Exposing Injustice Through Graphic Images
by Jim Hewes
Making the Abstract Concrete
We can talk until we are blue in the face, but violence is simply an abstract concept for so many people (in the case of abortion – healthcare, reproductive rights, choice, etc.) Nicholai Berdyaev stated at the beginning of the 20th century:
“The greatest sin of this age is making the concrete abstract.”
Similarly, the philosopher Emmanuel Levinas puts it this way:
“The only thing that really converts people is the face of the other.”
Thus, injustices won’t come to an end if the victims remain hidden and out of sight.
Historical Examples of Graphic Images Driving Social Change
Historically we have evidence of how horrific images at different times throughout the world have impacted societal movements by exposing injustices. Photos can interrupt one’s day and have a certain staying power.
- Photographs of plantation brutality, including graphic photographs of beaten and lynched slaves, helped the anti-slavery movement (like McPherson & Oliver’s photo “The Scourged Back’).
- Images from concentration camps revealed the atrocities of the Holocaust.
- Photographs from Hiroshima and Nagasaki showed the horrific human consequences of atomic warfare.
- The Vietnam War’s haunting image of 9-year-old Phan Thi Kim Phuc fleeing a napalm attack deeply influenced public opinion.
- When a famine breaks out in a country, there begins a campaign against starvation by showing images of malnourished children.
- Photos are shown from DWI or drug fatalities or the ravages of cancer from smoking.
- The brutal murder of 14-year-old Emmett Till in 1955. His open-casket photograph showed his face was beaten beyond recognition, His mother responded: “I want the whole world to see what they did to my boy.”, This stirred civil rights activism; Rosa Parks said the image of Emmett Till gave her the strength to not to move as she had been ordered.
- The photograph of 3-year-old Syrian refugee Alan Kurdi lying lifeless on a Turkish beach with the headline: “If this doesn’t change Europe’s attitude towards refuges, what will?”
Anti-war photographer James Nachtwey, in his 2003 book Inferno, offers powerful photos of people involved in war, as well as famine, and destructive governmental policies or cultures. From the introduction, his comment:
A photograph can enter the mind and reach the power of immediacy. It affects that part of the psyche where meaning is less dependent on words and makes an important more visceral, more elemental, closer to the raw experience.
I want my work to become a part of our visual history, to enter our collective memory and our collective conscience. I hope it will serve to remind us of history’s deepest tragedies concern not the great protagonists who set events in motion but the countless ordinary people who are caught up in those events and torn apart by their remorseless fury.
Graphic Images and the Abortion Debate
Pro-choice feminist Naomi Wolf acknowledges the power of graphic abortion images by stating:
How can we charge that it is vile and repulsive for pro-lifers to brandish vile and repulsive images if the images are real? To insist that truth is in poor taste is the very height of hypocrisy. Besides, if these images are often the facts of the matter, and if we then claim that it is offensive for pro-choice women to be confronted with them, then we are making the judgement that women are too inherently weak to face a truth about which they have to make a grave decision. This view is unworthy of feminism. (“Our Body, Our Souls”, New Republic, October 16, 1995).
Photography (including “abortion victim photography”) can be a way to show that someone really matters. It makes concrete that this tragic reality is not just in some distant faraway place, but in our own country and even in our own neighborhood. These pictures draw the viewer into their humanity.
Images such as the April 30,1965 edition of Life magazine, with a photo of a 18-week pre-born child, which Ben Cosgrove (editor of LIFE.com) stated “gained a kind of immortality” along with the June 9, 2003, issue of Newsweek: “Should a Fetus Have Rights? How Science is Changing the Debate.” Such pictures can’t be dismissed as “fake” or “doctored” and move the debate from choice to what is being chosen.
As the Rev. Martin Luther King poignantly stated in his Letter from a Birmingham Jail:
Like a boil that can never be cured so long as it is covered up but must be opened with all its ugliness to the natural medicines of air and light, injustice must be exposed, with all the tension exposure creates, to the light of human conscience and the air of national opinion before it can be cured.
This point was powerfully demonstrated during the trial of Dr. Kermit Gosnell when the jury, upon viewing the graphic photo ‘Baby A,’ shifted their perception and impacted the trial’s outcome, according to the understanding of the prosecutor in the case, Christine Weschler (I saw her say so in a presentation on February 27, 2020).
Personal Impact and Testimonies
Former Planned Parenthood director Abby Johnson experienced a life-changing moment when witnessing an abortion via ultrasound. Horrified by what she saw, she became a committed pro-life advocate, actively helping clinic workers transition to life-affirming careers.
In the DVD Life After Abortion, women revealed how clinic staff often misrepresented ultrasounds, convincing vulnerable pregnant women that their unborn children were mere ‘shells.’ Many women describe how every staff member at all the abortion facilities conveyed to them that there was just a “bunch of cells. If the vulnerable pregnant woman wanted to see the ultrasound, they were persuaded not to view it; if they insisted they showed them a very distorted blurry picture.
Conversely, a Los Angeles pregnancy center that openly shared truthful abortion footage saw 80% of mothers choosing life, affirming the powerful influence of honest visual testimony. They also gave each woman a copy of the video. One year they did a survey of all mothers who chose life, and 80% said that the video was the number one thing that helped them to choose life for their babies. Thus, photos can change “pre-abortion” women if see the truth, instead of hiding the reality of what abortion actually involves
Yet photos might even start a healing path for post-abortive women, especially if it occurs near the anniversary of her abortion or the date when her child would have been born
Some people may feel that you are imposing something on them by showing pictures of pre-born children. But that is reality. There’s a tremendous difference between showing evil and doing evil.
For example, there’s the true story of a girl who yelled and swore during one campus display of pro-life photos. A year later, she revealed that when she found herself pregnant several months later, she couldn’t go through with having an abortion. Even though she hated the pro-life group for showing her the pictures, she couldn’t escape the truth those pictures conveyed. (“Seeing Is Believing: Why Our Culture Must Face the Victims of Abortion,” Jonathan Van Maren p. 89)
The Psychological and Moral Power of Visuals
James Clear author of Atomic Habits: An Easy and Proven Way to Build Good Habits and Break Bad Ones highlights the profound impact of vision:
The most powerful of all human sensory abilities, however, is vision. The human body has about eleven million sensory receptors. Approximately ten million of those are dedicated to sight. Some experts estimate that half of the brain’s resources are used on vision . . . visual cues are the greatest catalyst of our behavior . . . for this reason, a small change in what you see can lead to a big shift in what you do. (p. 84)
Research in the Journal of Psychiatric & Mental Health Nursing further supports the therapeutic and empowering potential of “participatory photography,” confirming visual imagery’s profound influence.
All of this reflects a statement made by famous concentration-camp survivor Elie Wiesel:
“To forget murder victims is to kill them twice.”
As Monica Migliorino Miller affirms that abortion kills real people:
Photos of the aborted pre-born and their public exposure in no way dishonors these children. Abortion kills real people, it assaults the life of a personal someone — a someone whom the very act of abortion meant to keep hidden forever, as if he had never existed. When a graphic image is displayed, it is that child who speaks. The abortion photo is the definitive way that unwanted, discarded unborn children can prove that they lived, that their lives matter, that their all-too-brief existences can impact this world and change it for the better. The photos of abortion victims are the only tangible guarantee they have that their lives, and even their murders, were not in vain. Through their photos the world is stimulated to contemplate the injustice suffered by the aborted unborn — and be aroused to do something about it!
Conclusion: The Necessity of Seeing the Truth
Father Frank Pavone of Priests for Life succinctly captures this imperative:
“America will not end abortion until America sees abortion.”
This was true in my own journey in pro-life movement which began 56 years ago after witnessing Dr. Jack Wilkie’s compelling visual presentation of pre-born and aborted children. Thus, today I only deliver pro-life talks that include such visual evidence.
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For posts on similar themes, see:
Abortion When it Involves a Rape: See the Faces
Seeing War’s Victims: The New York Times Investigation of Civilian Casualties in Iraq and Syria
Seeing the Humanity of “the Enemy”: Movies to Provoke Thought and Discussion
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