Terror in the Womb: The Forgotten Victims of 911

On Thursday, September 11, our nation remembers the victims of the terror attacks of seven years ago in New York City, Pennsylvania, and Washington D.C. Every American remembers where they were when we were attacked, just as we remember where we were when President Ronald Reagan was shot, or when the Challenger space shuttle blew up on take off, and for those of us old enough when JFK was assassinated. On September 11, 2001, I was in Miami, FL driving one of the Center For Bio-Ethical Reform’s (CBR) Reproductive “Choice” Trucks. Just as I was on the phone with local reporte! rs attempting to secure some media coverage of our pro-life billboard truck project, the tragic news came over the radio. I will never forget that day. I will never forget that fateful day not only because of the devastation it brought to New York and our nation’s capital but because it crystallized in my mind forever the battle to which I have been called. That call is to defend the forgotten victims of terror – America’s unborn children. Interestingly, more Americans were killed by abortionists on September 11 (about 3,200) than were killed by Islamic terrorists (about 3,000). Assuming 3,000 deaths among the 50,000 people who worked at the World Trade Center, about one in seventeen was killed. One in three unborn babies is killed by abortion every day. On September 11, it would have been six times safer to be a worker in the Twin Towers than it was to be a baby in her mother’s womb. Why do Americans support the “War on Terror,” but ignore the plight of the unborn? Why did Americans write big checks to the Red Cross and the United Way, but ignore pro-life organizations which are struggling to raise funds?

Could it be because the press made the victims of September 11 so painfully real? After all, we were shown pictures of the World Trade Center tragedy on television night after night for weeks and months. Grieving relatives were interviewed. Their backgrounds were profiled. The press also made real the horror of the victim’s deaths. The sight of airliners crashing into skyscrapers tortured us. We were sickened by pictures of people jumping from the upper floors. We gasped as the buildings collapsed into rubble. The images were published and broadcast until they became unbearable. Thus was forged a national consensus that, somehow, each of us must fight terrorism, personally, regardless of the cost. Sadly, no such consensus exists concerning abortion -- even in the church. The victims of abortion are anonymous. The horror of abortion is invisible. Of course American’s aren’t haunted by abortion. How could they be? The good news for the forgotten unborn victims of terror is that CBR and others who use the photographic evidence of abortion intend to change all that. Many pro lifers hope to do for the public’s perception of abortion what the media has done for people’s understanding of Muslim terrorism. Abortion pictures have been banned from television, newspapers and magazines but we have airplane photos, truck photos and hand-held signs and we are using them to make abortion as unavoidable as the press made the terror of 9/11. We continue our Genocide Awareness Project on college campuses, our work with crisis pregnancy centers, our video production endeavors, and Reproductive “Choice” Campaign (RCC).

Kristin Doss, 20, who is pro-life and once briefly considered an abortion, was shocked by the images. "They think making it graphic is going to change people's minds when, in actuality, it's just making people mad," she said. "If I was thinking about an abortion, it would make me think twice, but it would also make me angry because it is a person's right and doing that is forcing something on someone."

People get angry when pro-lifers show the truth about abortion because they don't want to be bothered. The pro-life movement is losing this struggle precisely because enough people aren’t bothered by abortion. Unlike 9/11, abortion has not exacted enough of an emotional toll on American society. The culture is in massive denial about what abortion is and does. Also unlike the terror of 9/11, pro-lifers do not have a willing media to help forge a consensus on the terror of abortion. Americans are not angered at the news media for showing the pictures of 9/11 because Americans are not complicit in the deaths of those who perished in the Twin Towers or Pentagon. However, many Americans ARE angered by our images of aborted babies because at least 40 million parents have participated in the killing of an unborn baby. The news media, entertainment media, education establishment, clergy, etc. have suppressed the truth about abortion. Therefore, we must bypass these gatekeepers and take our message directly to our target audience. This is the lesson of historical social reform. Social reformers have always had to force-feed facts into the heads of people who resist evidence of their own complicity in injustice. The Reproductive “Choice” Campaign and other similar efforts by pro lifers across America will continue to disturb the nation until the stress becomes unendurable. Sooner or later Americans will be forced to come to grips with the victims of abortion. 3000 Americans died on September 11, 2001 by the hands of foreign terrorists to which our nation rightly mourns. Unfortunately, few Americans realize that on the very next day (and everyday since) September 12, 2001 another four thousand Americans died at the hands of domestic terrorists (abortionists) and few if any noticed. Sadly, for these victims of terror there is no day of remembrance.

Mark Harrington is the Executive Director of CBR Midwest, and hosts Activist Radio.