The baby's head is gripped at the top by a pair of pliers, and blood is streaming down its face. The top is squashed, pinched, mashed in the pliers, making it look like a hideous upside-down mushroom. The head is disconnected from the body, which lay in a heap, tiny arms and legs tangled. Bloody tentacles trail from the baby's neck.

The image is at least 20 feet tall, on the median of one of the busiest streets in Boulder, Colorado. It is a poster of sorts, huge, gruesome, and absolutely impossible to ignore. Standing beside it, holding up the image, his hand tiny near the baby's severed head, is a placid young man with dark glasses, a small smile on his face.

Cars are not placid -- the street is on fire with people honking, yelling ("my kids are in the car!"), and telling him to take his "fucked-up shit off our streets." These weren't gunslinging protestors, but the infringement of the images implies a sense of personal violence. I sit in my car, remembering a timid confession of a friend of mine a year ago. She had a one-night stand, got pregnant, and couldn't find a clinic anywhere near our college town of Des Moines, IA. She drove six hours to Chicago, where the clinic told her she could have no friends or family members accompany her on the premises -- security was too big of an issue. So she walked past the protestors and into the clinic and went through the procedure by herself. She told me this with sad, empty eyes over coffee.

By the time I pull the car over at a corner gas station and cross the median to talk with the young man, I am covered in a light, sticky sweat. His skin is pale, in the way that glows green like it's only seen fluorescent lights, and his smile stays light and mocking as I talk with him.

"Walk with me," he says. "It's almost lunch, and people are getting threatening out here."

He tucks the poster awkwardly under his arm, his thin bicep lying directly on top of the spaghetti-like strands falling from the baby's neck. I ask him simple questions, his name, how long he's been doing this, what group he is affiliated with, and he smiles an oily smile and tells me he'd have to stay quiet and take me to the group leader. I find it funny that he regards me warily -- I imagine he sees my alternative clothes, my nose ring, and my reporter's notebook as a stamp of bitter liberalism. What he doesn't know is I'm remembering doing the exact same thing as he, a little under ten years ago.

A block away there is a group of teens, each holding a variation on this graphic poster. They all stand, their hands propping up images of dead fetuses, looking fresh-faced and well-dressed, talking about what they want to eat for lunch.

I am brought to Keith Mason, who serves as a facilitator for the group called "Survivors of the American Holocaust." He's been listening to stories of angry drivers. "Sure it infuriates them," he says with a smile. "A picture speaks a thousand words. It's a harsh thing, but it's the truth."

Survivors of the American Holocaust is an anti-abortion group for those born after 1972, the year Roe V. Wade was passed and abortion was legalized. The group sees legalized abortion as a genocide, a holocaust. They claim that abortion has claimed "1/3 of our peers."

"This is abortion, and this is wrong," says Sheryl Conrad, who got involved with the group through one of its summer camps. Conrad claims the group is not religiously based, but then falls silent for the prayer lead by Mason before lunch, in which he hopes that they can all "change some hearts this afternoon."

Apryl Moreno is a beautiful 18-year-old with flawless brown skin and tightly braided hair. She answers my questions in a breathless, beauty-pageant manner:

"Saving one baby's life makes it worth all the effort -- each life is so precious," she says.

Moreno says she's traveling across the nation to promote the message, and that it's not always easy. The group was put in jail in Washington D.C. for trespassing, and it's been banned from several clinics.

"We'll stand in front of clinics and try to give women information," Moreno continues, citing that she's caused many women to back out of the procedure. "It's so amazing; it just takes a lot of talking and convincing."

I notice a small pin on her shirt -- the tiny gold baby feet that are supposed to represent a baby's feet at like, six weeks. I had worn the same pin daily, loving it when people asked me what the feet stood for. "I am pro-life," I would say proudly, having not had sex or thought about rape or actually having a baby or the economic and emotional factors involved with deciding to keep a pregnancy.

And like these kids, I would stand on Saturdays in front of women's clinics, yelling at the young women going in, and walking back and forth for hours, showing my "It's a baby, not a choice" sign.

As with many of my strong, young ideas, it has worn down to nearly its complete opposite. I stood by a high school friend who was raped, had the child, and spent long, sad days at home with her baby, wishing she could go to college. I sat with my friend at coffee, and heard her recount her screams at the abortion clinic, and knew she couldn't have anyone with her.

The girls in front of me on the sidewalk are still talking, and telling me how after lunch they are going to go protest at a local women's clinic. Their voices grow feverish as they talk about their goals of converting women to the pro-life point of view.

I ask them what clinic they'll be protesting at, and they reply with a name of a clinic that I know has recently moved across town, but left its sign up to misguide the pro-life protestors.

"That place is still there, right?" one of them asks.

I nod. "You'll see the sign," I tell them, and they put up their severed baby head posters and run across the street to the gas station to eat microwaved burritos. Later they would stand in front of the empty building with their strong words and their larger-than-life images, and they would not notice that no women walked by or the lights were off. They would stay there all afternoon, blinded by the sound of their own voices, by the images of their own creation, and by their thoughts that they were truly saving lives.