IRISH CENTRE FOR BIO-ETHICAL REFORM PRESS RELEASE
 
DATE: Tuesday 21st February 2017
 
 
For Immediate Release:
 
New Anti-Abortion Group To Display Graphic Abortion Imagery To Counter Illegal Abortion Bus in Ireland
 
The Irish Centre for Bio-Ethical Reform will launch its #ExposingDeception tour to counter the bus ROSA plans on using to target colleges and city centres across Ireland while handing out illegal abortion drugs to vulnerable young women.
 
Aisling Hubert, a spokesperson for ICBR said, “ICBR intends on following the ROSA abortion bus to every community they visit to ensure that vulnerable women are told the whole truth about the dangers of abortion. We will expose the graphic reality of abortion using large banners that show the broken bodies of pre-born children dismembered through abortion. ROSA campaigners are not medical doctors or health experts, they are anarchists that only care about one thing - killing pre-born babies, and they are willing to put the health and wellbeing of young women at risk to achieve their agenda.”
 
Countless pregnant women have told volunteers in the countries where CBR operates that they have changed their minds about “pregnancy termination” when shown the inexpressible evil of abortion.  Aisling reports that “many post-abortive women have told us they would never have aborted had someone shown them that truth before instead of after they aborted.”
 
Jean-Simonis Engela, director of the new organization explained, “Abortion can only be properly understood once it is seen. If we find abortion photos so distressing, why would we tolerate abortion practice in Ireland. In other words if showing this is way to awful, then why would we make it lawful. If it’s too horrifying to visualise, then it’s too depraved to legalise.”
 
In relation to ROSA campaigners drawing their inspiration from civil rights leader Rosa Parks, Jean-Simonis says that “the founders of ROSA have deceived themselves into believing they are similar to civil rights hero Rosa Parks, who stood for total equality for all people, when what they are seeking to do is eradicate the equality of vulnerable pre-born children. Rosa Parks fought to expose injustice, at ICBR we seek to do the same. We hope the authorities will uphold the law, and ensure the lives of pre-born and born Irish citizens are protected throughout the course of this outrageous event.”
 
In February 2013 Salon carried an online article entitled ‘Rosa Parks: “I had been pushed as far as I could stand” which details the events surrounding Rosa Parks’ famed defiance of segregation that sparked the Montgomery, Alabama, bus boycott and further galvanized the civil rights movement:
 
Years later, Parks clarified what motivated her stand, reframing the discussion away from its narrow idea of a seat next to a white person to actual goal of equal treatment and full human dignity... Her aim was to “discontinue all forms of oppression against all those who are weak and oppressed.”
 
As PBS notes, Parks said she was thinking of Till at that moment. “I thought of Emmett Till, and I just couldn’t go back”. Emmett Till of course was the 14-year-old black boy who 3 months prior to Ms Parks courageous refusal to give up her seat on that bus was brutally murdered after he purportedly whistled at a white woman. He was visciously beaten and murdered before being dumped in the Tallahatchie River.  A History.com article on the death of Emmett Till continues the story:
 
Three days later, his corpse was recovered but was so disfigured that Mose Wright could only identify it by an initialed ring. Authorities wanted to bury the body quickly, but Till’s mother, Mamie Bradley, requested it be sent back to Chicago. After seeing the mutilated remains, she decided to have an open-casket funeral so that all the world could see what racist murderers had done to her only son. Jet, an African American weekly magazine, published a photo of Emmett’s corpse, and soon the mainstream media picked up on the story.
 
The sight of Emmett’s broken body gave Rosa Parks the desire “... to be treated as a human being with dignity not only for myself, but all those who are being mistreated.”
 
ICBR recognizes that social reform is always about the pictures, whether in the context of civil rights or child labour or genocide or abortion. The mainstream media won’t show these images, in fact RTE News were happy enough to show the faces of our volunteers standing outside the Citizens Assembly but blurred the images. No one wants to see sickening pictures but until the public is forced to look, the sickening violence can’t be stopped. The history of social reform is the history of shocking images.
 
That is why ICBR volunteers will be holding up our shocking images of abortions victims outside ROSA’s abortion pill bus at its scheduled stops across the cities and universities of Ireland. By standing opposite the bus we are holding up a mirror to what is happening inside their bus. These displays will consist of medical images of pre-born children aborted in the first trimester. The same age of the babies ROSA plan to kill by luring pregnant mothers to step onto their bus. The  banners have brief, content-neutral, identifying captions. They are non-judgemental and non-polemical and offer no negative commentary concerning abortion, or the people who choose abortion, or the people who perform abortion. The are simply the visual facts.
 
No doubt the abortion lobby and their journalist pawns will want to paint this event as pro-lifers filming women going into the abortion bus; something we don't do. But here, as everywhere else CBR operates, they rarely let the facts get in the way of their story. Our sister affiliate in the UK (Abort67) often have these allegations leveled against them without any evidence. The allegation is that we are deliberately filming women using abortion services. This is nonsense. Where is the evidence of us broadcasting women entering or leaving abortion clinics? Further, ICBR uses body cameras to protect our volunteers from false allegations of the sort the abortion industry and it’s allies maliciously level at us, just as the Metropolitan Police in the UK use body cameras for the same protection:
 
“In 2016, the Metropolitan Police will introduce the world's biggest single roll-out of 22,000 body-worn cameras. By the end of the year, the majority of front-line police officers across the country will have access to one.”
 
“The largest pilot study by the Metropolitan police – which led to its £3.5m investment in the cameras – set out to show that malicious complaints against police would fall, oppressive behaviour by police – particularly on stops and search – would decline, and evidence gathering would improve. The findings of the report were mostly inconclusive, though malicious complaints against police were down. ‘Where officers were wearing cameras, there was a 33 per cent reduction in allegations against them,’ said Nerys Thomas, head of research at the College of Policing.”
 
In addition An Garda Siochana closely monitor what our volunteers are doing at our own invitation and if they saw the alleged behaviour occurring, they would not hesitate to prosecute us.
 
ICBR’s travel itinerary will mirror that of ROSA’s and is listed below. The three day tour will finish with another education initiative outside Dáil Éireann on the Wednesday evening, International Women’s Day to highlight the evil of sex selective abortions. Preborn baby girls are those most at risk of discrimination and violence and often the most underrepresented. We hope that by showing the violence being visited upon these girls globally other women will be moved, as Rosa Parks was, to take a stand not only for themselves but for all those who are being mistreated.

 
The planned route is as follows:
Monday 6 March
University College Dublin 08.30
Waterford IT 12.30
Cork City 17.00
 
Tuesday 7 March
University College Cork 09.00
Limerick City 12.30
Galway City 17.00
 
Wednesday 8 March
NUI Galway 09.00
NUI Maynooth 12.30
Dublin City 14.00
Dáil Éireann 17.00
 
 
 
The Irish Centre for Bio-Ethical Reform (ICBR) is a non-profit public policy and advocacy group that promotes social reform with regard to prenatal and reproductive justice and the right to life for the unborn through education and the development of innovative educational programs. ICBR has connected to pro-life groups in the US and the UK to challenge the campaign for the legalisation of abortion in Ireland. For more information please contact info@icbr.ie or visit www.irishCBR.info