Why Abortion Is a Yawner
On Tuesday, May 11, 2004, Al-Qaeda’s Abu Musab al-Zarqawi took a large knife and sawed off Michael Berg’s head while a video camera rolled. The clip hit the Web like an earthquake. Those who could bear to watch stared, sobbed, or seethed. Nobody yawned.
On Tuesday, September 11, 2001, jumbo jets slammed into the World Trade Center towers in New York, the Pentagon, and a remote field in Pennsylvania. The toll for the day — 2,752 burned, crushed, or dismembered American bodies — mobilized a nation for war. Nobody yawned.
Mention the word “abortion,” though, and eyes glaze over.
Ironically, the bare facts are more hideous than Berg’s beheading or thousands of innocent people being shredded, burned, or crushed by falling airliners: Every single day more innocent Americans perish in abortion clinics than died on September 11, 2001. This has gone on for 30 years.
Their bodies have been burned with chemicals (saline abortion), dismembered piece by piece (D&E abortion), shredded (suction abortion), or “beheaded” in utero: a living baby’s skull pierced with a blunt Metzenbaum scissors and her brains vacuumed out mid delivery (partial birth abortion).
Yet people — even pro-lifers — still yawn at the word “abortion.” Why? One word: images.
A Picture or a Thousand Words?
Americans think and learn visually, by images, not arguments. Witness the beheading of Daniel Berg and words are unnecessary. Talk about abortion without the right images and people think of a benign extraction of formless tissue. No big deal.
To halt the yawns and revitalize interest, pro-lifers must visually awaken moral sensibilities. We must move the debate from the abstract question of “choice” to the concrete issue of dead babies. We must show what abortion does.
The impact of seeing can be powerful. To research an article on abortion for Harper’s, Verlyn Klinkenborg visited an abortion clinic. There he beheld the remains of a 10-week-old preborn child and recorded his candid impressions:
I felt a profound and unmistakable kinship with the shape implied by the foot and hand in the tray, a kinship so strong that it was like the rolling of the sea under my feet .... I was surprised by my own sadness, by the sense of loss that I felt ... In that tiny, naked hand there was the imputation of innocence.1
I have stacks of letters from the people whose minds have been changed confirming that graphic images are the single most effective tool in changing minds on abortion.
The national debate on partial-birth abortion seriously undermined public support for abortion for one reason: It was visual. For the first time in 25 years, the debate was on abortion itself. Pro-abortion columnist Naomi Wolf wrote, “When someone holds up a model of a six-month-old fetus and a pair of surgical scissors, we say, ‘choice,’ and we lose.”2
Pro-lifers showed the seven-minute video Harder Truth3 to a legislative committee during debate on the bill. The pictures of babies killed through D&E and suction abortion were enough to shift discussions from “choice” to the killing itself. In a dramatic turn of events, New Jersey legislators — including liberal Democrats — vigorously supported limits on abortion.
The pro-abortion cause was injured precisely because it did not focus on what abortion does for the mother, but rather on what abortion does to the child. Pro-lifers had forced abortion backers to do the one thing they don’t want to do: defend killing babies. Pro-choice advocate Katherine Kohlbert admitted that if the debate is on what happens to the unborn, her side will “get creamed.”4
Emotion and Exploitation
Some say using graphic visual aids is manipulative. True, we ought to avoid empty appeals to emotion offered in place of good reasons. If, however, pictures substantiate the reasons rather than obscure them, they serve a vital purpose. Truth is the issue. Wolf observes, “How can we charge that it is vile and repulsive for pro-lifers to brandish vile and repulsive images if the images are real?”5
Using graphic images is a powerful form of advocacy with a noble history. Virtually every human rights crusade has made use of such a strategy, vividly depicting the plight of the persecuted, plundered, disenfranchised, and oppressed.
Movie theaters screened Schindler’s List for free to over two million students in 40 states, in spite of its graphic content. Pictures of mutilated bodies stacked like cordwood communicated the horror of the death camps in a way no lecture could.
Others claim this tactic exploits the unborn. It is never exploitative to vividly champion the cause of those truly exploited by other means. As one of my staff put it, “It is always appropriate for victims to testify on their own behalf.” Using images of aborted babies does just that.
Truthful images that show the human toll of abortion no more exploit pre-born children than a crucifix exploits Jesus when it’s used to show the toll of human sin on our Savior. Both vividly depict the consequences of evil so we may be moved to remedy it, the first by embracing life, the second by embracing redemption.
Dramatic visual aids like Harder Truth must be used wisely, though. Explain to your listeners in advance that the video contains graphic pictures, and that your purpose is not to condemn, but to clarify what is actually at stake. Advise them to look away if they prefer not to watch. When talking to Christian audiences, mention that our Lord is eager to forgive the sin of abortion.
I used this approach with 750 high-schoolers at Hume Lake Christian Camps in central California. After making my case against abortion I closed with this: “I know many of you are still on the fence or maybe even pro-choice. Five minutes from now you won’t be. And I won’t have to say another word.”
Then I ran a short segment of Harder Truth showing an actual abortion and its remnants: the dismembered bodies of human infants.
When the lights came up, the only sound to break the stillness was the sound of weeping. And no one yawned.
Gregory Koukl, a Talbot student, is president of Stand to Reason (str.org) and author of Precious Unborn Human Persons, Relativism: Feet Firmly Planted in Mid-Air, and Making Abortion Unthinkable: The Art of Pro-Life Persuasion.
Sources
- Verlyn Klinkenborg, “Violent Certainties,” Harpers Magazine, January 1995, 46-7.
- Naomi Wolf, “Pro-Choice and Pro-Life,” New York Times, 3 April 1997.
- Harder Truth is available from Stand to Reason, 800-2-REASON or str.org.
- “Abortion Rights Leader Urges End to Half Truths,” American Medical News, 3 March 1998.
- Naomi Wolf, “Our Bodies, Our Souls,” New Republic, 16 October 1996.
© Biola University 2005