A thoughtful article on the nature of graphic displays and what they achieve.
I personally believe the graphic abortion photos are necessary, but they only have a lasting impact when there is simultaneously a dialogue with those holding the signs. I’m pretty sure that’s the point of the Genocide Awareness Project presentation–it’s to get people talking and asking questions and thinking about it.
And I don’t actually think these are “shock” tactics. I hate movies with blood and gore just for the sake of it, and haven’t seen a horror movie since a grade five Hallowe’en party (The Watcher in the Woods). (In case you are wondering, my friend’s mother saw how scared I was and removed me–rescued me–to play by myself in my friend’s bedroom, where I was much happier. Oh, and years later, I tried the Blair Witch Project, which was a very bad mistake involving a lot of closing my eyes, plugging my ears and humming The sun will come out, Tomorrow! in the theatre, and that’s the end of horror movies for me, forever.)
But when the history is bloody, then show me the history. When I did Holocaust courses for my degree, there were sections so horrible I couldn’t keep reading. But when it is truth, then bring it on.
Abortion is horrible, therefore the photos and evidence is horrible. Showing what abortion is to an apathetic public is not a shock tactic, for shock’s sake alone. I support it.
by 
well said, Andrea.
I agree with you, Andrea.
I also think that the real reason pro-choicers object to these graphic displays is not so much the blood and gore, to which we are fairly de-sensitized nowadays, but the fact that it reveals the humanity of the unborn in a manner that is impossible to ignore.
And they don’t want to be associated with such grisly realities. Keep it sanitized.
And isn’t it only “blood and gore” if the photo is of a now dead, but once living, human being? I mean, it it were truly only a mass of undifferentiated cells, there would be no “shock and horror.”
Notwithstanding the good points you mention here, it’s worth considering whether these images really fit into the whole ethos of the pro-life movement. We are supposedly a movement that is against the “culture of death” and therefore it seems contrary to our message to use the grim images to catch the attention of passers-by.
If these fetuses are human persons (and the soundness of the pro-life argument requires that they are), then grotesque images seem to be completely contrary to our purpose. They dehumanize these persons by turning pictures of their mangled corpses into something that is meant to catch the attention of and inspire revulsion in someone passing by.
What’s more, the true pro-life position has the advantage of intellectual consistency over the pro-abortion position (See “Achieving Peace in the Abortion War” by Dr Rachel MacNair). Why would we use these images in a way that largely provokes emotional responses, lowering our argument to a level where we have no clear advantage over pro-abortion emotional propaganda? The tagline on the PWPL header is “Canada without abortion. By choice.” But a choice, if it is to be a definitive one, must be a rational choice, not an emotionally driven choice.
To put it in a different way, we have to show people what they’re saying “yes” to when we ask them to say “no” to abortion. If a person’s main contact with the pro-life movement is seeing heinous images of destroyed corpses from across the quad, then at best we’ve given them something to say “no” to, but rational human choice is such that we choose positive goods in the concrete. It is impossible to make a choice that is merely against evil, except in an abstract way (“as a rule, I always vote against a Liberal” — but then you must either make a choice to vote for someone who is not a Liberal or to do something else that isn’t voting).
In sum, should we abandon use of these images altogether? Probably not. Especially on a small, “private” scale (like in a book), the fact remains that the images are in some sense “true” and therefore cannot be completely without value. Should the Carleton students have been arrested? Of course not, but that’s a different issue. Nevertheless I maintain that their tactics are a sort of “easy way out” which utilizes the tendency of our culture to reduce arguments to emotional propaganda (because cultural relativism forbids definitive truth claims). It will be much harder to convince people to say “yes” to life than to say “no” to grotesque images of abortion, but in the end, it’s the only to achieve a world without abortion, by choice.
I have a five year old son who asks questions about everything but who gets really, really scared about some things. I don’t want scary pictures in public places.
It might seem like we are all desensitized to blood and gore, like it is all around us, but actually, it isn’t as visible as some might think. It is all over the television, but the television is an option my husband and I have choosen to do without. There aren’t all that many billboards or public displays of gore and violence, so we can in general keep our children from seeing things.
I don’t know anything about the Carleton campus, but while universities might be dominated by young adults there are often daycares on campuses, and parents who take their children through campuses. If a group were to set up a display on a university near me, I would appreciate there be warning signs so I can choose another route.
Actually, my children when they were five years old “got” the horror of abortion from just a simple description: the woman doesn’t want the baby and asks a doctor to kill it. Sadly, many five year olds never hear this truth from their pro “choice” parents and grow up to be college and university students who avoid and deny this simple truth. At that point, it is virtually impossible to get their attention with the idea “choose life” without also showing what they are currently choosing, that is, death. Many people have been shocked out of their “dogmatic slumber” (to borrow from Kant) by such images, thus, they have an important role to play in changing the current culture.
@Christy: Gratuitous violence on television for entertainment purposes and the exposure of real violent injustice occuring all around us are two very different things.
I remember seeing a display when I was in Kingston in 1998 on a family trip… I would have been 11 (so, not super young, but still), my guess in hindsight was maybe show the truth? I remember being disturbed and a little confused, but the message I got was that abortion was horrific. It helped form my conscience when I later came to consider the issue from an ethical standpoint.
@billy d:
Are you Christian?
I ask because it was Pope John Paul II who coined the term “culture of death,” and he didn’t shy away from the image of the crucifix.
Blaise –
I think that the analogy of the crucifix in Christianity does not quite hold up:
In the case of a graphic abortion image, death is the focus of the image, and the personal identity of the dead is accidental to the purpose of the image, which is to elicit a response to the death, qua death.
In the case of the crucifix, death is certainly part of the image, but the importance of the image for the Christian is not primarily in the death but in who it is that died.
This illustrates precisely what I mean by “dehumanisation.” The graphic images ask us to contemplate the death. The crucifix asks us to contemplate the One who died. The “scandal of the cross” (cf. 1 Corinthians 1) is that “God is dead” (first uttered, not by Nietzsche, but by Luther). But anyone who meditates on the crucifix insofar as it is an instrument of torture and death — without reference to the resurrection — is not truly looking at the crucifix in a “Christian” way (see, for example, the reference to the Hans Holbein painting in Dostoevsky’s The Idiot, which is disgusting to the Prince because it is the dead Christ with no room to rise).