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 “In Your Face!”
In California, the shock tactics employed by one pro-life militant are literally turning heads,
while aggravating both supporters of abortion and more cautious pro-lifers.

By Robert Kumpel

At 6:15 am in an industrial park somewhere in central Los Angeles, a plain-looking warehouse is unlocked. Beyond the iron gates and surveillance camera, another gate leads to a truck yard, which in turn leads to giant doors. Inside, the trucks are being warmed up. A few more people show up. Some are staff, some are volunteers, and two of them are off-duty police officers who will escort the trucks.

The reason for all the security is apparent when you look at the trucks. Photographs of aborted fetuses are blown up to billboard size on each side of the bed on every truck. Over the photos is the word “Choice” in quotation marks and a web address: www. abortionNO.org. Some of the babies are juxtaposed against a dime which is as big as their entire body—signifying a fetus in the earliest stages of pregnancy. Every working day, five days a week, since June, these trucks have been on the freeways of Los Angeles, turning heads for three hours as they drive through the morning traffic.

A project that has been planned and choreographed for years, the trucks are only the latest weapons being used by the Center for Bio-Ethical Reform, a pro-life group dedicated to forcing the American public to face an issue it would love to avoid. The group’s founder and director, Gregg Cunningham, briefs the crew before leaving on today’s run. Using a large map, he reveals his plan for what freeways they will cover. Today it is a loop: 605 North to 60 East to 57 North, to 210 West to 134 West, to 405 South to the 10 East to 5 South and back to 605 South. “We will drive this loop ad nauseum—that is, until every driver that has seen us is nauseated!” Cunningham jokes. The session ends with a brief prayer. At 6:40, everyone boards the trucks.

Everyone who rides wears body armor: a 50-pound bulletproof vest with steel panels on all four sides of the torso. Each vest has pepper spray in its pocket. Helmets are located under the seats—just in case. Cunningham remarks:

The California Highway Patrol turned down our application to armor-plate the cabs. Yet you can buy a bulletproof Mercedes or BMW just by placing the order. We are being victimized by content-based discrimination. That’s a case we could win in court if we ever get around to filing a lawsuit. The windows are not bulletproof, but they are coated with Mylar film, which can stop a brick. Nobody is ever going to pull us out of a truck and do to us what Reginald Denny had done to him by Damien Williams. We don’t put our people in harm’s way for the purpose of getting beaten up.

As the trip begins, a police car follows the convoy of trucks, keeping lanes clear behind them and making sure no one can stalk the convoy upon return to the warehouse. The security car and the trucks are equipped with video cameras that document all surrounding activity on each trip. Each member of the convoy communicates with the others by radio.

Cunningham explains:

Violence against pro-lifers is under-reported because a lot of pro-life activists just don’t think the police will do anything about it. And frequently they won’t do anything about it. It’s harder to get district attorneys to prosecute it, and it’s harder to get judges to find people guilty for it or penalize them significantly. A judge is more likely to shrug off an assault against a pro-lifer, but a bogus allegation of an assault against a pro-abort is likely to land a pro-lifer in jail.

During the early part of the trip, the trucks are going against the flow of the morning commute. Drivers sitting in the stalled traffic on the other side of Highway 60 cannot miss the message on each truck. The trucks move at 45 miles an hour, the minimum legal speed on California’s Highways. As he drives, Cunningham explains his mission:

The truck campaign is an outgrowth of the Genocide Awareness Project, which involves the display of large photo murals out of doors on large university campuses. We’ve now been on 33 public campuses all over the country, setting up the murals outside of student unions and what have you. Probably three quarters of a million students have seen these pictures now.

That project was the result of a fairly sophisticated analysis we’ve done on the history of social reform, looking for the unchanging principles of social reform, going back 150 years or more. We’ve examined every movement from the abolition of child labor, the abolition of slavery, the civil rights movement, the anti-Vietnam war movement, et cetera.

Cunningham has infuriated liberals by ripping a page right out of their playbook. “Successful social reformers invariably used horrifying pictures to dramatize injustice,” he notes. He continues:

Those pictures were then used to confront the culture and prick the collective conscience. But since the reformers were social liberals, they found sympathetic allies in the press, who would publish and broadcast these photos. If we were to apply these principles to pro-life activism, we could only do so up to the point which we had to rely on the press.

Clearly the press, if not hostile, is certainly not sympathetic to our point of view. So we had to come up with a new mass medium, a way of putting these pictures into the heads of people who are never going to see them on television or in newspapers or magazines or billboards. It occurred to us that the freeway system is this multi-billion dollar complex designed and built for transportation, but could be appropriated for educational purposes. Commutes are getting longer and freeways are getting more crowded each year, and you basically have a captive audience of people who can’t change the channel and can’t turn the page when they see us.

Welcomes hostility
As Cunningham describes the project, his voice is earnest, steady, and gentle. He clearly recognizes the hostility roused by his tactics. “When I’ve done talk radio and I am asked a question, two or three words into my answers, everyone starts shouting me down,” he reports. Yet even that reaction serves his purpose: “Without realizing it, these talk show hosts who are so vehemently opposed to the truck project are making our point—which is, you can’t hang up on the trucks. You can’t put them on hold and you can’t shout them down.”

Cunningham welcomes public denunciations and media hostility toward the project. “We have the more convincing argument,” he reasons. “Those who shout me down are foils for me because they are demonstrating their fear of my answer when they won’t let me give it.”

Cunningham also acknowledges his trucks exemplify a shocking, “in your face” approach. “It’s critical that they are ‘in your face,’” he believes, “because another aspect of social reform that we identified was massive societal denial among people who had been complicit in injustice.”

“Once you look fleetingly at the pictures” on the passing trucks, Cunningham feels sure, “they are in your head and you’re never going to get them out. Every time you hear the word ‘abortion’ thereafter, instead of calling to mind an abstraction, you are going to see a dead baby—tortured to death, bloody, sickening.”

He recognizes that some people will never be convinced: “This project only works with those who have a functioning conscience. If you don’t have a functioning conscience, none of this is going to matter.” But his goal is to bring home the reality of abortion to those who are still willing to consider the issue. “Evil that remains invisible quickly becomes tolerable,” he says. “It’s really imperative that you make it real to people, but you’ve got to make it real through media that are non-consensual, because they’re not going to give you their permission.”
The fact that people do not consent to receive his message—that they do not want to see the images displayed on the trucks—is what makes his approach so powerful, Cunningham believes:

That creates a great deal of anger. But Martin Luther King created a great deal of anger; the anti-Vietnam war movement created a great deal of anger; Earth First creates a great deal of anger. Social reformers are not trying to win a popularity contest. They don’t care what people think of them. They care what people think of injustice. If I have to get people angry at me to get them angry at abortion, that’s a price I’m willing to pay.

Whose enemy?
“The principle reason the pro-life movement has made so little progress over the last 30 years,” Cunningham charges, “is because social reform is new to conservatives. They haven’t done it before.” He believes that conservatives, “to their discredit, are frequently defenders of an unjust status quo” because they “mistakenly imagine that in order to be effective, you have to be liked.”

“What’s really bizarre,” Cunningham reflects, “is that mainstream pro-life organizations and the Church are working harder than Planned Parenthood to suppress the best evidence we have—photo evidence—that abortion is an act of violence and it does kill a baby.” He is very disappointed with the efforts (or, as he sees it, the lack of effort) by American Catholic bishops to fight abortion. He explains:

The US bishops just bought an ad campaign whose operating principle is subtlety. Well, Martin Luther King didn’t win equality for African Americans with subtle pictures. He used pictures of black people being torn limb from limb by police dogs, knocked down by water cannons and hampered down by nightsticks. Those were ugly, ugly pictures and the people who were making America look at those pictures invited a great deal of persecution, because people didn’t want to see those pictures.

During the Vietnam war, the working press had historically low approval ratings because people were angry that night after night they would turn on the television and see the police chief of Saigon blowing out the brains of a Vietcong suspect or of naked children, whose clothing was burned off by napalm, running toward the camera. Those photos lodged in the public mind and gradually eroded public support for US involvement in the war.

The press was willing to take the hit. The protesters wre willing to accept persecution. They had their eyes focused on a public policy objective and you can’t win this on the cheap.

“But the bishops want to win this on the cheap,” Cunningham argues:

They are laboring under the misconception that to be effective you have to be liked. They need to go back and read the prophets of the Old Testament and note the consistency with which they were persecuted and even martyred. Jesus said, “If they persecute me, they will persecute you.” Well, they’re not persecuting the bishops because the bishops have been very careful to avoid any behavior that invites persecution.

Completing the loop
As we turn on Route 210 and enter the San Gabriel Valley, traffic gets heavier. As we draw closer to Pasadena, the cars we pass begin to look more expensive. Although today no one is making obscene gestures at us—a frequent occurrence—many people are glaring or staring at the trucks. In cars carrying more than one passenger, we can see someone point, and there seem to be many animated discussions. “When we are in Orange County and the Inland Empire, we get looks of stunned disbelief,” Cunningham says,

Some people will attempt to cut us off or break into the convoy. They’ll do that when they haven’t seen the police car behind us. We have the police behind us because we drive at a speed that forces people to overtake us and we want their first visual impression to be of the police, to deter misconduct.

We’ll see more aggressive driving the closer we get to West L.A. That’s where the cultural elites are. Sometimes we’ll go into Malibu and Topanga Canyon, and that’s where the studio bigwigs are. You’ll really start seeing the obscene gestures and scowls and frowns. They’re scandalized because they regard these areas as their domain and we’re violating the sanctity of their liberal environs by bringing the truth of abortion to Malibu.

To prevent legal harassment, the project keeps two public interest law firms on retainer: the Life Legal Defense Foundation and The Thomas More Center. Cunningham explains that the legal team meets before trouble arises:

We have batteries of lawyers who we bring to the planning table. These are not people to whom we go after we’ve botched something and want them to bail us out. We involve counsel in the planning of everything we do, from the conceptual level all the way through implementation. We structure our activities to give us maximum litigation advantage and our adversaries the minimum of openings to harass us in court. In the 11 years that the Center for Bio-Ethical Reform has been doing its work, we have not been sued one single time.

“We are easily the most aggressive pro-life organization in the country,” Cunningham announces. Yet in spite of his “in your face” approach, he denounces all pro-life violence. At the same time, he rejects any notion that such violence is at all widespread:

When you look at the history of social reform and note the thousands and thousands of bombings and riots and injuries and arrests and murders—especially during the civil rights movement and anti-Vietnam war movement—and compare that to the fact that only seven lives have been lost in 30 years of pro-life activism . . . suggesting that the pro-life movement has been violent is preposterous. There were more people killed during a few days of rioting in the Rodney King matter in Los Angeles than have been killed in the entire history of the pro-life movement—not only in this country, but worldwide!

As we enter bumper-to-bumper traffic on Route 405 South at the Sepulveda pass, we are in what Cunningham describes as one of the “most intense” areas, where the offense taken at the photos is greatest. He is now able to generalize about what the drivers’ reactions will be according to models of cars he sees on the road: “Porsches aren’t that bad, and Mercedes aren’t that bad, but there’s something about a BMW that attracts serious pro-aborts.”

As we move south of Westwood, we turn east on Route 10 and traffic thins out. Gawkers continue to slow down and stare as they pass us, but the ride back to the warehouse is uneventful. As we pull into the lot, a pickup truck following us, takes down the building’s address, then flees before the police stop him. They don’t bother chasing him.

Another successful mission is accomplished. An estimated 400,000 drivers have seen the message.

At the age of 54, Gregg Cunningham —a former state legislator, Justice Department official, and assistant US Attorney —has the background that might equip him for any number of high-powered, high-paying careers. Why is he doing this?

I sat in the US Attorney’s office in Los Angeles and every week watched 25 or 30 résumés come across my desk from people at very good law firms and people from very good law schools who graduated high in their class, edited their law reviews—all kinds of academic honors. Day by day it became clearer to me that any one of these people could do my job at least as well as I was doing it, and some of them better. But none of them would be willing to fight the greatest moral evil the world has ever seen. I thought to myself, “I’m going to have to stand before the judgment seat of Christ and explain what I was doing while the sewers of our cities were running red with the blood of our children.”

Christians want to live a “normal life” and the “American dream,” but that notion would have been absolutely anathema to 1st-century Christians.

I admit, I’m a materialistic person. I used to have a private plane. I had a Rolex and drove a Porsche; and I miss them. But I can’t have those things and sit here on the freeway, scandalizing Southern California with the horror of abortion. We’ve got to make a choice.

Robert Kumpel writes regularly for the Los Angeles Lay Catholic Mission. This article is an abridged version of a piece that originally appeared in the October 2001 of that newspaper. It is reprinted here with permission.

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