Category: Pro-Choicers on Abortion Pictures

From author Gene Burns:

“Even those who do not accept that babies are killed during abortions know that, politically, graphic images of fetuses that bring to mind babies are the Achilles’ heel of attempts to liberalize abortion laws. To the extent that there is discomfort with abortion among the general population, concerns about the relationship of abortion to babies is clearly the reason.”

Gene Burns The Moral Veto: Framing Contraception, Abortion, and Cultural Pluralism in the United States (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005) 24

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A pro-abortion writer tries to explain why pictures of aborted babies generate so much sympathy for preborn babies:

“The story and reasons of the aborting women unknown, the fetus found in a plastic bag in a dumpster is seen to be as alone and abandoned as a half- grown Christmas puppy.”

Leslie Cannold The Abortion Myth (Middletown, Connecticut: Wesleyan University Press, 1998) 36

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Pro-Abortion author Judith Orr  writes:

“The use of new technology to view a developing embryo and foetus has become a vital tool for the antiabortion lobby – and not just in pickets outside clinics, with their giant posters. For example, the antiabortion calls for mandatory viewing of ultrasound images of their pregnancy for women requesting abortion, and supposedly “4D” videos of foetus are used [sic] to build opposition to abortion.”

Judith Orr Abortion Wars: The Fight for Reproductive Rights (Bristol, UK: Policy Press, 2017) 91

Even pro-choice people acknowledge that pictures like the one below are powerful pro-life tools.

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Pro-choice activist Judith Arcana, who has performed abortions, gave the reasons why she thinks the pro-life movement has been so successful in the US. This is one of the reasons she mentioned:

“Third, there is science, the technology of pregnancy. People can now make fetuses live, keep them alive outside of a woman’s body, from far earlier in pregnancy than was ever imagined by us, thirty years ago.

Rapid changes in medical technology have changed pregnancy utterly.

We can now watch babies growing, virtually from the beginning of pregnancy, throughout their development; one result of this is that women relate to the fetus quite differently – primarily after the third or fourth month of course…

Judith Arcana ““Feminist politics and abortion in the US,”  Psychology and Reproductive Choice

Visited 9/2/2017

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Pro-abortion attorney Sarah Weddington, who successfully argued Roe vs. Wade before the Supreme Court, says in her book that the pro-choice movement had nothing powerful enough to counter the pictures of aborted babies that pro-life activists show:

“Pro-choice groups such as NARAL worried about the tactics of the opposition; according to one NARAL mailing, “Rational arguments have limited impact against the opposition’s emotional frenzy.

It is time to meet shock with shock.” But advocates of choice never came up with symbols as powerful as the opposition’s.”

Sarah Weddington A Question of Choice (New York: The Feminist Press, 2013 ed.) 192

She is really saying that the emotional impact of pictures of aborted babies is powerful and hard for pro-choicers to argue against.

Although pro-choicers claim they are using “rational arguments” all the rational-sounding, euphemistic words that pro-choicers use to deny the true nature of abortion are ineffective against the reality shown in the photos.

Pro-choicers have no visual aides as striking as what pro-lifers can show. They have no good visual rebuttal to the photos and can only accuse people who show them of engaging in an “emotional frenzy.”

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Pro-Choice feminist Kathleen McDonnell wrote in her book on abortion:

“… Developments in medical technology are radically changing the nature of the abortion debate. Our expanding knowledge of fetal physiology and psychology makes it more and more difficult to simply dismiss the fetus in the abortion discussion.

The fetus is literally becoming a “patient” while still in the womb, the recipient of surgery and other therapeutic techniques at gestational ages well before the cut off point for abortion.”

Kathleen McDonnell Not an Easy Choice: Re-Examining Abortion (Canada: Second Story Press, 2003) 24

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Kate Michelman, former president of NARAL Pro-Choice America, an organization dedicated to fighting laws against abortion:

“Technology has clearly helped to define how people think about a fetus as a full, breathing human being.”

Sarah Kliff “Remember Roe!” Newsweek April 16, 2010

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Pro-life writer William Brennan wrote:

“At a National Abortion Federation meeting in May 1982, Alfred Moran, Executive Vice President of Planned Parenthood of New York, warned his cohorts that “we are prepared to begin to recognize that technology and medical sciences and perceptions of fetal viability are radically changing in our society.”

He was particularly horrified by the consequences of the new life – enhancing fetal technology – “we begin to see the fetus as a patient, which tends to personalize it” – for jeopardizing the right to abort.

He even went so far as to rate technological changes designed to aid the unborn as “more powerful” than legislative attempts to outlaw abortion “because they are human personifications.”

William Brennan The Abortion Holocaust: Today’s Final Solution (St. Louis, Missouri, 1983) 181, cites

“Technological Advances to make Pro-Abortion Position Tougher, Planned Parenthood Official Tells National Abortion Federation” National Right to Life News October 14, 1982, P8

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A pro-lifer who infiltrated an abortion conference quoted Ann Furedi, head of the largest chain of abortion clinics in England. She is CEO of the British Pregnancy Advisory Service, which provides about one quarter of all British abortions and specializes in late-term abortion :

Having to contend with “all those Lennart Nilsson photos of a 17 week-old fetus sucking its thumb,” has made abortion activists like us “necessarily a little bit apologetic. It’s not surprising that a lot of young people are not enthusiastic about abortion. They’re not enthusiastic about killing unborn babies….

For far too long, said Furendi, the abortion movement has let religious anti-choice extremists dictate the agenda. But now the time is ripe to claim that “abortion is right.”……

“We need to claim the moral high ground. We cannot have equality if we are constantly victims of our own fertility. A woman is not just a vehicle for pregnancy. I respect human life but there are elements of human life that make us people…personal autonomy, decision-making…bodily integrity. It is morally reprehensible to deny this capacity for choice and decision making.”…

What’s more, [Furedi] went on, it hasn’t helped that “most women who come to our clinics are there because they are in personal need, not because they are pro-choice.”

“Undercover Reporter Infiltrates World Abortion Biz Conference” LifeNews OCT 29, 2012

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