2001 Little Notes
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Contents © 2001
by Jim Holman.
All rights reserved.

OCTOBER 2001 LITTLE NOTES

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"Columnist Nat Hentoff, a former labor organizer who writes about free-speech issues, says it's logical that pro-lifers not backed by sympathetic news media have resorted to the nation's freeways. Anti-abortion speech has been heavily restricted outside abortion clinics, he said, citing Hill v. Colorado, the June 2000 Supreme Court decision that criminalized unwanted close encounters between pro-life activists within eight feet of women on their way to abortion clinics. 'The trucks are free speech,' he says. 'They are not doing anything but giving an opinion. The only real restriction of free speech is if you are advocating something illegal and those people are not. If people are upset, they can post a counter message on their own convoy of trucks.' ...Why show first-trimester fetuses? 'That is when 90 percent of all abortions are performed,' he [Cunningham] says. 'Until we can get a consensus that this is a baby, women will continue to have abortions.'

"...Cathy Cleaver of the National Conference of Catholic Bishops said such displays could traumatize children. 'There are different ways to convey the truth about abortion and the humanity of the unborn child,' she said. 'If you show photos of the violence of abortion, there is a risk your audience will feel so insulted by your depictions, they'll dismiss you and your message.' The American Life League declined comment, but the Population Research Institute supported using the trucks."


WRONG ON ABORTION AND CRIME. This from the Informed Christian Digest: "In research to be published in this month's [August] Harvard Quarterly Journal of Economics, Stanford Law Professor John Donahue and a co-researcher claim legalized abortion may account for as much as half of the recent crime reduction.

According to the study, the crime rate in America dropped 18 years after the U.S. Supreme Court legalized abortion, reducing the number of mothers who gave birth to unwanted children, and thus reducing the number of people alive today who would be in the peak age group and demographic for committing crimes....

"Statistician David Murray of the Statistical Assessment Service said the drop in crime rate correlates with a number of different social and cultural developments during the same time period -- everything from the advent of the Internet to the demise of disco music. The latter no more explain the drop in crime than legalized abortion does, he said.

"'They didn't ask the right question and as soon as you ask the right question the effect they think they're seeing disappears and the picture becomes much more obscure, much more cloudy,' Murray said.

"Murray said young males between the ages of 17 and 25 do commit the majority of crimes. If abortion did reduce crime, crime rates would have dropped first among young people. They haven't. The number of crimes committed by older people dropped first.

"'You're trying to identify, retroactively looking backwards, (if) these people (would) have been likely criminals because they fall in social categories that are also likely to be aborted,' said Murray, who said the study amounted to racial profiling.

"He said that while the rate of homicide committed by young men has dropped, the rate of aggravated assaults among the young has increased. And the rate of homicides committed by young females -- which should have been equally affected by abortion as males -- has not dropped.

"'They didn't ask the right question, they looked at all crimes aggregated together and they looked at all age groups within a certain frame as to whether they have committed crimes,' Murray said."


STARTING IN JUNE, Rachel's Hope, the Catholic post-abortion healing apostolate, erected its first billboard ad, in downtown Fallbrook. It stayed up for eight weeks. On August 21, a second billboard was erected in Pacific Beach, on Bayard and Garnet, across from Boondoggies Bar and P.B. Bar and Grill. The billboard displays a woman's face and the words, "Something inside dies after an abortion" and "For help, call 858-581-3022, Rachel's Hope, www.rachelshope.org."

Although Rachel's Hope has not yet received new clients for its retreats since erecting the billboards, they have received a higher than usual number of "hang-up calls," in which the caller says nothing and then hangs up. Following the September 11 terrorist attacks on the East Coast, Rosemary Benefield, founder of Rachel's Hope (along with her husband), has received the first two calls in which the callers spoke to her. A young woman called between 10:00 and 10:30 p.m. on September 16: "She called three times, one right after the other. She was very angry; she said she was very offended by the sign and said, 'People are dying back east [from the terrorist attacks]. How dare you put that [billboard] up; you're just making people here feel worse! I've had an abortion and I'm glad I did.' And she hung up. Then she called back again and said, 'You Jesus freak, get that down!' I responded with, 'You wouldn't be as angry as you are if you weren't hurting.' And she hung up on me. Then she called back again and she was screaming so loud that I couldn't understand her. I think she was drinking."

On September 18 Benefield received her first call from a man, in response to a billboard: "He said, 'I want to complain about the billboard up in Pacific Beach. It shouldn't be up there. It shows a lot of ignorance.' I responded that the ignorance is on the part of those who don't realize that there is an effect on women and on men when there's an abortion.... Then he said, 'That woman's face up there and her eyes ... it's too pro-life of a message.'

Benefield credits Father Bud Kaicher, pastor of St. Peter's in Fallbrook, with launching the billboard project. At his request, the parish contacted her, proposed the idea of putting one up in Fallbrook, and made arrangements with a billboard ad company. They borrowed the phrase, "Something inside dies after an abortion" from the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops' ad campaign. The parish contributed funds, along with the San Diego Pro-Life League and Rachel's Hope. The Pacific Beach billboard has been funded exclusively by Rachel's Hope, and they hope to keep it up for a second month. The Benefields hope to erect the billboard ads throughout the county.

Donations for may be sent to Rachel's Hope, P.O. Box 17363, San Diego, CA 92177. For more information, call 858-581-3022, e-mail rachels_hope@juno.com or visit www.rachelshope.org.


APPROXIMATELY 100 PRO-LIFERS from throughout Southern California went to Disneyland on Saturday, August 25, from 8:30 to 10:00 a.m. for a "Show the Truth" event featuring large, full-color pictures of aborted babies.

On August 2, Steve Klein of San Diego Christians United sent a letter to Anaheim government officials and Disney CEO Michael Eisner disclosing the group's picketing plans and requesting police protection.

Deputy chief of police Stephen Sain thanked Klein, "Please be assured that the Anaheim Police Department recognizes your constitutional right to conduct this activity, and we will not interfere provided that it is conducted in a safe and lawful manner."

Media reaction to the first-of-a-kind event was not as positive. "The media outlets have been calling and patiently trying to wear us down on the issue that it traumatizes the children," Klein wrote to supporters on August 24. "Pastor Gene Cook hit the nail right on the head and the media can't handle it. Pastor Gene noted that the children see the pictures of the aborted babies and intuitively and inherently (the law is not suppressed on their hearts yet, just their parents) ask their parents how can this happen in America?"

Many park-goers yelled at the demonstrators who stood on three corners at the Harbor Drive main entrance while others tried to shield their children's eyes so they would not see the posters. Jan Westrup of San Diego described her experience with a passerby: "When one OBGYN nurse drove up to our signs and yelled that she didn't believe in abortion, but what we were doing to kids out here was wrong and that there were kids crying in the cars, (no one saw any crying kids) I explained to her that at least we were doing something that obviously worked. Then I asked her what she was doing to stop abortion? As you can imagine she was flustered and drove off in a huff. She had no answer."


PETER STEINFELS, in the September 8 New York Times, makes the most eloquent argument against stem-cell research to date: "Nearly a century ago, in the preface to his play 'The Doctor's Dilemma,' George Bernard Shaw laid down a simple rule that no medical researcher caught up in the current controversies over embryonic stem cells or therapeutic cloning would think to challenge.

"Shaw, of course, put the matter in the usual outrageous way he employed to provoke thought. 'No man,' he wrote, 'is allowed to put his mother into the stove because he desires to know how long an adult woman will survive at a temperature of 500 degrees Fahrenheit, no matter how important or interesting that particular addition to the store of human knowledge may be.'

"And just to nail the point down, he added, 'When a man says to Society, "May I torture my mother in pursuit of knowledge?" Society replies "No." If he pleads, "What! Not even if I have a chance of finding out how to cure cancer by doing it?" Society still says, "Not even then."'"

Steinfels goes on to say that pro-stem-cell-research politicians and scientists have conceded that there are some milestones in embryonic development that are "morally relevant" in considering when one can destroy embryos for research -- implantation, diversification of cells, or appearance of a "primitive streak" (when twinning is no longer possible), but the problem is that the moral standard is changeable: Steinfels, further on in the article: "Are ethical limits, to which everyone gives lip service, really based on some inherent and morally significant quality of human life? Or are they strictly provisional dividing lines, like the movable rubber cones or wooden horses that are used to block off road work or parade routes, handy enough to allay anxiety and ward off conflict for now but easily shifted if the potential benefits of medical research so require?"

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