February 26th, 2020 | Written By - Carrie Bifulco '21
We see them occasionally, on the sides of buses, mounted on posters, and plastered on billboards. The grisly, jarring, images of so called aborted babies that make our hearts beat out of our chest. I always turned my head away from this evangelical propaganda because in all honesty, the pictures are incredibly upsetting. However, in light of seeing posts from a recent pro-life march in which hundreds of women paraded through the streets of DC holding images of “aborted waste” I was finally curious enough to dive into researching the questions: where do these images come from? Are they REALLY formaldehyde soaked fetuses? How is it even legal to display images that many could argue are visual terrorism? Do abortions actually look like this? Well after a deep dive into these questions, here are the answers I was able to find.
Not surprisingly, I had trouble attempting to find reputable information about where these images come from. According to an interview with Eric Scheidler, a man who leads an activist group that is a huge proponent of using images of terminated pregnancies to persuade the public, many of the pictures the organization uses were taken by a woman named Monica Miller, an avid pro-life activist and amateaur photographer. The bodies are supposedly sourced from a dumpster behind an abortion clinic on Michigan Avenue in Chicago. His claims were confirmed by an interview with Monica Miller, in which she recounted the same story. She claims she snapped the pictures behind the Chicago abortion clinic in 1987. In an attempt to confirm her claims, I googled “women’s health clinic on Michigan Avenue Chicago'' and sure enough, the Michigan Avenue Center for Health popped up, meaning the clinic is still running to this day.
Miller also explains a case in which she and her husband continually retrieved shipments for eight months, from a loading dock in Northbrook, Ill., a suburb of Chicago. The boxes in the shipment contained fetuses from around a dozen abortion clinics. She kept these boxes in her apartment for some time and eventually in 1988, Cardinal Joseph Bernardin, archbishop of Chicago, presided over a funeral for around 2,000 of the fetuses. Activists buried many others. Obviously, her confiscation of private property and the photographs taken without the permission of clinics triggered a massive lawsuit that was settled in 2003.
Many of the photos Monica has taken are of late term abortions and an important statistic to include is that the images are misleading because most abortions (90%) happen under 12 weeks, according to Nicki Saporta, president of the National Abortion Federation. So while many of these images are, according to my research, real, the overwhelming majority of abortions do not involve removing fetuses that are as developed as the ones in Miller’s photos. Another important detail about late term abortions from Public Seminar is that often recipients of these special abortions have specific reasons for their choice to undergo the often emotional and physically painful procedure. According to the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG), “Many women undergo late term abortions because of the discovery of fetal anomalies that would risk the viability of the fetus’ survival outside of the womb, or because the pregnancy presents a threat to the pregnant person’s health or life.”
In addition, something important to keep in mind is that women who pursue abortions later on in pregnancy often reported doing so because they had difficulty finding a reputable provider and securing the funds. This concept seems entirely plausible considering how many pro-life organizations take great pains to make abortions as inaccessible as possible. One of the most poignant examples of this is the fact that many women are led to “crisis pregnancy centers” under the false pretense that the facility has staff to assist them with scheduling an abortion, not talk them out of one. I would highly recommend the VICE documentary The Fake Abortion Clinics of America, if you want to learn more about this phenomenon.
That being said, the gory images used during pro-life rallies are indeed legal as I could not find any laws specifically censoring this type of image. In conclusion, if you take anything away from this article, I hope it is that you should ALWAYS be skeptical of WHERE an image came from but also WHY it exists and the larger context of the circumstances in which it was taken. Being more informed about where pro-life propaganda comes from has made me rethink many of my own beliefs about abortion.
Photo Source - WIX
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