(Spoiler Alert: Do not read if you believe in Santa Claus!)
What does a 10-week old fetus look like? Recently, the group called Show the Truth brought graphic images to the streets of Halifax. You can watch some pretty one-sided coverage of the event here on CTV News, where one opponent to the display states:
“It uses shame tactics and misinformation and fake science,” said Ashburn. “That is not what a 10-week-old fetus looks like. They’re computer-generated Photoshopped images.”
You can actually watch the words come out of her mouth on the CTV video at minute 1:45. My first reaction to her statement was anger, that someone who is college educated (I know, because I’ve heard her make a similar statement about “fake science” on the local college radio station) could be so wrong about something. This was quickly followed by frustration, that we even allow such ridiculous and fact-less statements to be made on the news and radio. But the lingering feeling that still tousles and twists itself around in my brain is sympathy.
Wouldn’t you sort of have to believe that this is not what a 10-week old fetus looks like in order to support abortion? I know I wouldn’t be able to say it was just a clump of cells when I could clearly see a face and tiny toes. But perhaps BabyCenter.com is in on the conspiracy too, maybe this isn’t what a 10-week old fetus looks like. Heck, maybe Gray’s Anatomy of the Human Body is propaganda!
But it’s my duty, as much as it makes me unpopular, to tell the truth. Because I care about women, because their universities have apparently failed them, and because I won’t let unchecked statements go on masquerading as facts.
1. Let’s not forget that long before Adobe Photoshop (created in 1988, Wikipedia told me so) even existed, people were using images of abortions to expose the death of unborn babies. I would guess that many of those photos are decades old.
2. I don’t know how I feel about the graphic images. I’m not sure if they’re useful. I held up a sign once for an hour, and I don’t really know if it made the impact one would’ve hoped for. I was completely uncomfortable. But regardless of how I feel, how else are people going to see this stuff? They’re certainly not going to put it on the news or in the paper in any impartial way.
3. Even if you don’t like the signs, you have to see the insanity of one group of people standing on one side of the street saying “Please don’t kill babies, this is what they look like” and then people on the other side of the street shouting obscenities at them and showing them their bums. Are we really saying that asking that babies not be killed (in ANY context) makes you a jerk but mooning people doesn’t?
4. This is the last on the list, but the most important to remember…Gray’s Anatomy is not a book of lies, it’s on its 40th edition. That is what a 10-week old fetus looks like, and in Canada, they are killed every day. It’s not like getting a mole removed (please stop lying to women and the rest of the world telling them that it is).
It can’t be easy to see the truth and interpret it for that when you’ve been fooled your entire life. It’s like when my partner was asked to tell his teenage niece there was no Santa Claus. She just couldn’t believe what he was saying and quickly wrote a tell-all letter to Santa reporting him. Maybe sometimes a graphic image is the slap-in-the-face truth that some people need to stop believing in Santa Claus.
by 
One has to be aware that our opponents may be women or men who have just aborted their child at 10 weeks and can’t face what they have done. That is why the denial is there. It has nothing to do with the facts, and everything to do with trying to come to terms with one has done.
Emotions play such a significant role in this debate…
I’m starting to think that prenatal development should be part of the curriculum in high school Biology. The sheer ignorance on this topic is stunning.
I’m not a big fan of graphic images of aborted fetuses. I think they are highly inappropriate in places where children might frequent. And I think they tend to engage people at a visceral level. whereas I would think we would hope to engage them on a logical level, or the very least on an emotional level.
But shame on CTV for allowing the veracity of the image to remain in dispute. In the segment, one woman says the image is not real, another says that it is. CTV could have quickly consulted an outside source for what a ten-week fetus looks like, and settled the dispute for the viewers, rather than allow it to remain a he said, she said dispute. That’s what good journalism does: it exposes facts.
I agree Melissa. CTV could have very easily done its homework. Heck, fact check.