Many pro-lifers are against showing pictures of aborted babies. They say these pictures are too graphic, or too upsetting, or showing them is too unkind. They argue that they can traumatize people, such as post-abortive people and those who have suffered miscarriages.
Other pro-lifers say the pictures are a valuable pro-life tool and point to minds changed and babies saved by the photos.
In his 2017 book, ‘Seeing Is Believing: Why Our Culture Must Face the Victims of Abortion,” Jonathan Van Maren describes cases of people who were initially very angry and even abusive when shown graphic pictures, but later changed their minds about abortion.
For example, he tells the following story:
One girl who yelled and swore at us during one campus display came up to us a year later and revealed that when she found herself pregnant several months later, she couldn’t go through with having an abortion – even though she hated us for showing her the pictures, she couldn’t escape the truth those pictures conveyed.
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Her baby was saved as a result.(1)
There are other examples here.
Rather than weigh in with an opinion, I’m going to tell the story of how seeing a picture of an aborted baby back in high school affected the trajectory of my life.
My Own Experience
When I was about 10 years old, I overheard a discussion in my local church about abortion. One woman was saying that abortion should be illegal; another was agreeing, and they were talking about it as if it were a bad thing. But what was abortion?
I asked my mother that night. She told me, “Abortion is when a woman is going to have a baby and she goes to the doctor and he makes it so that she doesn’t have to have the baby.”
My mom is pro-choice, though she says she is “uncomfortable” with abortion “as birth control,” and also with late-term abortions. So this sanitized language was in character for her.
(My whole family, incidentally, is pro-choice. When I started writing for Live Action, my sister stopped talking to me entirely, and that silent estrangement lasted for years.
Things have since improved between us, but this is still a major point of conflict for us. I avoid talking about any of my pro-life work around my family in general, my sister in particular. They have never supported, or even understood, my feelings about abortion.
They would be far happier if I walked away from the pro-life movement entirely. I have never had any support from my family, not immediate, not extended. There are no pro-lifers among my aunts, uncles, or cousins.)
Back to the story. When I had this conversation with my mom, I had only just learned where babies came from in the first place.
I digested this information and came to the conclusion that there was absolutely nothing wrong with abortion.
As time went on, I never thought about the issue much. It didn’t come up much in church, even though I knew that, as a Catholic, I was supposed to be against abortion.
I recall getting in one conversation with a friend where I defended abortion, talking about how a woman should have a choice. But for the most part, I didn’t really think about the issue.
My sophomore year of high school, I started to commit very deeply to my Catholic faith. My parents had taken me to mass as a child, though neither was particularly religious.
As I grew more serious about my faith, I began to believe that abortion must be wrong. I took the teachings of the church seriously and modified my position slightly. Abortion was a bad thing, and perhaps, should ideally be illegal.
But I was no activist. I never felt moved to get involved with the issue. I never argued the pro-life position with my friends. At this point, I considered myself “pro-life”— but kept it to myself. As far as I was concerned, it was something like not eating meat on Fridays during Lent— a Catholic teaching. Applicable to me, perhaps, but not to others— something I was supposed to accept.
I never felt compelled to do anything against abortion or try to convince anyone it was wrong.
I never, ever, in a million years, thought I would be involved in the pro-life movement.
The Photo That Changed My Life
But as a committed Catholic, I spend a lot of time with other Catholics my age. One was strongly pro-life. She tried to convince me to go with her to the March for Life. It sounded fun, but I wasn’t sure about going.
One day, my friend showed me a postcard-sized piece of literature from Human Life International. The postcard was divided into two sections.
On one side, it had a picture of an 8-week-old unborn baby. You could clearly see the hands and feet of the child; you could even count fingers and toes. It was a beautiful picture, but it was the second picture that caught my attention — and changed my life forever.
This picture showed what a baby that age looks like after an abortion. The head was missing; the arms were flung out and clearly visible, still attached to the baby’s torn and crushed body. The little legs could be seen, battered and broken, at the bottom of the picture. I was horrified.
This was a baby. This was definitely a baby. That was what this was. And these babies, my friend was telling me, were being killed at a rate of over 4000 a day.
I couldn’t get my head around it. All those little children — killed. It was shocking. Disturbing. Horrifying.
In that moment, a pro-life activist was born.
I remember being in the local library, looking at more pictures of aborted babies. Silently, I went into the bathroom, and got down on my knees, to pray.
I asked God to use me, to give me opportunities to speak out against abortion and help preborn babies. I promised Him I would devote the rest of my life to fighting abortion. I prayed that I would always be strong and dedicated.
While I’m no longer a religious person, no longer a believer in any sort of God, I’ve always been true to that prayer. In that, I’ve never wavered.
My Pro-Life Work Over the Years
I’ve written well over a thousand pro-life articles. Before I began doing that, I set up a huge website, with pages reaching out to abortion-minded women. Before Google changed its policies about indexing sites to favor pro-abortion sources like Planned Parenthood (a good subject for another article), I got over 2000 visitors a day.
These were almost all pregnant people considering abortion. They all got to see my website, my appeal to them, fetal development facts and pictures, links to pregnancy resource centers, and pictures of aborted babies.
A few hours before I wrote the original version of this article, about ten years ago, a woman left a message on my website saying that she had been planning an abortion and changed her mind after seeing graphic abortion photos.
The next few paragraphs were written back then when my site was still getting a lot of traffic.
I have had a number of women come to my website and change their minds about abortions they were planning on having. These women Googled information about abortion or abortion clinics and got my site.
Seeing the pictures of what abortion would do to their children, they realized they couldn’t go through with it.
I also have had pro-life conversions. There is a survey on my site on a page that has a video of abortion procedures. The survey asks what the viewer’s feelings on abortion are, whether or not it should be legal, and whether their opinions were changed by the video.
A lot of people who come to my site are already pro-life. Some are pro-choice, and stay pro-choice.
I don’t understand how someone can see pictures of aborted babies and stay pro-choice, but I can’t judge them.
They may be carrying pain in their hearts from an abortion they or their partner had; they may not be able to admit the truth to themselves or anyone else. Or their hearts could just be hardened to the point where they don’t care. I don’t know.
But it seems like every week, 3 or 4 people who respond to the survey say that they have converted from pro-choice to pro-life on the spot after seeing the video.
In other cases, they stay pro-choice, but choose the option that says “it hasn’t changed my stand, but I view abortion differently now.” I am hoping that some of those people, even though they still support legal abortion, will think twice before having one.
I like to think that even someone who still feels that abortion should be legal, as long as they know the reality of abortion, can be an asset to the pro-life movement if they are willing to talk to their loved ones about how bad abortion is.
It’s a process — people don’t always convert on the spot, but even with the pro-choice ones, I hope I’ve planted a seed.
All Because of a Picture
Like I said, I’ve written over a thousand articles about abortion. These articles have made it into amicus briefs in three different Supreme Court cases.
They’ve been quoted in publications like the Wall Street Journal. They’ve been referenced in debates before Congress. They have been shared by top influencers. They have been reprinted and/or reposted many thousands of times.
They have reached many hundreds of thousands of people or more.
For over eight years, 2000 abortion-minded people a day saw my site. About thirty of them said in the comments they changed their minds and decided to have their babies. Over the years, about forty other women have decided to have their babies after talking to me.
And those are just the ones I know about.
The vast majority came, looked, and never contacted me personally.
If just 1% of the pregnant people who came to my site considering abortion chose life based on what I wrote and the facts and pictures I shared, that would be 20 babies saved per day. For eight years.
If 10% did, that would be 200 a day.
Not only that, but I could see, through my analytics, that every day, dozens of visitors left my site and went directly to pregnancy resource center directories, or, from their computer, called a pregnancy resource center hotline. Every day, three or four visitors went to the abortion pill reversal site.
Again, for eight years.
Some may have just been curious. Some, I want to believe, went looking for help.
So Should We Show Pictures?
I wouldn’t say that the tactic of showing abortion pictures is right in every situation or with every audience.
But if you are one of those people who think they never should be shown, please consider this.
Everything I have ever done— every article, my website, my talks with people considering abortion, and any other pro-life work— is because I saw that picture of the aborted baby.
Had I not seen it, I never would have done any of it. I never would have become truly pro-life.
None of those babies would have been saved. None of those articles would have been written. None of those people would have been reached with the pro-life message. None of that would have ever happened if not for that picture. If not for me seeing it that day.
When my friend showed me that picture, she changed my life forever. If she had never shown it to me, and if I had never seen an abortion picture in any other context, I never would have done anything at all to help preborn babies or their mothers. None of what I built would exist.
I am pro-life because I saw that picture. I’ve done everything I’ve ever done because someone showed me it.
Does that mean you, personally, should show pictures of aborted babies to your friends and family, or publicly? I don’t know. I can’t answer that. But please consider what I said.
Footnotes
1. Jonathan Van Maren Seeing Is Believing: Why Our Culture Must Face the Victims of Abortion (Fort Collins, Colorado: Life Cycle Books, 2017) 89-90
LifeNews Note: Sarah Terzo covered the abortion issue for over 13 years as a professional journalist. In this capacity, she has written nearly a thousand articles about abortion and read over 850 books on the topic. She has been researching and writing about abortion since attending The College of New Jersey (class of 1997) where she minored in Women’s Studies. This article originally appeared on Sarah Terzo’s Substack. You can read more of her articles here.
