Monica Migliorino Miller and several other pro-lifers set up a display of aborted babies outside the abortion clinic where they were found. Miller and the others had retrieved the aborted babies from the clinic’s trash.
Pro-Choice columnist Linda Gorov of the Chicago Sun-Times wrote about the display:
All the antiabortion pickets in the world cannot convey the loss you feel when you look at a 10 week old fetus in the bright sun light. You can be for abortion or against abortion. It doesn’t matter. You look and you look away and you feel lousy for a long time afterward.
This reporter “feels lousy” because she knows she’s looking at a dead body and not a clump of cells. There would be no reason to “feel lousy” otherwise. There would be no reason to be distressed over a clump of tissue. Instinctively, this reporter knows that the baby she sees is a dead human being, not just a surgical byproduct.
Seeing a 10 week-old baby with little arms and legs torn from his or her body by a suction machine is horrific. On my website, you can see a picture of the face of an aborted baby at 10 weeks, his mouth open in a silent scream. Even though many pro-choicers are hardened enough to block out images of aborted babies, many undecided and uncommitted people can be converted by them. They can also inspire nominally pro-life people to become more active in the movement.
One of the hardest things to understand, as a pro-lifer, is how some pro-choice people can look at pictures of unborn children with little arms and legs and fingers and toes, with little faces, and not see that they are people. Perhaps they know that they are people but refuse to admit it. Layers of denial must build up before a person can see a picture of an aborted child and still maintain that women should have unrestricted access to abortion. It can be hard to respond to, or understand, this hardness of heart.
Pictures of aborted children, or even demonstrations showing their remains, will sadly not be the magic bullet that ends abortion. But they are still an important tool, one that can unsettle even those committed to promoting abortion.
Source: Monica Migliorino Miller Abandoned: the Untold Story of the Abortion Wars (Charlotte, North Carolina: St. Benedict Press, 2012) 135
