared to the side of my car or even dead babies that were fully concieved but born dead due to the fact that the mother did not take care of herself...it is not whether or not abortion is right or wrong it is whether or not it is right ethicaly not morally to show dead babies on the side of a vehicle...you are obviously not getting the point...my feelings on abortion are my own... but my feelings on the hypocritical nature of american society to deem the mangled bodies ok and Janet Jackson's breast perveted are just logical...take it as you will Jon.

Note: Not meaning to personally attack anyone. Just stating my opinion. This has been a public service announcement from Zana.

Ok I respect what you are saying about personal responsibility. However, I wonder if we can't look at both sides as a matter of personal responsibility. Before abortion was legal, women who were perhaps in abusive relationships or simply did not want children were forced to deal with having babies whether they wanted them or not by and large. There was a time when birth control was illegal too. The reason abortion is legal is not because women wanted the right to be free-wheeling with life and sleep around with no consequences, but because the supreme court thought it prudent to allow a woman to decide if she could in fact parent the child in question.

Let's put this hypothetical out there: If a woman knew she didn't want children, wouldn't be a good mother and couldn't provide for the child but also took all the precautions she could (i.e. let's say she used two kind of birth control) and still ended up pregnant, is she still being irresponsible for having an abortion? I think it's an important question to ask. At what point does it matter that a woman may know she is simply unable to care for a child at all? What if she's in a relationship that might actually be harmful to the child? What if she's ill in some way? What if she's simply too immature to care for the child and is at risk for allowing the child to be then raised by the state via neglect? What if she has a history of neglecting or abusing children and does not want any more?

Yes some of those questions go a bit over the top. I agree. But there are so many what-ifs that making abortion illegal would only bring up many, many more. It's not possible to make rules that account for every single exceptional circumstance and in the quagmire that is the abortion debate, aren't we safer, as a soceity that values individual freedom, allowing abortion to remain legal than to begin setting up an impossible-to-enforce ban?


Zana

Jonathan, that is just plain stupid. You expect a woman, simply by the fact that she is able to bear children, to be REQUIRED to do so, if she becomes pregnant? It *does* involve her body, not yours.

By that line of thinking, if you were to get a woman pregnant and it was unexpected, she should be able to DEMAND that you have a vasectomy.

And, I believe, you are a violent person. Kill a mother because she aborted *your* fetus?


And exactly who died and allowed you to set all of the moral guidelines? If you don't want an abortion, don't have sex. If you must have sex, please do so with someone who shares your views on abortion.


Yes, it's called Pro-Choice. They make the CHOICE to have an abortion or not to have one.


Do you have kids??!! Do you REALLY think its just a 9 month ordeal? Do you realize how much time, effort, emotion, and money children tap? Sure, they return it 10x over in joy and love.. but some people are not ready for the responsibility, and shouldn't be forced into it because YOU DISAGREE with abortion.

How many unwanted babies have you adopted? What have you done to assist with all of the children in foster homes?


Trying to equate someone who has had or is contemplating having an abortion as someone who is irresponsible is unjust. Making a decsion to have an abortion is not something most people take lightly.

I'll take a wild guess and say it starts with a "J" *runs*

I can answer your questions just fine. If the woman does not want the child and was very careful, it is a possibility that the father may want the child and he should have that right to raise his child on his own.

If he doesn't want that child then she can always give it up for adoption. There are families out there always looking for babies. Babies get adopted right away, its the older children that have a harder time getting adopted.

The question of rights is hard because your rights end where another persons begins. Namely the child and the father. My feeling is if you have an adoption the father has lost the ability to have his own child and raise it, and the child has lost a life, but if you don't have the abortion all you ahve lost is 9 months of your life and you can give the child to the father or up for adoption.

9 months versus death and alife of suffering knowing your child was killed. To me its rather simple.

JV

Chip my old debate buddy, perhaps if you read my posts you would see I am not religious at all. so no Jesus is not the answer to that question.

JV

The point of the 9 months statement is if you don't want the child you can put it up for adoption and in that case it is only a 9 month ordeal.

Secondly I am not old enough nor responsible enough for children, but when i am I WILL adopt a child as well as have my own.

JV

I'm going to try to pull this thread back round to the issue of whether the tactic originally posted was an appropriate means of communicating the anti-abortion rights message publicly.

While personally pro-abortion rights (although anti-abortion, but that gets a little complicated), I can understand the passion with which people who oppose abortion work to further their cause. If you sincerely believed, for example, that lynching minorities because of their race was wrong, and yet lived in a society where it were an accepted, even every day, occurence, would you not feel justified in going to extreme ends to defend the rights and lives of the victims? Would you not be villainized by the proponents of the status quo? I believe many people who oppose abortion oppose it precisely because they believe that it constitutes the murder of a human being. It is, for these people, not a political decision, not a conclusion they've reached after having it drilled into their heads, but a decision to protect human life as valuable.

I would posit that the only way to support abortion rights unconditionally is to allow that the fetus itself is not "human" in any real sense. It is possible to acknowledge that the fetus is human and still believe that one should have the right to abort it, but such a position is not an unconditional one of support -- the utility of the mother's rights versus the fetus's life must be weighed, and I think in such cases we would find more often than not that the mother *should* bear the child except in those instances with which most abortion apologists are familiar -- rape, incest, severe genetic disease, threat to the life of the mother, etc.

I'm afraid I've gone a little off-topic, but my point is that the people putting these pictures on vans believe themselves to be doing more than making a political statement -- they are attempting to save lives, and so they probably feel that they are justified in almost any action (as some extremists have shown by bombing abortion clinics and killing doctors who perform abortions).

That said, can it still be said that the vans are acceptable displays? Well, how can we? Do our anti-obsenity laws and attitudes permit the political or artistic intent of an image to mitigate its violation of public taste? Sometimes yes, but more often not. If someone were to post billboards of naked children, there is little doubt in my mind that they would be stopped, even if their intent was political/artistic. Although we permit such images within barely less public spaces, as in museums and books in bookstores and libraries.

We might cite a more specific example: The holocaust. Several images are available which expose the brutality and horror of the holocaust, including photos of corpses, mass graves, etc. You can go to museums to view many of these, you can buy books which document many of these, but would we, as a public, want those images to be plastered in our public places? If the Anti-Defamation League felt that such actions were necessary, would we, as a public, permit it?

My feeling is that we would not. We generally have a sense about such images: it is important that they be available for our education, but the images themselves should not be forced upon the public, nor should they be forced upon children without the explicit consent of their parents. So those images are not censored, but they are tastefully restricted from total public view.

So perhaps that is the criticism to make on these vans. They overstep a boundary. Certainly, the message is an important one which deserves space in the public consciousness, but I don't think it can be argued that the moral conviction of its proponents outweighs the standards of public decency.

I for one don't think think abortion is a good idea. The way things are going those babies will make a great future food source. Yum, I am making myself hungry.

Excellent post, very unbiased and logical.

The vans may not be tasteful, but pro life people feel as if the issue is not at the forefront enough and that saving lives is more important.

my arguement for them (though i'm not totally sure i support the use of them) is that pro "choice" people claim that a fetus is not alive nor a human, so the pictures on the van are not dead babies but nothing basically. So it should not be offensive, and the only reason it is offensive is because THEY ARE DEAD BABIES, NOT JUST FETUSES!

JV

ok so let me get this straight...if I can go into a library and see a naked person on display then I should be able to handle dead fetus on the side of a truck? Let me drive through your neighborhood with a mangled body of a crack dealer who was killed in a drive by plastered to the side of my car...I will drive back and forth for hours on end untill you agree with me...why not just do what is right for you and leave everyone else the f alone....no abortion is not right and it is not wrong it just is...humanity is an experiment people we have not been through now before now and your morals and my ethics are obviously conflicting

I know JV. It was just too perfect a setup to resist What can I tell ya?