Recently, Jane had an abortion. She writes of her experience,
"Lining the street in front of the clinic were a dozen or so protesters. They held up large banners with anti-abortion slogans, religious iconography, and images of dead babies. Just past the bulletproof security doors, the graphic nature of that imagery haunted me in the waiting room. What would my abortion look like? I decided to secretly document my abortion with my cell phone.
My intention in documenting and sharing my abortion is to demystify the sensationalist images propagated by the religious and political right on this matter. The perverse use of lifeless fetus photographs are a propaganda tool in the prolife/prochoice debate in which women and their bodies are used as pawns to push a cultural, political, and religious agenda in the United States.
At 6 weeks of pregnancy, my abortion looked very different than the images I saw when I entered the clinic that day."
Jane states that her abortion looked very different from the images held by the protesters outside the clinic. She is correct. The dead children pictured on the protesters' signs were dismembered with a tool like this. Whereas Jane's child was sucked out with a powerful vacum tube. Her child's tiny body was no match for this tool, and was therefore "liquified" and then pumped into the jar like so much medical waste.
Jane hopes that by sharing this image of her "liquified" child, she can demystify the images of aborted children used by pro-lifers. However Jane misses the point. How a child looks after it has been killed is irrelevant to the morality of killing the child. Far more pertinent is how the child looked before it was killed.
Pictured above is a photograph of a living fetus at 6 1/2 weeks, taken by Lennart Nilsson and published in the April 30, 1965 issue of LIFE Magazine.
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