See the photos

And the far left can be plenty violent itself. Several of our educational activities involve the public display of large photographs of aborted human embryos and fetuses. Our painful experience has taught us to expect unprovoked violence, or threats thereof, from pro-abortion activists nearly everywhere we exhibit these images. We have been victimized by attacks from passersby who rammed their car into one of our pro-life photo exhibits, nearly running over one of our staff. A pro-abortion newspaper columnist, in print, explicitly encouraged other motorists to do the same at one of our later displays (see above). Our staff has been punched. Objects have been thrown at us. One of our staff recently had a cup of hot coffee thrown directly in his face. Our signs have been attacked with a knife which police had to wrestle away from an assailant. Our signs have been repeatedly knocked down, punched, kicked and hit with all manner of thrown objects and substances. We have been the object of countless death threats from pro-aborts, many publicly shouted or posted on the Web. We are seldom able to display our pictures without the protection of armed police officers and crowd-control barricades.

ANTI-VIETNAM WAR VIOLENCE

But compare the real record of anti-abortion violence with the history of social reform discussed in a book by Clark Dougan, A Divided Nation, Boston Publishing (1984) and you get a different perspective. Dougan reports that the US Treasury Department estimates that 5,000 bombings took place across the nation between 1967 and 1970 (The New York Times, October 11, 1970, reported that "… another 1,174 attempted bombings were forestalled either because the devices were discovered and disarmed or failed to work”). The majority were related to anti-Vietnam war protests. The Weather Underground, for instance, (a faction of the Revolutionary Youth Movement) and Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), terrorized the nation with bombings which destroyed the home of a judge, damaged the New York City Police Department and blew up restrooms in the US Senate and Pentagon buildings. A bombing at the University of Wisconsin did $6 million in property damage and claimed the life of an uninvolved graduate student.

At the 1968 Democratic National Convention, 5,000 anti-war protestors clashed with 12,000 police, 6,000 National Guardsmen and 7,500 regular Army troops. Authorities responded to wide-spread rock-throwing with tear-gas and savage beatings.

In 1969, 300,000 anti-war demonstrators marched in Washington, D.C. and 500 of those rioted, attacking police and government buildings. Approximately 100 were arrested and an equal number were hospitalized.

In 1970, civil disobedience at Jackson State College in Mississippi was staged to protest the invasion of Cambodia. A battle ensued with police, state patrolmen and the National Guard, in which some 400 shots were fired at a dormitory, killing a student and an uninvolved local youth. Twelve other students were wounded.

Again in 1970, the Ohio National Guard shot 13 Kent State students at an anti-Vietnam War protest. Four of these students died and two of them had not even been involved in the protest. There was also anti-war rioting at Berkeley and Columbia and countless other places.

RACIAL VIOLENCE

On the racial front, in 1965, 6 days of rioting in the Watts section of Los Angeles left 34 people dead and over 1,000 injured. There were 4,000 arrests and hundreds of buildings were destroyed.

In 1966, riots in Chicago killed 2 and injured 65. In 1967, Newark riots produced 23 dead and 725 injured. At nearly the same time, 5 days of violence in Detroit killed 43 and injured 324. Federal troops were called in and 7,000 people were arrested with 1,300 buildings destroyed and 2,700 businesses looted. In April of 1968, more Chicago rioting left 9 dead.

In her book Black Resistance/White Law: A History of Constitutional Racism in America, Berry, The Penguin Press (1994) Mary Frances Berry reports that: "The [Black] Panthers engaged police in more than a dozen firefights from October 1967 to December 1969, and at least 2 policemen and 10 Panthers died in that two-year period."

In 1992, a Simi Valley jury acquitted 4 Los Angles police officers who had used massively excessive force in arresting a black motorist named Rodney King. Rioting erupted in which 38 people were killed and 1,250 were injured. The violence produced 3,600 fires and 3,000 plus arrests. Eventually, 4,000 National Guardsmen were called in to serve with 4,000 regular Army and Marine troops. During the same period, related rioting broke out in San Francisco where 1,400 people were arrested. The National Guard also had to be called up in Las Vegas. There were 80 arrests for rioting in New York City and the National Guard had to put down violence in Atlanta.

And this was only a fraction of the violence produced by the drive for social reform in the 1960s. In fact, The New York Times, September 6, 1970 asserted that: "So accustomed has the nation become to civil disorders that the bulk of these disturbances were not reported in the national press or on television." In light of the extreme violence which characterized the civil rights and anti-Vietnam war campaigns, it is both fortunate and amazing that there has been so much less violence on the "pro-life" side of the abortion battle. The same cannot be said of pro-aborts who have killed 40 million unborn babies just since 1973.

CIVIL RIGHTS FOR ALL RACES AND ALL AGES

Now if only pro-aborts could see the parallels which do exist between the pro-life and civil rights movements. The January 13^th issue of the Alligator carried a letter from a confused student named Tom DeSimone, which offered a case in point. It featured the usual misstatements of fact and lapses in logic:

To compare the work of a group of zealots who rely on shock value and propaganda to further their twisted agenda with the revolutionary achievements of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., is a travesty. The comparison to the Holocaust is equally troubling.

Is there really any similarity between a systematic attempt to eliminate an entire race of people and a medically safe procedure that saves the lives of thousands of women every year?

This young man has obviously not read our essay, "Why Abortion is Genocide." But in the same issue of the paper, a more sensible student, Julia Henson was also published in a guest column:

During his lifetime, Martin Luther King, Jr. used pictures of the Holocaust and pictures of abused or murdered black men to catch the hearts and minds of those who could not see the violence forced on the black nation.

CBR's goal is to allow you to see violence forced on unborn children who can feel their lives being 'sucked' from them.

The truth is that abortion is almost never "used to save the lives" of any women much less "thousands of women every year", but this exchange is an example of the power of CBR/GAP to force a debate where there has heretofore not even been a discussion.

Back and forth the dialogue went. On Thursday, January 14 the Alligator contained a letter from alumnus Scott Truesdell:

In Wednesday's Alligator, Tom DeSimone calls abortion 'a medically safe procedure' ('No similarity between Holocaust, abortion.'). That depends on the perspective. It always kills someone.

Mr. DeSimone argues that the unborn baby is not "someone" in the sense of personhood. That is precisely the argument used by anti-Semites and racists to justify killing Jews and blacks. Practitioners and supporters of genocide always argue that their victims are subhuman.