Pro-choice author, on pictures of babies in the womb:
“Many women feel deprived by the fact that such images were not in circulation at the time when they aborted, others find that fact to be a source of relief.”
Eva Pattis Zoja Abortion: Loss and Renewalin the Search for Identity (London: Routledge, 1997) 72-73
“The entire pro-life movement has made substantial gains in humanizing a fetus at every stage of pregnancy and helping to establish personal rights for the unborn. Enlarged pictures of aborted fetuses and other graphic illustrations are commonly displayed at protests and may help contribute to a changing, more humanized, conceptualization of a fetus and in turn help sway public approval against the permissibility of using elective abortion services to resolve unwanted pregnancies.”
Alesha E Doan Opposition & Intimidation: The Abortion Wars and Strategiesof Political Harassment (Ann Arbor, Michigan: University Of Michigan Press, 2010) 161 She is referring to pictures like this one ,the arm and hand of a baby aborted at 9 weeks
Pro-choice politicians in Virginia were up in arms after Republican delegate Richard Black mailed models of unborn babies like the one below to them. A paper was included in the mailing that said “This is the size and shape of an actual first-trimester baby. Abortionists kill most babies at this stage of development.” According to the article in The Virginian – Pilot:
Senate Minority Leader Richard Saslaw of Fairfax County said [it] was one of the most inappropriate things he has seen in his 23 years in the Senate.
“Quite frankly, the people who saw this were pretty repulsed by it,” he said.
It’s not surprising that pro-choice politicians, whose decisions condemned thousands of unborn babies to a violent death every year, were “repulsed” at seeing a depiction of an unborn baby. Another lawmaker, Sen. Leslie Byrne, D-Fairfax County, said:
“It shocked me …It hurts the decorum of the General Assembly”
Actually, I was unable to determine which fetal model was distributed. It may have been the one above, or it may have been a slightly different one. But the article makes it clear that pro-choicers are horrified when confronted with the reality that they support killing babies. You can see more fetal models or purchase them here.
From a publication of the Religious Coalition for Abortion Rights, on pictures of aborted babies:
You’ve probably seen the garish brochures that anti-choice organizations hand out. The pictures in those brochures are designed to shock you and they do! They are designed to keep you from thinking seriously about the real issue. Sadly, they often do. THE REAL ISSUE IS FREEDOM!
‘Religious’ Coalition for Abortion Rights (RCAR) brochure entitled “RCAR has no pictures in this brochure. You can’t take a picture of freedom.”
The pro-choice group is attempting to dodge the issue. Pictures of aborted babies, like the one below, show the humanity of the unborn child.
Pro-choice groups and individuals often try to discredit the pictures that pro-lifers show of mutilated children who were aborted. Naomi Wolf, a pro-choice feminist, admits that the pictures are real and takes other feminists to task for trying to discredit them:
“To many pro-choice advocates, the imagery is revolting propaganda. There is a sense among us, let us be frank, that the gruesomeness of the imagery belongs to the pro-lifers… that it represents the violence of imaginations that would, given half a chance, turn our world into a scary, repressive place. “People like us” see such material as the pornography of the pro-life movement. But feminism at its best is based on what is simply true…. While images of violent fetal death work magnificently for pro-lifers as political polemic, the pictures are not polemical in themselves: they are biological facts. We know this.”
Naomi Wolf, “Our Bodies, Our Souls,” The New Republic, October 16, 1995
She is referring to pictures like the one below, which shows part of the remains a seven-week-old aborted child. These pictures are difficult to look at, but of one many people over to the pro-life movement. And even pro-choice activists to of seen them and dismiss them cannot deny their effectiveness.
“Some abortion advocates refuse to participate in debates with pro-life representatives unless the pro-life side is prohibited from showing any pictures either of fetal development or the results of abortions.”
Camille S Williams “Feminism and Imaging the Unborn” in Brad Stetson, editor The Silent Subject: Reflections on the Unborn in American Culture (Westport, Connecticut: Praeger, 1996) 69
“When a pro-life candidate ran television ads showing aborted babies, people were outraged. A CBS Evening News reporter declared the abortion debate had reached a “new low in tastelessness.” Strangely, there was no outrage that babies were being killed… only that someone had the audacity to show they were being killed.”
Randy Alcorn Why Pro-Life? Caring for the Unborn and Their Mothers (Hendrickson Publishers, 2011)
People are often enraged when encountered with the horror of abortion. This has led some pro-lifers to feel that pages of aborted babies should not be shown to the public. They worry that this will make people more entrenched into their positions because they cannot process the horror of what they are seeing and instead take their anger out on the messenger. However, people are often swayed by the pictures when they see them on the Internet. Read some testimonies here.
From an interview with pro-life activist Joe Scheidler:
Q: When you debate leaders on the proabortion side, and you show them these pictures of what are clearly dead, and mutilated corpses of unborn children, how do they respond?
A: They say, “You have broken the rules. We’re not supposed to show pictures.” They say that we paint these pictures, or that it was really a baby that was killed and some other way. They’ll try anything when confronted with it to try to divert attention from it. If you get on a television talk show, they will not let you use the pictures, but I always have them lying there are in a folder nearby to keep them nervous.”
David Kuperlian and Mark Masters “Pro-Choice 1990: Skeletons in the Closet” New Dimensions, 1990