Ultrasounds Confirm Unborn Babies are Human Beings and Abortion Activists Hate That

One of my daughters is president of a local Women Helping Center. If anyone knows the critical importance of ultrasounds, it’s him and the staff. By making concrete what a woman facing an untimely pregnancy is essentially an abstraction, ultrasounds dramatically change the decision-making calculus.

By slowing the rush of death, ultrasounds offer a woman (or women) prone to abortion a chance to catch her breath and calm her nerves. That’s why, of course, pro-abortionists hate women for help in general, ultrasounds in particular.

Let’s put ultrasounds in the context of “science,” which for pro-abortionists is limited to whatever they insist will advance their cause. So when pro-abortionists come across something—anything—they think can further the process of desensitizing the public to the horrors of abortion, it’s “real science.”

Conversely, when pro-lifers find something—anything—that offsets the Abortion Industry’s futile attempts to separate the mother from the unborn child, we are engaging in “pseudoscience.”

When we offer irrefutable evidence, we are said to have “hijacked” it.

I thought about this dynamic when I re-read it [yet again) “The Iconic Photo Hijacked By the Anti-Abortion Movement,” by Amarens Eggerat, whose grumpy piece for VICE Netherlands was reposted for an American audience here.

Click here to sign up for pro-life news alerts from LifeNews.com

Pro-life veterans would guess, correctly, that she is referring to “Swedish photographer Lennart Nilsson’s book of photography A Child Is Born, which became a global sensation after appearing in Life magazine in 1956 [she means 1965]. Nilsson captured intense closeups showing the various stages of human development, from fertilized egg to fully formed baby.”

It’s been almost seven years since Nilsson, a photojournalist extraordinaire, passed away. As we have written dozens of times, the effect of the cover of Life magazine is not calculated.

The cover–“Fetus, 18 weeks”–continues to receive a well-deserved second look as “one of the great photographs of the 20th century,” to quote Charlotte Jansen, writing for the British (and very pro-pro-abortion) newspaper, The watchman in 2019.

Here’s how Jansen got started:

In April 1965, Life magazine put a photo called Fetus 18 Weeks on its cover and caused a sensation. The issue was an amazing success, the fastest selling copy in the entire history of Life. In full color and crystal clear detail, the image shows a fetus in its amniotic sac, its umbilical cord coiled around the placenta. The unborn child, floating against a seemingly cosmic backdrop, looks frail but serene. His eyes were closed and his small, perfectly formed fists were clenched against his chest.

So to get back to Amarens Eggerat, how did pro-lifers “hijack” this picture? I have read the article several times, and I am still confused.

The best I can gather is that the pro-lifers didn’t make much of what came to be known as “Nilsson photos,” as this is how the photos were one of the earliest “windows on the womb.”

To be sure, he was joking

The color pictures were one of the first representations of the miracle of life, and actually gave viewers the impression that they were staring directly into the womb, looking at a fetus calmly floating around like a tiny astronaut.

But since, “In reality, Nilsson photographed miscarried and aborted fetuses,” somehow decades later the impact on countless millions of mothers and fathers should be reversed while they are happy looking at a four-color ultrasound of their unborn baby. Or at least make it suspect, to the likes of Amarens Eggerat.

What a waste.

Again, Eggerat’s real gripe is less with us than it is with the transformative power of ultrasounds to change the way we—and especially pregnant women—understand the unborn child. Read this convoluted paragraph:

And then, the public window into women’s private domain became political. Before ultrasound technology, anti-abortion activists often relied on religious or moral arguments against safe access to abortions. But the powerful image of prenatal scans helped them to strengthen their cause – triggering people’s protective instincts towards what looked like a tiny unborn child.

He recycles tired pro-abortion nonsense about how ultrasounds have made women “invisible” because “they can only be interpreted by specialists.” In a distorted sense, that may have been partially true in the 1970s and 1980s, but no one needs to tell parents of unborn babies what they see on the screen today.

We were once at a Saturday banquet at our daughter’s Women Helping Center when the medical director showed the audience ultrasounds from the 1970s, 2000s, and today.

You can see the baby’s head, fingers, and feet in extraordinary detail.

The effect on the audience was truly stunning.

You hear whispers in the room.

No one has “hijacked” anything, although pro-abortionists continue to dodge, trying to persuade themselves that “triggering people’s protective instincts towards what looks like a little unborn child” is somehow wrong.

Earth in Eggerat, this is the most natural response in the world.

LifeNews.com Note: Dave Andrusko is the editor of National Right to Life News and an author and editor of several books on abortion topics. He writes frequently for Today’s News and Views — an online opinion column on life issues.