Have you ever seen an actual abortion, even a late-term abortion? For too many people, abortion is simply a concept, like addiction or immigration or health care.
But in February I attended a presentation by Christine Wechsler, one of the prosecutors in the Kermit Gosnell case, where she said that when a photo of “Baby A” was shown to the jury, it changed the course of the trial. (Dr. Gosnell was convicted in 2013 of killing three infants born after botched abortion attempts.) The philosopher Emmanuel Levinas puts it this way: The only thing that really converts people is “the face of the other.” Nikolai Berdyaev stated at the beginning of the 20th century: “The greatest sin of this age is making the concrete, abstract.”
The only thing that really converts people is “the face of the other.”
That is what happened in the case of Emmett Till, the 14-year-old Black boy who was brutally murdered in Mississippi in 1955, his face beaten beyond recognition. His mother decided to have an open casket despite people telling her that this would upset others. His mother responded: “I want the whole world to see what they did to my boy.”
Portrayals of plantation brutality and graphic photographs of slaves scarred by beatings and mutilation dramatically served the anti-slavery movement. And there was Lewis Hine, who took over 5,000 pictures to combat the exploitation of child labor; when child labor reform finally happened, it was his pictures that were credited as the single most effective catalyst of that change. More recently, there was the picture of the 3-year-old Syrian named Alan Kurdi lying dead, face down, on a beach in Turkey, which prompted international soul-searching about attitudes toward refugees.
Contrast this with the images of preborn children, including the photos of those who have been aborted. They are completely hidden by the media in order to legitimize and destigmatize what abortion really does to developing human beings.
Photos are completely hidden by the media in order to legitimize and destigmatize what abortion really does to developing human beings.
In 1968, when I was in college, the main issues of the day were the war in Vietnam and civil rights. I was invited one day to a presentation by Jack Wilke, the obstetrician who helped establish the modern pro-life movement, and his wife, Barbara. They showed slides of preborn children and the reality of abortion (which, at the time, I knew nothing about and which was still illegal in most states). I was horrified by the images. They brought home to me that this tragic reality was not in some faraway place but in our own country and even in our own neighborhood.
Thirty-five years ago, in my first pastorate, I had one of the most powerful experiences of my priesthood. I received a call one day from a couple that I had married over a year before. They asked me to come to the hospital to baptize their son, who had been born prematurely. My jaw dropped when I saw Jose, who was born at only 22 weeks gestation. This was the tiniest human being I had ever seen. It was hard watching this little one struggle for his life in a kind of incubator. The nurse brought me an eyedropper, and I baptized this incredible gift of life. He was so small that I could literally hold him completely in my hand. It made me think of the passage in Isaiah where God said that he will hold us in the palm of his hand.
Unfortunately, Jose passed away, but the outcomes for children born prematurely are steadily improving. This year, The New York Times reported on studies showing that up to 38 percent of babies born at 22 weeks survived to be discharged from the hospital, with the survival rate increasing to 55 percent for babies born at 23 weeks at some facilities.
When I left Jose and stepped outside into the cool air, it struck me that in another part of this hospital, the life of a preborn child at the same gestational age might be ended through an abortion, and the only difference between the two lives would be that one was wanted and valued, while the other was unwanted and discarded. If that is how we value and protect human life (wanted or unwanted), our society is in deep trouble.
The brutal reality is that the lives of 900,000 preborn children end every year in the United States from abortions. What would we think if 900,000 toddlers or 900,000 immigrants or 900,000 African-American men were killed every single year? How can the magnitude of that violence not dwarf every other issue by a mile, unless one holds that preborn children aren’t really human beings?
What would we think if 900,000 toddlers or 900,000 immigrants or 900,000 African-American men were killed every single year?
It is because of this magnitude that we can say protecting preborn children (and helping women in crisis pregnancies) is our pre-eminent priority. If one does not exist, other human rights will not come into play. And if one is not allowed to exist, one cannot promote a consistent ethic of life or live out the nonviolent teachings of Jesus.
In other words, all people are equal in value, but not all rights are equal. There is a hierarchy of values. The preborn are the most invisible, voiceless, defenseless, powerless, vulnerable, innocent, marginalized lives in our society, as well as the most unequal and excluded of any human beings in the world.
Pope Francis has stated that we need to put a human face on the issue of immigration and refugees. I believe the same applies to abortion. Images that may be considered graphic and disturbing (even “ghastly,” as Jeannie Gaffigan recently wrote in America) not only present the reality of what otherwise takes place in secret, but they can provoke pity, sorrow and a realization of the injustice done to the baby, whose humanity is now obvious.
Even the pro-choice feminist Naomi Wolf defended the sharing of these images in a famous essay in The New Republic in 1995. “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,” she wrote. “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.”
As Alexander Solzhenitsyn said: “Let the lie come into the world, let it even triumph, but not through me.” This is the challenge for all of us as Catholics, whether Republican, Democrat or independent, not only on Election Day but every day of the year.
