viz.

(Public Domain Image found at Wikimedia Commons)

I came across this Russian anti-abortion poster from 1925, and thought it was pretty striking.  The text translates to:  "Abortions performed by either trained or self-taught midwives not only maim the woman, they also often lead to death."  It shows a woman talking with a midwife, then a woman in a hospital, and then a coffin being lowered into a grave with mourners looking on.  What struck me about the image is that the argument is essentially that abortions are bad because they endanger the lives of the women who get them.  The pathetic appeal depends on the viewer's sense of identification with the woman. 

While you do often hear pro-life advocates talking about the negative consequences of abortions for them women who get them, I don't think it's a huge stretch to say that the "life" at the center of most pro-life arguments is not the life of pregnant women.  Rather, anti-abortion advocates today have been phenomenally successful at making the baby/fetus the primary point of identification and erasing the presence of the mother.  I'm not going to post pictures of aborted fetuses on this site, but these rather maudlin images from the 1973 Right to Life comic Who Killed Junior get the point across pretty well (potentially disturbing):

(Image Credits: Ethan Persoff)

You can view the entire comic book here.  I've been thinking for a while about what a pro-choice visual rhetoric might look like, and given our current public debates about the redifinition of rape, conscience clauses, and this disturbing but hopefully DOA bill in South Dakota, which would essentially make it legal to kill doctors who perform abortions, it strikes me that there may be an opportunity to reclaim the language of life in a way that makes pregnant women in distress visible once again.