BIG SPRING, TEXAS — Mark Lee Dickson squeezed a plastic toy fetus in his right hand as he drove down the highway. Small and soft, it resembled a fetus in its 12th week of development, about the size of a fat baby carrot. Two more of them sat in Dickson’s center console. The 34-year-old pastor carried them around as props.
“My thought was when I first saw one was, it’s a baby!” Dickson said. “That’s how most people react. No one has ever taught them this is what a child looks like at this stage.”
Dickson, who wore a backwards baseball cap over his shaggy hair, referred to the toys as anatomically correct. (An OB-GYN I consulted said they were oversimplified.) It was late January, and Dickson was on his way to Big Spring in west Texas, population 28,000, where the city council was about to vote on an ordinance to ban abortion.
