The Use of Graphic Images: Re-Thinking Pro-Life Strategy
by Fr. Frank Pavone. Used with Permission

What we are doing is not enough.

The three biggest expenditures of pro-life money and manpower are crisis pregnancy support services, political activity (electing candidates and lobbying incumbents) and education.

Crisis pregnancy work is important but the vast majority of women in crisis pregnancies don’t go to crisis pregnancy centers for help; they go to abortion clinics. They don’t want help getting through a crisis pregnancy, they want help getting out of it. Moreover, as many as 80% who go to these centers are not abortion-minded!

Political activity is important, but the vast majority of voters don’t care very much about abortion as a political issue.

Education is important but when a culture is reluctant to learn that abortion is an act of violence which kills a baby, and when so many of those who need to hear the message are complicit in the injustice, people choose to turn away from listening to pro-life talks, attending pro-life events, or reading pro-life brochures. If our educational activity relies primarily on the voluntary consent of the audience we are trying to reach, we will not reach the audience we need to reach.

Much pro-life educational activity, moreover, simply assumes the truth of the proposition that abortion is an act of violence which kills a baby. Note here that often we are simply stating a conclusion without providing the evidence that leads to that conclusion. And if people don't want to believe that abortion kills a baby, they won't believe it.

People know and don't know, simultaneously.

In a sense, people already know this is a baby. But there are different kinds of knowing. One can assert that abortion takes a human life, as most Americans do assert. But without seeing it, one can also fail to appreciate the enormity of the evil, and can reconcile the assertion that it is wrong with the assertion that it is necessary, at least sometimes, and especially in the first trimester. This dynamic is reflected in the statistics regarding the positions of Americans on abortion. Most are in the middle, the "conflicted middle," holding that what is admittedly child killing should sometimes be allowed. This "conflicted middle" will decide the outcome of the abortion war in our country, and they have to be moved out of the middle.

When you want people to act to reform deeply embedded trends in society, it is not enough simply to know that the trends are wrong. One must be profoundly disturbed so as to be stirred to action. One must perceive the difference between evil and absolute evil, between tolerable evil and intolerable evil. One must be made angry enough to be willing to sacrifice to end injustice -- and in this sense, the very reason some say pictures don't work because they make people mad are really hitting upon the reason why they do work.

To most Americans, women in crisis pregnancy are real but their unborn babies are unreal (especially during the embryo and early fetal stages of prenatal development). To most Americans, the hardship of a mother’s crisis pregnancy evokes more sympathy than her baby’s death by abortion because the horror of abortion is far less real than the terror of crisis pregnancy.

The experience of those who use horrifying pictures teaches that those who haven’t seen abortion only think they know how evil it actually is. Some say aborting mothers believe God will punish but ultimately forgive abortion; but there are different levels of "believing" and a mother with a functioning conscience will find it easier to trivialize the spiritual consequences of abortion if she has never seen one.

The Respect Life Office director of an East coast Catholic archdiocese recently signed a letter telling a pro-life organization in his state that graphic images "… can make those in a crisis pregnancy more aggressive in pursuing an abortion…." There isn't a shred of evidence which even hints that seeing aborted babies makes women more likely to abort. Yet the president of a well known West coast Evangelical Protestant college made exactly the same statement ten years ago. This paralyzing myth persists despite the fact that many women have told us that they aborted because no one showed them a picture but no woman has ever told us she aborted because she saw a picture.

QUICK EXAMPLES OF THE EFFECTIVENESS OF GRAPHIC IMAGES IN OTHER SOCIAL REFORM MOVEMENTS

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EXAMPLE 1

Life magazine, September 20, 1943, explained the editors' motive in publishing a disturbingly graphic picture of three American GIs who had been gunned down on a beach in New Guinea:

The reason is that words are never enough. The eye sees. The mind knows. The heart feels. But the words do not exist to make us see, or know, or feel what it is like, what actually happens. The words are never right.

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EXAMPLE 2

On November 28, 1997, The Los Angeles Times carried a story headlined "Pet Billboard Is Real …Too Real for Some." The subhead reads "Ad: Proposed spay/neuter photo shows barrels of euthanized pets. Some object to grim image; others say shock value may shake up public on overpopulation problem."

Imagine driving the kids to school and they see it: a billboard displaying 10 trash cans filled with dead dogs and cats, courtesy of the city of Los Angeles’ animal regulation commission.

They’ve tried gentle persuasion. Now, they’re into pure shock: Sterilize your pets or else.

Some animal rights supporters say they too believe that the shock treatment may be the best way to grab attention, much like the [California] state health department’s anti-smoking campaign. Those graphic public service announcements include a woman smoking a cigarette through a hole in her throat.

‘People will say it’s not good for children to see it,’ [Bill] Dyer [Southern California field representative for In Defense of Animals] said. ‘But I think children will understand it.’

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EXAMPLE 3

Canada has taken the disturbing photos of smoking-related cancer victims to an even more shocking level. The San Francisco Chronicle, January 3, 2001 published a Baltimore Sun story headlined "Graphic Labels Confront Canadian Smokers."

With the first stroke of the New Year, Canada ushered in the biggest, boldest and most shocking cigarette warning labels in the world.

The labels carry not just words but alarming color photos that graphically depict the ravages of smoking tobacco.

Depending on which of 16 rotating labels they encounter, smokers fumbling for their next cigarette might see a photograph of a person’s blackened, bleeding gums and the words, ‘Warning: Cigarettes Cause Mouth Disease.’

Some labels contain photos of a diseased heart, a lung tumor, a gangrenous foot, or a sick baby connected to hospital monitors [a color photo accompanying the article depicts an actual diseased, human brain, cut open to expose damaged blood vessels].

‘These are things that really happen to people. It’s not fake,’ said Cynthia Callard, executive director of Physicians for a Smoke-Free Canada. ‘If you want to call it shock value – well, some people may be shocked.’

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EXAMPLE 4

Parents with children in supermarket shopping carts must often run a gauntlet of disturbing cover photos on the magazines which fill the racks at check-out stands. Setting aside the countless magazines featuring cover photos of scantily clad women in sexually suggestive poses, a recent look at the archives of just a few news magazines revealed gory Newsweek cover photos of a bloody "Teenage victim of last week’s New York school murder," the bloodied face of a Kurdish child attacked by the government of Iraq, the bloodied face of a victim of "the marketplace massacre in Sarajevo," the bloodied face of a Bosnian child, the bloody corpse of shooting victim in New York City, and on the cover of an issue of U.S. News & World Report, a photo of the bloodied face and fractured skull of Reginald Denny, savagely beaten in a race riot in Los Angeles.

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EXAMPLE 5

On February 27, 1997, the Raleigh, NC News and Observer joined countless other US newspapers in reporting criticism by Congressman Tom Coburn, R-Oklahoma, of NBC television’s decision to air Stephen Speilberg’s academy award-winning movie Schindler’s List in early prime-time, when children would see the film’s disturbing nudity, sex, violence and profane language. "Coburn said public outrage was necessary to keep network television from ‘polluting the minds of our children." The New York Times, March 2, 1997, in an article headlined "Congressman Meets Holocaust" further described the firestorm of protest touched off by Rep. Coburn’s critique:

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