Behind the mile-high fetus: My Justice For All training experience

By On October 15, 2012 · 2 Comments

If you’re familiar with this blog, you may remember a thing (or two) (or three) (or four) that might indicate OK4RJ’s official stance on Justice For All. Briefly: JFA is a  traveling festival of assholes who regularly camp out at public universities near their homebase in Wichita, Kansas with 15-foot posters of aborted fetuses.  And they’re coming back to OU this Tuesday and Wednesday.  Carly emailed them for their schedule and found out where the training was being held. The next logical step for me was making up a fake name, using the fake name to email the coordinator, and showing up at Trinity Baptist Church last Saturday morning to see what I could see.  Easy.  At least once I got past shaking hands with the first guy I saw (“John!”) and saying, “Jessie!” when the nametag stickered to my conservative button-up said HELLO MY NAME IS LESLIE.

“No, ma’am, sometimes they call me Sarah and sometimes they call me Mary, but I’m definitely not that old rascal Huckleberry Finn in a dress.  Hit that rat with a piece of lead?  No probz!”

JFA has two goals.  One is to get sinning murderer sluts to stop murdering babies, duh.  The other is to sell Christianity.  These goals often conflict, because good salesmen usually don’t start off their pitch with you-hell-hell-murder-genocide-slut-hell.  So a big part of the training is about keeping your real feelings about people who have abortions on the inside.

The volunteers are encouraged to pretend to be normal students who just happen to strike up a conversation while looking at The Exhibit with you. Every other tactic stems from this first tactic of appearing unthreatening. Trainees learn how to take advantage of the fact that people, especially women, will let you continue an uncomfortably personal conversation for a long time rather than appear rude by ending it. You practice asking a series of scripted questions designed to suss out how passersby feel about abortion, and then you Trot Out The Toddler (and they will twist ANY justification for abortion around until it is somehow related to killing a toddler).

Near the end of the training, they showed us a video of a student confronting a JFA volunteer from a few years ago. The student said she objected to the whole idea of trying to make women who have abortions feel guilty because her reason for having an abortion was REALLY good: rape, resulting in pregnancy at the age of 13.  It was abominable to make someone feel guilty who was clearly the victim of the situation, she said, who was trying to protect her own life, and who was herself a child at the time of the abortion. The volunteer in the video tried to use the script anyway, and she blew up at him.  They stopped the video.  What had the volunteer done wrong?

In the preceding hours I had started to retreat into myself, to stop participating, to take bathroom breaks when it was time to read scripts. Now, I raised my hand, the first and only time in the large group parts of the training that I was honest.  ”Sometimes the right thing to do is just to apologize for wasting their time and let them go,” I answered.  I wanted to answer: It was always wrong to engage with her this way, ever, at all. But I was getting nods from the group.  Had I said the right thing?
“Right,” said the trainer.  ”But do you let them go without steering them toward Jesus?  You can always give them your number, or ask if it would help to talk to a crisis pregnancy center counselor or a post-abortion counselor, or invite them to church with you.”  For good measure, they trotted out the toddler: what if someone wanted to kill a toddler who had been conceived in rape?
Later, I was waiting in the windy parking lot to be picked up when the JFA trainer who had worked with my small group ran out to catch me.  ”Leslie,” she said.  ”I really hope you come to volunteer at the Exhibit.  I think you in particular will do a really good job.”
I thanked her and gave her my fake email address.  That was the last dialogue I had to do as Leslie.   I have no intention of opening it up with them again.  If they get in your business on Tuesday and Wednesday, readers, you blow those kazoos hard into their faces, and you laugh at them, and you remember who you are.

 

Jessie has been cussing out the JFA take-home manuals all week.  This article was 2500+ words and a lot more cusses before Pearl fixed it, thanks Pearl.
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  • http://www.facebook.com/mitzi.turpin Mitzi McGuire Turpin

    You show the weakness of your character as well as the weakness of your argument by advising your followers to “blow those kazoos hard into their faces”.  There is a reason that pro-life people “trot out the toddler” as you put it:  because killing a preborn baby is the same as killing any other human being, whether she is a toddler, teenager, or adult.  We are trying to get you to see the analogy; that we are all human beings, and as such, it is wrong for one human being to kill another human being, regardless of his or her location.  We know you do not recognize the preborn as human; however, that is an arbitrary stand you have taken.  Even a cursory glance at fetal development photos will show you that the preborn is indeed human.  I believe the tide is turning in America towards life, and you must have felt it too, or else you would not have to resort to sneaking in to a JFA training session to see what “the other side” is up to. 

    • http://twitter.com/jmstamand Jessie St. Amand

      Thank you for your comment.  I think you are right that both pro-life and abolitionist movements are most interested in pushing the rhetoric of humanity when they are talking to the faces of people who might have abortions.  I do think they have some different rhetoric when they’re talking among themselves, ABOUT people who might have abortions.  And that was my interest in attending this training.