Seeing a Picture of an Aborted Baby Changed His Life, Now He Fights Abortion

Many pro-lifers are against showing pictures of aborted babies. They say these pictures are too graphic, or too upsetting, or showing them is too unkind. They argue that they can traumatize people, such as post-abortive people and those who have suffered miscarriages.

Other pro-lifers say the pictures are a valuable pro-life tool and point to minds changed and babies saved by the photos.

In his 2017 book, ‘Seeing Is Believing: Why Our Culture Must Face the Victims of Abortion,” Jonathan Van Maren describes cases of people who were initially very angry and even abusive when shown graphic pictures, but later changed their minds about abortion.

For example, he tells the following story:

One girl who yelled and swore at us during one campus display came up to us a year later and revealed that when she found herself pregnant several months later, she couldn’t go through with having an abortion – even though she hated us for showing her the pictures, she couldn’t escape the truth those pictures conveyed.

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Her baby was saved as a result.(1)

There are other examples here.

Rather than weigh in with an opinion, I’m going to tell the story of how seeing a picture of an aborted baby back in high school affected the trajectory of my life.

My Own Experience

When I was about 10 years old, I overheard a discussion in my local church about abortion. One woman was saying that abortion should be illegal; another was agreeing, and they were talking about it as if it were a bad thing. But what was abortion?

I asked my mother that night. She told me, “Abortion is when a woman is going to have a baby and she goes to the doctor and he makes it so that she doesn’t have to have the baby.”

My mom is pro-choice, though she says she is “uncomfortable” with abortion “as birth control,” and also with late-term abortions. So this sanitized language was in character for her.

(My whole family, incidentally, is pro-choice. When I started writing for Live Action, my sister stopped talking to me entirely, and that silent estrangement lasted for years.

Things have since improved between us, but this is still a major point of conflict for us. I avoid talking about any of my pro-life work around my family in general, my sister in particular. They have never supported, or even understood, my feelings about abortion.

They would be far happier if I walked away from the pro-life movement entirely. I have never had any support from my family, not immediate, not extended. There are no pro-lifers among my aunts, uncles, or cousins.)

Back to the story. When I had this conversation with my mom, I had only just learned where babies came from in the first place.

I digested this information and came to the conclusion that there was absolutely nothing wrong with abortion.

As time went on, I never thought about the issue much. It didn’t come up much in church, even though I knew that, as a Catholic, I was supposed to be against abortion.

I recall getting in one conversation with a friend where I defended abortion, talking about how a woman should have a choice. But for the most part, I didn’t really think about the issue.

My sophomore year of high school, I started to commit very deeply to my Catholic faith. My parents had taken me to mass as a child, though neither was particularly religious.

As I grew more serious about my faith, I began to believe that abortion must be wrong. I took the teachings of the church seriously and modified my position slightly. Abortion was a bad thing, and perhaps, should ideally be illegal.

But I was no activist. I never felt moved to get involved with the issue. I never argued the pro-life position with my friends. At this point, I considered myself “pro-life”— but kept it to myself. As far as I was concerned, it was something like not eating meat on Fridays during Lent— a Catholic teaching. Applicable to me, perhaps, but not to others— something I was supposed to accept.

I never felt compelled to do anything against abortion or try to convince anyone it was wrong.

I never, ever, in a million years, thought I would be involved in the pro-life movement.

The Photo That Changed My Life

But as a committed Catholic, I spend a lot of time with other Catholics my age. One was strongly pro-life. She tried to convince me to go with her to the March for Life. It sounded fun, but I wasn’t sure about going.

One day, my friend showed me a postcard-sized piece of literature from Human Life International. The postcard was divided into two sections.

On one side, it had a picture of an 8-week-old unborn baby. You could clearly see the hands and feet of the child; you could even count fingers and toes. It was a beautiful picture, but it was the second picture that caught my attention — and changed my life forever.

This picture showed what a baby that age looks like after an abortion. The head was missing; the arms were flung out and clearly visible, still attached to the baby’s torn and crushed body. The little legs could be seen, battered and broken, at the bottom of the picture. I was horrified.

This was a baby. This was definitely a baby. That was what this was. And these babies, my friend was telling me, were being killed at a rate of over 4000 a day.

I couldn’t get my head around it. All those little children — killed. It was shocking. Disturbing. Horrifying.

In that moment, a pro-life activist was born.

I remember being in the local library, looking at more pictures of aborted babies. Silently, I went into the bathroom, and got down on my knees, to pray.

I asked God to use me, to give me opportunities to speak out against abortion and help preborn babies. I promised Him I would devote the rest of my life to fighting abortion. I prayed that I would always be strong and dedicated.

While I’m no longer a religious person, no longer a believer in any sort of God, I’ve always been true to that prayer. In that, I’ve never wavered.

My Pro-Life Work Over the Years

I’ve written well over a thousand pro-life articles. Before I began doing that, I set up a huge website, with pages reaching out to abortion-minded women. Before Google changed its policies about indexing sites to favor pro-abortion sources like Planned Parenthood (a good subject for another article), I got over 2000 visitors a day.

These were almost all pregnant people considering abortion. They all got to see my website, my appeal to them, fetal development facts and pictures, links to pregnancy resource centers, and pictures of aborted babies.

A few hours before I wrote the original version of this article, about ten years ago, a woman left a message on my website saying that she had been planning an abortion and changed her mind after seeing graphic abortion photos.

The next few paragraphs were written back then when my site was still getting a lot of traffic.