The placards are the product of Feminists for Life of America (FFLA), which is launching a campaign called the College Outreach Program.” “Students are always told to question the status quo,” says the group’s president, Serrin Foster. “Twenty-seven years after the Roe vs. Wade decision, abortion has become the status quo — one out of every five abortions is performed on a college woman.”

FFLA wants to change the status quo, and if enough people pay attention to their posters (eight in all, which can be seen and downloaded at www.feministsforlife.org.), they will. The images are eye-catching, straightforward and powerful: real people, women, girls and children, testifying to the human realities behind the euphemistic rhetoric of “choice.”

The faces tell the stories as much as the words do. There’s the high school or college-age girl who’s been through an abortion (pictured at left), headlined: “Been there. Done that. Hated it.” There’s the wide-eyed, innocent baby, accompanied by the straightforward question, “Is this the face of the enemy?” There’s the grown woman conceived in rape, looking you in the eye and asking: “Did I deserve the death penalty?”

Even if you’re not already pro-life, you can’t help but question abortion when you read these simple, compelling messages. And there’s plenty more where they came from: FFLA is promoting a whole host of subversive ideas, many of them embarrassing reminders of a history today’s feminists would just as soon forget.

For example, FFLA offers a poster of 19th-century founding feminist Susan B. Anthony expressing her pro-life views (sarcastic headline: “another anti-choice fanatic”). The group’s Web site is full of quotes from other early feminists who referred to abortion in terms like “child murder” and “a crying evil.”

To them, abortion was anything but an exercise of “women’s rights.” It was — in the words of Alice Paul, author of the original (1923) Equal Rights Amendment — “the ultimate exploitation of women,” for which men bore at least equal if not greater responsibility. (“Guilty? Yes,” said an article in Anthony’s periodical The Revolution:“No matter what the motive . . . the woman is awfully guilty who commits the deed. . . . But oh, thrice guilty is he who drove her to the desperation which impelled her to the crime!”)

FFLA also recalls the immediate pre-Roe years, when liberals diagnosed “unwanted children” as the cause of social ills and prescribed readily accessible abortion as a remedy. “Abortion rights advocates promised us a world of equality, reduced poverty,” an FFLA poster notes—“a world where every child would be wanted. Instead, child abuse has escalated, and rather than shared responsibility for children, even more of the burden has shifted to women.”

It makes you wonder, doesn’t it: Why, when no one is “forced” to bear “unwanted” children (some 30 million have been aborted since the practice was legalized), are problems like child abuse so much worse today? Early feminists could have answered that one, if they could have imagined an era like ours: Once men are freed and encouraged to have sex without responsibility, many of them are bound to jump at the chance. And once self-indulgence replaces family commitment, we’re bound to get more men who, following the grim logic of abortion, feel free to abandon or mistreat older children as well.

It says a lot about the decline of feminism that a group like FFLA is now an aberration. Women naturally hate abortion; it wars against their identity on the most fundamental levels (mothers, nurturers, even sexual partners). For that reason, if feminism really were what it claims to be—“the women’s movement”—you’d think most of its leaders would be pro-life. It’s something of a testament to the power of propaganda that, instead, groups like the National Organization for Women (NOW), which favors subsidized abortion on demand through all nine months of pregnancy, have long been treated as the spokeswomen for Womankind.

But truth has a way of surfacing in the long run, which is probably why NOW is fading, fewer and fewer women identify themselves as feminists, and more and more women (as well as men) tell pollsters they’re pro-life — especially high school and college students. NOW simply has little of relevance to say to them. A group like FFLA, on the other hand, has a great deal to say.

All things considered, FFLA’s College Outreach Program has tremendous potential—to save lives, to rescue women from lifetimes of regret, to help shape the convictions of a new pro-life generation. Susan B. Anthony would be proud.