viz.

In the wake of the Supreme Court decision to uphold a ban on "partial birth" abortions, I thought it would be worth mentioning how visual rhetoric is employed in the abortion debate, particularly by pro-life partisans. Anyone who has spent much time on a large university campus has likely seen the images of protest I'm referring to in demonstrations once or twice a year, protests often coordinated by off-campus religious groups. In their most confrontational manifestations, the groups frequently employ large signs depicting very, very graphic images that they claim show aborted fetuses. I don't have enough medical knowledge to evaluate whether or not such images depict the realities of abortion. But certainly such graphic depictions have an impact on passersby. And certainly visual depictions, whether photos or drawings, will influence how people feel about abortion.

I don't wish to post any of the more graphic images pro-life groups have tended to employ, but even in the image above, taken from a Catholic pro-life site, the ostensible medical drawing is certainly designed to have an emotional impact on audiences. I leave it to readers to decide what they think of all this, but would further add that there has been a move in texts such as Sturken and Cartwright's Practices of Looking to acknowledge that even medical imaging is framed and read in a variety of subjective ways.

I am reminded of the scene in Jesus Camp (which I recently screened in my RHE 306 class) where small models of babies in various stages of development were used to talk to young kids about abortion. Instead of looking, say, fish-like, as a fetus does in the early weeks of development, the models looked exactly like newborn babies, just much, much smaller.