Pro-choice blogger Katie Klabusich, a former Chicago area abortion clinic escort, recently wrote a post entitled, “Picketers vs. Patients.”
In the post she parrots the worn out liberal talking point that pro-life sidewalk counselors and prayer partners are actually “killing women” by scaring them so badly they are forced into the arms of the likes of convicted murderer and abortionist Kermit Gosnell.
This is, of course, patently false. Most women drive or walk right by sidewalk counselors without a care in the world.
After all, as much as Klabusich wants to make it sound like a horrible gauntlet, we’re talking about grandmas with rosaries offering free help here, not shouting mobs with pitchforks.
Are Abortion Images “Photoshopped”?
But something else in the post caught my attention, and that was the other worn out liberal talking point Katie parroted: the idea that the graphic images of the victims of abortion that pro-lifers use are “photoshopped”.
Now, I have personally shaken the hands of the people who took many of the abortion photos in wide circulation, and as someone who edits photos professionally I’m pretty comfortable saying that nothing about the photos looks inaccurate or touched up.
But I wanted to know why Katie thought they were photoshopped, so I had a friend ask her in the comments on her blog.
Blogger’s Response Betrays Ignorance of Basic Abortion Facts
Katie’s response betrayed a shocking level of ignorance of fetal development and US abortion law. Here’s her reply:
For an activist who’s been on television talking about the issue, I’m surprised she typed some of these nonsense words. She says, “at the legal gestation point . . .” Whoa, whoa, whoa. Let’s hold it right there.
What’s a “legal gestation point”? I can only assume she means the age through which it’s legal to perform abortions, though that’s not what the words she wrote mean. But the fact is that in the US, there is no point in pregnancy at which abortion is illegal.
Even in states with limitations on age there is nearly always a “mental health exception” that allows for an abortion to be performed for pretty much any reason at all up to the second the child is delivered.
But that’s neither here nor there, because embryos have facial features remarkably early! Check out this little guy to the left. Six weeks old, around the time when the majority of abortions are performed and already sporting a nose, eyes, cheeks, a mouth, all those features of a human face.
On the Credentials page of her website, Klabusich claims, “I can intelligently and articulately discuss any issue, but am most often called on for the intersection of women’s rights and politics.” And yet she’s making rookie mistakes about fetal development.
If you don’t know when a baby grows a face, you might not be the best qualified person to decide whether or not our photos are doctored, much less whether we should be allowed to kill the babies depicted in them!
Pro-Life Is All About the Facts
The signs we use at the League, and those used by most groups who use or print these signs, are verified by doctors as being medically accurate. Their age, where they were found and any other details we have are printed right on the signs.
As common as this photoshopping claim is, I’m shocked that it still pops up. Our message is clear and we welcome fact checking. Anyone who likes can search the internet for an image of an unborn child of the gestational age of the babies on our signs and see if they match up.
The pro-life side deals in facts, photos, and scientific verification. Abortion supporters deal, of necessity, in generalities and obfuscation because their whole goal is to convince people that what is obviously and clearly a human being is not a human being.
All their common rhetorical terms—blob of tissue, right to choose, terminate the pregnancy, products of conception—seek to cloud the issue. The whole game is one of misdirection.
Abortion Photos Demand a Response
So why do they even bother to claim the photos are doctored? Because the photos demand a response. People instinctively know when they see these photos that they depict something terrible. If our pictures are accurate, millions of Americans are complicit in the guilt.
Women who procured abortions, boyfriends and husbands that paid for them, fathers who drove their daughters to the abortion appointment, friends who told them it was OK or simply said nothing, even pro-life people who haven’t done what they can to fight abortion—all of us bear some of the blame.
CLICK LIKE IF YOU’RE PRO-LIFE!
Confronted with that reality, people either need to do something to stop the evil of abortion, or they need to make the guilt go away. So Klabusich and others like her take the ostrich approach and bury their head in the sand, hoping that if they insist that abortion can’t be as bad as the pictures make it look, it won’t be.
Keep Calm and Know Your Facts
Next time you hear the claim that the pictures are photoshopped, don’t get mad or defensive. They’re not attacking you, they’re looking for a way to deal with the way the pictures make them feel.
Ask them for proof of their assertion and point them to the facts. Learn more on our Questions and Answers page and keep a copy of the League’s Sharing the Pro-Life Message handbook with you so you’ve got your fetal development photos and facts at the ready.
It’s only through this kind of calm, reasoned response that we’ll win a hearing with a world that would give anything for us to be wrong about abortion.
LifeNews Note: Matt Yonke writes for the Pro-Life Action League.
