Category: Pro-Choicers on Abortion Pictures

While most pro-choice activists deny that pictures of aborted babies are real, one pro-choice feminist admits that they are and speaks out against the hypocrisy of pro-choicers  who want to hide them:

“So what will it be: Wanted fetuses are charming, complex, REM-dreaming little beings whose profile on the sonogram looks just like Daddy, but unwanted ones are mere ‘uterine material’? How can we charge that it is vile and repulsive for pro-lifers to brandish vile and repulsive images if the images are real? To insist that the truth is in poor taste is the very height of hypocrisy. Besides, if these images are often the facts of the matter, and if we then claim that it is offensive for pro-choice women to be confronted by them, then we are making the judgment that women are too inherently weak to face a truth about which they have to make a grave decision. This view of women is unworthy of feminism.”

Naomi Wolf,  feminist author and advocate of legal abortion, in “Our Bodies, Our Souls”, The New Republic, 10/15/1995

A pro-choice author comments on The Silent Scream, an antiabortion movie that shows an unborn baby being aborted on ultrasound. Planned Parenthood pulled all the stops out to discredit this movie, because it swayed many people towards the pro-life cause.

While these facts may, as Planned Parenthood says, speak loudly, it’s unlikely that they say what the prochoice groups hope, since they put the fetus, even a televised facsimile, on center stage, precisely where prochoice groups don’t want it. Assume the film is wrong and the Planned Parenthood brochure is right. Assume that was a fetal yawn and not a scream. None of the experts contested that it was a fetal mouth, and that it was pan of a fetal head, attached to a fetal spine, and that it had arms andlegs, fingers and eyes.  ….

In fact, we need neither The Silent Scream nor a degree in fetal physiology to tell us what we already know: that abortion is the eradication of human life and should be avoided whenever possible. Should it be legal? Yes, since the alternatives are worse. Is it moral? Perhaps, depending on what’s at stake.

Jason Deparle, “Beyond the Legal Right; Why Liberals and Feminists Don’t like to Talk about the Morality of Abortion,” Washington Monthly Apr. 1989

Cynthia Gorney, pro-choice author:

“One of the dirty secrets of abortion is it’s really gruesome, but nobody would look at the pictures. With partial-birth, the right to life movement succeeded for the first time, forcing the country to really look at one awful abortion procedure.”

Cited in Larry Reibestein, “Arguing at a Fever Pitch,” Newsweek, January 26, 1998

Scott Klusendorf. The Case for Life: Equipping Christians to Engage the Culture. (Wheaton, Illinois: Crossway Books, 2009) 242