We Used to Mail out Anti-Abortion Propaganda.

There were at least two times at church that we were recruited to mail anti-abortion propaganda to companies that supposedly supported abortion.

Now, of course, there were so many things wrong with this, not the least of which was that we were doing this as part of an all-male church group. As if the world needed more men to make judgments about what women should and should not do.

The mailings were primarily testimonials from women who had had horribly botched abortions, or from women who regretted having their abortions. I must have folded hundreds of sheets of paper and stuffed hundreds of envelopes, but I never really closely read the contents on the paper. The only part I remember to this day was some woman who said that the doctor who was administering the abortion told her she could not move without tearing her cervix. It was (supposedly) a direct quotation from her, and it was in bold. I probably only remember that part because it was about where I would make the 1/3-page fold.

It was never stated how these companies we targeted “supported” abortion (Did they make corporate donations to Planned Parenthood? Did their CEO articulate personal pro-choice views? Did they recently begin covering birth control under their employee health insurance plan? Did they provide a limo service for women heading to/from the clinics?), but we didn’t think to ask such questions. Hell, who even were the companies we were contacting, anyway?

Our incentives for participating in this task are difficult to locate. We were promised free pizza and soda for lunch, but that by itself would not have been enough to motivate me if it were something I hated doing. That said, the food incentive was certainly non-trivial. I think another incentive was the promise of getting to spend time with friends from this church group. Spending four hours of a Sunday afternoon doing repetitive tasks can be enjoyable when you’re in good company. And I think there was a third incentive which was much more complicated. I think we all had some twisted idea that by participating in this effort, we would be able to change corporate altruism in a way that we had been brainwashed into thinking was moral. We were all good Christian boys who believed all the right things—including that abortion was a sin and needed to be stopped. This was a non-violent, “loving” way to do this.

I think I actually believed that my efforts would make a dent in the abortion rate. I had this silly notion that by doing this task, I was educating these “bad” companies. I thought that the readers of these letters would never have heard this perspective before, the perspective of women who wished they hadn’t gotten the procedure and statistics about failed abortions. How brainwashed these poor companies had been! Meanwhile, I’m sending off papers that I hadn’t even thoroughly read but fully expected other people to read.

The irony is so salient here.

I do wonder what happened to all those mailings. Did anyone read them, or were they immediately thrown out with the junk mail? And if they were read, who read them—the CEOs, the executive assistants, the receptionists, the interns? What were the readers’ reactions? Did they forward the mailings to anyone? Was anyone’s mind changed?

I know the answer to the last question. No.