Abortion images serve a purpose
Dear Editor,
Re: “Council debates graphic abortion signs and freedom of expression”, June 27/18.
Over the years, magazine covers, front pages of newspapers, and TV screens have featured horrific scenes of the mutilated bodies from Rwandan massacres and Bosnian genocides. They have shared the images of gaping, twisted Kurdish corpses; victims of Saddam Hussein’s “yellow rain” and the more recent victims of the Syrian chemical weapons attacks.
Billboards with pictures of starving children in the throes of suffering with skull-like heads, bloated abdomens and flies crawling over leaking nostrils and sores have dotted our roadways.
Why show us such scenes? Wouldn’t descriptions do?
The thing about pictures is that they rip away the sense of distance and unreality that can form around even the most vivid descriptions of human suffering. They give that suffering a human face.
That’s what happens when we see pictures of the aftermath of abortion. Reality sets in.
Those of us who would like the choice of writing off the unborn child as non-human, as just a “blob of tissue” are pulled up short. The veil of delusion is torn away. The unborn are given a human face.
That is, I suppose, what really bothers us. This isn’t happening to people in distant lands. It’s happening right here; in the places in which we live; to people who we would have known as our child, grandchild, cousin, niece, brother, or neighbour.
We need to ask ourselves, “Are we more disturbed by the possibility of our short-term responses to the pictures or by what’s actually happening to the children in those pictures?”
Every few years, we are given photographs of Auschwitz’s emaciated prisoners, inmates being executed, and bodies dumped into lime and ash pits? Why? To remind us of what a society, if it is not vigilant, can justify doing to other human beings.
Why show us what happens during abortions? To remind us of what we have justified doing to other human beings.
Should we accept being shocked out of our comfort zones? I hope so. That’s what a civilized society would do because, whether hidden by distance or a wall of muscle, the human faces are still there.
Sincerely,
Brian W. Brasier