(See The Anti-Choice Project Signs.)

The pro-life movement is multi-faceted in its building of a Culture of Life. It consists of established pro-life organizations, those who pray in front of abortion facilities, crisis pregnancy centers, Rachel's Vineyard and post-abortion healing programs, pro-life legislation, and those who fight to keep Planned Parenthood out of our schools and promote abstinence-only education. Each of these ministries has proved to be a vital part of fostering a society that rejects abortion for the betterment of mothers, their unborn children, and families. There is, however, one thing, we have been told, that is off-limits: that to expose abortion, in all its gruesome detail, for what it really does to a helpless baby in the womb, through the use of graphic images, is going too far. Consequently, there is a significant rift between those in the pro-life movement who either defend or denounce the use of graphic pictures as a necessary means of ending abortion.

Nearly 36 years since the dreadful Roe vs. Wade decision and we have exhausted every verbal argument against abortion. Our society has reduced the humanity of the unborn child and the horror of abortion to a debate of semantics. Words like "choice", "life", "reproductive rights", and "fetus", have clouded the reality that abortion is an act of violence which kills a baby.

This war cannot be won if we remain afraid to be bold; afraid of sacrifice; or if we fail to recognize abortion as the intolerable evil that it is. Francis Schaeffer once said, "If people who claim the name of Christ are not going to be willing to stand up against something as evil as killing a baby, then the world has the right to ask whether Christ is real." Gregg Cunningham of the Center for Bioethical Reform adds, that "we have absolutely no moral authority with a culture if we say abortion is an indefensible act of violence which kills a baby and then we do nothing to stop that atrocity. Or what little we do approximates our approach to gardening or golf -- it's sort of a hobby we work into the periphery of our lives." In short, we must be more committed to saving babies than the enemy is to killing them.

As Fr. Frank Pavone has rightly said, America will not reject abortion until America sees abortion.

To most Americans, women in crisis pregnancy are real but their unborn babies are unreal. To most Americans, the hardship of a mother’s crisis pregnancy evokes more sympathy than her baby’s death by abortion because the horror of abortion is far less real than the terror of crisis pregnancy. Yet, every day, babies in this country are being dismembered, decapitated, and disemboweled. The enemy wants that hidden. And the one thing that best brings what's in darkness into light, that exposes the injustice in all its ugliness, is pictures--disturbing, shocking, ugly pictures. And as history proves, a culture is able to trivialize injustice if it never has see it.

The Anti-Choice Project seeks to dispel the myth that graphic images are ineffective, that they are off-limits. Moreover, we believe that the use of graphic images of aborted babies is imperative to the demise of legal abortion. The images work, and have worked historically, as an integral part of social reform.

Examples of the Use of Graphic Imagery in the History of Social Reform

Anti-Slavery Movement

Thomas Clarkson, a leader in the campaign against slave-trade in England spent "two years riding around England, promoting the cause and gathering evidence. This included his interviewing 20,000 sailors, and obtaining equipment used on the slave-ships (such as iron handcuffs, leg-shackles, thumb screws, instruments for forcing open slave's jaws and branding irons) for use in publications and public meetings." He displayed chains and shackles to the public to show how the slaves were mistreated.

From Wikipedia:

"Thomas Clarkson noticed how pictures and artifacts were able to influence public opinion, more than mere words alone, and quickly realised that the contents of the chest might reinforce the message of his anti-slavery lectures. He used the contents to demonstrate the skill of Africans and the possibilities that existed for an alternative humane trading system. The 'box' became an important part his public meetings, providing an early example of a visual aid."

Civil Rights Movement & Emmett Till

"Like a boil that can never be cured so long as it is covered up but must be opened with all its ugliness to the natural medicines of air and light, injustice must be exposed, with all the tension its exposure creates, to the light of human conscience and the air of national opinion before it can be cured." -Dr. Martin Luther King Jr, Letter from a Birmingham Jail

Emmett Till was a fourteen-year-old black schoolboy visiting relatives near the hamlet called Money in the Mississippi Delta. Because he had prankishly flirted with a white shopkeeper, he was brutally beaten and shot. Several days later his corpse was found in the Tallahatchie river, with a gin-mill fan barbwired around his neck. The boy's mother, Mamie Bradley, insisted that his body be shipped back home to Chicago, where it was displayed in an open coffin for four days [a Mississippi sheriff had ordered the coffin sealed to conceal the brutality of the boy's murder]. At least a hundred thousand members of the black community stood in line for hours to view the body. The leading black periodicals, including Jet and the Chicago Defender, juxtaposed earlier photographs of the bright-eyed youngster in shirt and tie with the horrific picture of his bashed and bloated face. The story of the huge outpouring of sympathy – and the lynching behind it – was picked up by the white press as well.

Pictures and stories about Emmett Till's murder transformed many who would fight in the civil rights movement over the next decade.

Anti-War Movement

Life magazine, September 20, 1943, explained the editors' motive in publishing a disturbingly graphic picture of three American GIs who had been gunned down on a beach in New Guinea:

"The reason is that words are never enough. The eye sees. The mind knows. The heart feels. But the words do not exist to make us see, or know, or feel what it is like, what actually happens. The words are never right."

Today there is no debate about the use of graphic imagery to convey injustices from the past; it is a "no-brainer." People pore through history textbooks that contain graphic images; they flock to museums that show images of yesterday’s injustices; they line up to watch movies that convey the mistreatment of peoples by previous generations.

Why, then, is there a debate today about the use of abortion imagery? For the simple reason that such imagery shows a present atrocity not a past one. The guilt of historical crimes lies with our ancestors, not us. The guilt of present-day crimes lies with no one but ourselves. It is easy to say, "Shame on them." It is difficult to admit, "Shame on us."

Many people ask us, "Why do you hold up these horrible pictures in public?" Our answer to them is, "We do it for the same reason we would have held up pictures of Auschwitz and Dachau in the streets of Germany. Injustice must be exposed or it will never be ended." We would applaud anyone bold enough to expose the atrocities against the Jewish people, and yet we are conflicted about exposing the atrocity inflicted on the unborn.

They are not so different.

We say that a picture is worth a thousand words. The Anti-Choice Project believes one picture of abortion is worth a thousand pro-life arguments.