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A story from Fr Frank Pavone of Priests for Life on the importantce of pictures in the struggle for life.(my paraphrasing): During the sixties at the height of the civil rights movement, the murder a particular young black man made national attention. He was beaten so severely that the undertaker told his mom that there should be a closed casket ceremony. She said “No, I want the world to see what hate did to my beautiful boy.” The mother called the news and front-page pictures of her murdered son circulated around the world. It was a major turning point in the civil rights movement.

Now some quotes from Priests for Life

Fr. Frank: "Show the American people what an abortion is!" From the inception of his pro-life work, Fr. Frank Pavone has been urging the mass media to show the American people what an abortion is.

"Abortion is a reality which is so horrific that words alone can never convey its meaning."

Fr. Frank serves on the board of the Center for Bioethical Reform, which makes it a priority to share with the nation the world's largest collection of images of actual abortions. In conjunction with that organization, a series of careful analyses of what the pro-life movement can learn from other social reform movements is being prepared. We present here some of the grim reality of abortion. Only seeing such images can bring us to the kind of indignation needed to sustain the sacrifices that will be necessary to finally bring an end to this injustice.

It is especially critical to show people the images of babies aborted in the first trimester. It is in regard to such children, who constitute 90% of abortion victims, that the myth persists that they are not really children at all.

A conclusion without the evidence

The word abortion has lost practically all its meaning. Not even the most vivid description, in words alone, can adequately convey the horror of this act of violence.

Abortion is sugarcoated by rhetoric, which hides its gruesome nature. What a pro-life person has in mind when he speaks about abortion and what the average American has in mind when he hears the word are two very different things.

One of the key reasons the pro-life movement is not making more progress is that we so often assert before the public that abortion is an act of violence, but do not produce the evidence which would lead people to this conclusion.

Photographic evidence is the most trusted source of information in any discipline. It transcends language and logic, and goes straight to the heart, where people are motivated to take action, instead of merely to the head, where people passively entertain all sorts of concepts without any commitment necessarily following.

People absorb impressions rather than substance. Although a photo is just a slice of reality, if it is the right slice, it captures the distilled essence of an event in a way that nothing else can. A photo is even more powerful than a video, since it is the difference between 30 images per second vs. one image for 30 seconds.

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The Use of Graphic Photos of Aborted Children in the Public Forum Ephesians 5:11 states "And have no fellowship with the unfruitful deeds of darkness, but rather expose them." The large graphic photos expose the heinous truth about abortion in an unsurpassed way. Unlike other modern social movements, the media has been unwilling to take images of injustice against the unborn to the public. Pro-life activists have struggled one city, one neighborhood, one person at a time to expose the grim truth about the plight of the unborn. The large graphic photos are a crucial tool, which has successfully allowed Christians to fulfill the Biblical mandate to expose evil.