The best of ProLifeCon - First three presentations

1. Intro by Jill Stanek: Notes that three of the "Top Ten Enemies" of the pro-abortion Left are speaking at ProLifeCon. I'll include the entire enemies list, bolding those speaking at ProLife Con:

10. Jill Stanek
9. Father Frank Pavone
8. Jay Sekulow
7. John Boehner
6. Dr. Charmaine Yoest
5. Marjorie Dannenfelsor
4. Lila Rose
3. Crisis Pregnancy Centers
2. Alveda King
1. Abby Johnson

Without further ado, Speaker #1, and the person the pro-abortion Left currently fears most: Abby Johnson.

Abby's presentation surprised me. She didn't reiterate her story. She launched straight into what it is she has to offer more than perhaps anybody else: how to use abortion-advocates' strategies to life-affirming ends.

And first of all, she chided us to go to abortion-advocacy web site to learn what they're doing and what they're using.

Her first -- brilliant -- suggestion is to download their own informed consent forms. (Which the patients, Abby assured us, "never read.")

Whatever for?

To counsel women considering abortion.

"Their words are so effective against them. And then it's not us, it's not the crazy prolifers, saying, 'Oh look, you could die from abortion.' This is out of Planned Parenthood's own mouth."

She encourages all of us to do this -- to find examples of abortion advocates hanging themselves with their own words, and tweeting them so they can go viral.

She urges us to be diligent, do research, and not just wait for things to happen.

When she opened the floor for questions, one man asked what she thought of the Providential timing of her book, coming out right before a floor debate about defunding Planned Parenthood.

Another question was about pressure within Planned Parenthood to meet abortion quotas. Abby described contraceptive services as a loss leader to generate "foot traffic" -- women who are accustomed to coming in the door, who trust you, and then who will follow the path of least resistance and abort. This is similar to what Carol Everett described, about how her clinics used in-school sex ed to inform kids they could get confidential contraceptives in order to put the girls on low-dose pills with a high failure rate, so as to generate 3 to 5 abortions per teen before she finished school.

"Their mission on paper doesn't match their mission in reality."

How do they study us? They're on the listservs. They read our blogs. They subscribe to our tweets and FaceBook pages. They send people to infiltrate conferences.

Speaker #2 - Lila Rose:

She encouraged us to create enough online buzz to break into the mainstream media. She spoke of the power of visual media. She spoke of when she released her first undercover video, and it went viral, and she got a cease and desist letter from Planned Parenthood. She thought, "They're afraid." Of the truth. In particular, truth they can't censor. (Which is, no doubt, why YouTube is getting very censorship happy lately.)

In response to a comment about her method going viral, she encouraged us to become "citizen journalists."

A woman from CareNet told Lila that pregnancy centers send infiltrators into abortion facilities across the country, and asked if there is training. Lila described the Rosa Acuna project, showing that what abortion centers claim to do is the opposite of what they claim. They're giving lies, not truth.

Next came a panel on taking the prolife message to urban audiences online. The speakers were Dean Nelson, VP of Underserved Outreach for CareNet (also Vice Chair of their Frederick Douglas Foundation) and Ryan Bomberger of the Radiance Foundation.

Dean said that when going into minority areas, they want to know, "What do prolifers have to do with us?" He stressed the importance of getting prolife centers into urban areas and framing the message for abortion-vulnerable minority women. Studies have shown, he said, that Black individuals are 30% more likely to believe a message if it comes from another Black individual. He also noted that though Blacks are more prolife than whites, they're shocked to learn how much higher the abortion rate is among Blacks than among whites.

He turned the mic over to Ryan, who started with the message, "Design can powerfully communicate." He spoke of the launching of Too Many Aborted, Sally's Lambs, and the Endangered Species campaign.

He showed a gorgeous video: Abortion kills our future. He addressed how PP is "predicated upon the false belief" that unintended = unwanted = unloved. He showed a picture of his family -- three "home grown" kids and ten adopted -- and notes that "this handsome kid in the middle" (him) was born as a result of rape. So he's putting forth a counter message -- "The Possibility Quotient." He shared the words of Margaret Sanger -- in her own voice, from an interview. Pretty damning stuff. He encourages us to prove her wrong by blogging stories of those who defied expectations.

The first question was from a guy from CatholicVote.org -- who mentioned their "Imagine the Potential" ad -- and asked how white activists can bring up these racial issues sensitively. (A good question -- since I had a prof in college who insisted that the only reason conservatives opposed aborting Black babies is because it's more fun to wait until they grow up and rape a white woman so you can execute him. And my Black classmates just dutifully took notes while I marveled that they'd just let a white man presume that a Black child is a menace to society by his very nature, and thus should be killed in-utero.) Dean thought that this is a topic best discussed inside the Black community.

Another question was about the access abortion-vulnerable women would have to the online community. Dean indicated that research says the digital divide is gone.