Ruth E. Day
1.
The pro-life movement started out as a relatively peaceful endeavor during and for a while after the pro-life decision. Roy O’Keefe was very adamant about remaining peaceful. He did not want to fight violence with violence. He led protests outside abortion clinics, organized sit-ins, and tried to show women that to get an abortion means to murder your child. Such tactics may not have made headlines but they gave the pro-life movement a rather respected and pacifistic reputation. This is the kind of reputation that O’Keefe wanted. He wanted the abortionists to look like the violent murderers and the pro-lifers to represent the peaceful good guys. However, this reputation did not last for ever. Eventually, a few people involved in the pro-life felt the need to take more drastic measures to get their message across. The first of these people were Michael Bray and Thomas Spinks. These people became so frustrated with the existence and legalization of something as fundamentally evil as abortion that they felt the only to get their point across was to blow up abortion clinics. In this way, they ended up committing sin to combat sin. One this trend of violence started, there was no stopping it. Why is that? Because no leader involved in the pro-life movement was willing to condemn such violent tactics. Exploding clinics got them press coverage. Many of them were faced with a moral dilemma. Was it okay to blow up buildings with no one in them if it prevented babies from being murdered? The fact that no pro-life leader came out and said that no, it isn’t okay to fight violence with more violence made their followers believe that such tactics were justifiable. Even though O’Keefe believed in peaceful protest, he also could not speak out against the bombings. “‘Yes, it [the bombing] is just,’ O’Keefe told the Washington Post hours after the bombing. ‘Is it prudent? No. [But] it is just to respond to violence against people by destroying property. Human life is far more valuable than property. Pro-lifers are going to act… The question is what shape the action will take.’” (Risen & Thomas, 94). O’Keefe is right, human life is more valuable than property, but the justification of the destruction of the buildings where abortions will eventually lead to the justification of the murder of the doctors who perform them. The mind set that led to the Christmas bombings in
2.
Randall Terry is a good example of a protestant who refused to use violent tactics to spread his pro-life message. However, he also did not condemn the bombing of abortion clinics but he did speak out against the murder of abortionists and made his followers swear an oath to non violence. He did agree with other types of contentious tactics to spread the pro-life message. He started out by waiting in the parking lot of an abortion clinic with his wife trying to convince women on their way to the clinic to change their minds and allow their child to live. Eventually, he became the head of peaceful pro-life organization and organized many successful sit-ins. Many of these sit-ins took the clinics by surprise and caused them to shut down for the day. He and his followers were repeatedly arrested but always released quickly because his tactics were fundamentally peaceful. He organized and huge series of sit-ins in
3.
I used The New York Times to find articles on the arrest of Joan Andrews after she destroyed some equipment in The Ladies Center clinic of
Image Source: http://www.prolife.org.au/nletters/15n1au.htm
6 comments:
I agree with Ruth that one of the main reasons that facilitated the alteration of the peaceful anti-abortion movement into a violent, radical one is the lack of anti-abortion leaders speaking out against the extremism. Without a voice of condemnation from more prominent pro-life activists, the radical fringe group did not feel compelled to halt their actions. To be silent, it seems, was to be favorable toward the violence. As far as the comparison between the Times and articles and the text, I found the relationship to be similar to that which Ruth found regarding her chosen event. The articles in general seemed to be one-sided and overly factual (but this makes sense, as it is a newspaper report), and this bias is almost uncomfortable to read after having read the Risen and Thomas accounts of the event. The authors of the book do take a more objective stance and leave any ambiguity surrounding the morality of the event up to the reader, whereas the Times and other newspapers, to be sure, tend to sway a story to fit the beliefs of the journalist, the editors, or a specific target audience.
Ruth, you bring up a good point in the first part of your blog. Although the bombing of abortion clincs was wrong, no anti-abortion leader could bring themselves to completely condemn the violence. After the violence began, the anti-abortion movement started to gain the publicity it so desperately needed and wanted in order to make progress. A quote stated in The Celluloid Closet can also be applied in this case: "Visibility at any cost."
The refusal of anti-abortion leaders to condemn the bombings and murders committed by fellow protesters definitely ruined public perception of the movement. The peaceful protests organized by Terry and O'Keefe never garnered the attention that civil rights protests did three decades earlier, so most of the public had no idea that the majority of anti-abortion protesters were nonviolent. The only things they heard about prominent figures in the movement was that they thought the bombings and murders were justified, although they were afraid to commit such acts themselves.
I do not think that the newspapers always presented a one-sided story. The articles I read concerning Paul Hill and his murder of Britton and Burnett presented the same facts about the incident as Risen and Thomas did, almost to the letter. The amount of bias in a newspaper article really seems to vary with each journalist.
I found your comments on the objectivity of the Wrath of Angels especially interesting because of the multiple effects that a more thorough examination of facts can have on the reader’s overall impression. In this case, more detail serves to provide a more balanced look at what happened that day at The Ladies Center clinic in Pensacola. In the case of Joan Andrew’s character, however, I found the availability of information regarding her background and behavior until that point to be persuasive against her. Her relationship with her mother, her mother’s devotion to religion, her traumatic encounter with a miscarried brother, and her secretive life of vandalism work towards a depiction that is, in my mind, emotionally damaged and mentally unstable. But based on the evidence provided by The New York Times article, Andrews appears to be no more than a fervently dedicated catholic woman whose pro-life beliefs take precedence over the law. The characterization within Wrath of Angels seems biased against the anti-abortion movement when really it is just an increase in the number of facts surrounding the incident. It works both ways.
True, one of the main reasons that the anti-abortion movement escalated to a radical, violent one was because there lacked opposition from the leaders of the movement, but had there existed opposition I'm not sure it would've really had any effect. In any type of movement there are always radicals that take it to a new level and cross the "line." If you look at the Pensacola bombings, the two young men acted alone. The bombings even within the anti-abortion movements brought about mixed reactions. I think the reason the movement escalated to the new level was because there was an overwhelming feeling that nothing was working. Many felt it was almost necessary to turn to violence as though the ends justified the means. If violence got results and nonviolence didn’t, than violence was the answer. It was as if violence achieved results that nonviolence would never have dreamed of in such a short period of time.
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