Fr. Pavone on the use of graphic images of abortion

[joab]

Not only that but there are so many Catholics who have had abortions because their cowardly mothers didn’t teach them right from wrong.

By the above line, then, we don’t need to show these graphic pictures to people indiscrimmitally on the side of the road, as all we need to do is “root out the cowardly mothers”. Of course, fathers must not count.

Also: bmmckinney, I have requested a resonse from you for where you accused me of the sin of “hyprocracy” in an earlier thread. Please reply so that I can attack this sin. Or, are you just throwing out words that hurt people instead of truely discussing the subject.

 

[boppaid]

I’m sorry, Bmmckinney, I’m confused. You say:

Its a good thing that babies get upset if they see pictures of abortion, it means they have a functioning conscience.

Then, you say:

Frankly if you actually have a child who would get upset after seeing these photos it would show that you aren’t a good parent

Which is it?

 

[Teflon93]

People tend to fall into 3 major groups. Those who are proabortion, those who are indifferent to abortion, and those who are prolife. Depending on the polls and the thresholds one sets for membership in these groups, the numbers vary.

We do not need to sway those who are prolife to the prolife cause. They are already prolife.

In order to end abortion, we need enough from the proabortion and indifferent groups to become prolife.

The likeliest and easiest group to bring over to the prolife side is those who are merely indifferent to abortion, but not ideologically, economically, nor culturally devoted to abortion.

Indifference toward abortion is predicated on ignorance of the act and its consequences. To know with some clarity what abortion is and what it does to child, parents, enablers, and practitioners is to move toward either the prolife or the proabortion camp.

Images of abortion serve to puncture one aspect of this ignorance: that the procedure itself is “clean”, that the child being aborted is in no way recognizable as human, that abortion is no more and nor less than a medical procedure.

The partial birth abortion debate has amply demonstrated that information provided, even when not in graphic form, can significantly sway the indifferent toward the prolife position.

Given the human capacity to rationalize, and the tendency of the proabortion camp to euphemize and corrupt language, appeals through the written word alone are limited.

As with the Holocaust, written accounts necessarily seem more distant, and less real, less urgent, than pictures. We are visual creatures.

In the end, it will be necessary to deploy imagery to awaken the indifferent to what really happens during abortion, just as it was necessary to depict the horrors of the Holocaust so as to bring its perpetrators to justice and steel the will against such things in the future.

How these are used matters. Showing them to children will be seen as provocative and hypocritical (rightly, in my opinion). Showing them to pubescent teens may be more licit, but would still require careful handling and probably be better averted in favor of less graphic means. Showing them to adults, long jaded and indifferent to a practice common throughout their lives, will be absolutely necessary.

As for children being traumatized by such things, this is quite possibly true, but to a limited extent. Children see (and have always seen) violence quite frequently. Television, video games, even the “scared straight” kind of programs at their schools. Context matters, presentation matters, and one must always avoid doing more harm than good.

I would not recommend showing these images to a teenage girl considering an abortion, for example, as there is precious little good done by frightening the frightened even more. Other means exist, and, as crisis pregnancy centers demonstrate, these other means are effective.

And effectiveness is the whole point, right?

 

[bmmckinney]

Actually 4 groups, not 3.

You have

the victim

the perpetrator

the bystander

and the defender

If you care more about people’s feelings then babies who are dying you fall in line 3, not 4. Most prolife people unfortunately fall in line 3. They talk big but they don’t follow through because they aren’t prepared to show the truth how it needs to be shown and is effective.

Listen, I love children and its a shame some of them get upset. But what this issue is all about is babies who are being butchered. This isn’t about feelings or any other issue some born people are trying to make it. Those people try to divert the attention away from the babies being murdered by trying to put our emotions elsewhere. As the Lord once said “Satan get behind me!” and I think this is more then appropriate for this situation.

 

[Teflon93]

Actually 4 groups, not 3.

You have

the victim

the perpetrator

the bystander

and the defender

If you care more about people’s feelings then babies who are dying you fall in line 3, not 4. Most prolife people unfortunately fall in line 3. They talk big but they don’t follow through because they aren’t prepared to show the truth how it needs to be shown and is effective.

Listen, I love children and its a shame some of them get upset. But what this issue is all about is babies who are being butchered. This isn’t about feelings or any other issue some born people are trying to make it. Those people try to divert the attention away from the babies being murdered by trying to put our emotions elsewhere. As the Lord once said “Satan get behind me!” and I think this is more then appropriate for this situation.

I happen to agree with you about babies being butchered and the great evil that is abortion. Unfortunately, we are not a large enough majority to get the practice outlawed at present. We are Nat Turner, not Abraham Lincoln, at the moment.

Therefore, the operative question seems to be: how do we get more people onboard?

If ending abortion is our goal (which it is), shouldn’t we tailor our methods (not our principles, but our methods) to effectively achieving that goal?

Hypothetically, if showing graphic images of abortion were proven to drive DOWN support for ending legalized abortion, would you recommend we do so anyway?

I don’t believe you would—you want this butchery to end.

Some people are best reached via shock treatment, some via therapy. We should not eschew the one for the other arbitrarily, but focus on effectiveness.

Who would have thought that “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” would have been the catalyst for ending slavery?

 

[Ani_Ibi]

bmmckinney:

People like yourself will make ANY excuse to try and keep abortion from ending…

In the past six months I have noticed more and more of this. Folks raise a hullaballoo when unpleasant aspects of history and current events are brought into the light of day so that they can be discussed.

Those who bring these unpleasant realities get called any number of abusive names and, more often than not, the objectors derail threads so efficiently that the threads are either closed or folks just abandon them from sheer boredom.

For a while folks objected to the use of the term ‘heresy.’ Then the term ‘Protestant’ fell into disfavour. Then when some of us used the term ‘Reformer’ that too fell into disfavour and sneering disrespect was heaped upon us.

Lately it has been the connection of the early Reformers to practices such as forcible conversion, massacres, seizure of property, anti Jewish practices which Hitler later borrowed. Now it’s graphic depiction of abortions.

The main thrust of this latest trend seems to rest on silencing points of view opposing those of folks who cannot come up with reasoned and referenced arguments supporting their own points of view: to wit, there is an elephant in the room… don’t look… don’t look!

bmmckinney:

you just happen to chose feelings today.

Oh, it isn’t just about feelings. It is about who gets to have those feelings. Same old unselfconscious elitism. The fruit of the poisoned 16 C tree.

 

[Ani_Ibi]

joab:

By the above line, then, we don’t need to show these graphic pictures to people indiscrimmitally on the side of the road, as all we need to do is “root out the cowardly mothers”. Of course, fathers must not count.

Showing graphic depictions of abortion seems to have done an effective job of rooting out the mothers and fathers in question. If it works, why fix it?

 

[KarenNC]

During the civil rights movement you would have been against Martin Luther King Jr’s successful tactics because they might have upset some young children, during the fight against slavery you would have done the same, the same with ending any historical form of genocide or injustice.

mlkjspokane.com/programs_descriptions.php
I suppose Rosa Parks was against Martin Luther King Jr as well when she said:
“I can see a world where children do not learn hatred in their homes. I can see a world where mothers and fathers have the last and most important word. I can see a world in which one respects the rights of one’s neighbors. I can see a world in which all adults protect the innocence of children.

I can see this world because it exists today in small pockets of this country and in a small pocket of every person’s heart.”

People like you are the reason we failed as an established prolife movement in this country for 35 years and are going to be held somewhat responsible in history for this atrocity and even more so because there is a group out there who figured it out and is doing the work to end abortion. If you are indeed against abortion then your motives are simply selfish in nature because its all about my “feelings” of other peoples "feelings instead of other people’s lives.

I am personally responsible for abortion in this country because I think you should show these photos in a way that children can reasonably not be expected to see them?

Not even one woman has committed suicide after seeing these photos. CBR saves about 1-2 children across the world each week that they know of directly simply because of their photos or video. I’ve done it myself.

Well, I’m glad no one has committed suicide because of these photos, but that is not the subject of the discussion. It is whether it is necessary to show them in ways that are reasonably known to be accessible to small children. How many of those photos and videos you mention were shown in venues accessible to small children and how many not? Was there a difference in the results you saw?

People like yourself will make ANY excuse to try and keep abortion from ending, you just happen to chose feelings today.

Now I am trying to “keep abortion from ending”??? Heck of a funny way to go about it.

 

[KarenNC]

Lately it has been the connection of the early Reformers to practices such as forcible conversion, massacres, seizure of property, anti Jewish practices which Hitler later borrowed. Now it’s graphic depiction of abortions.

So because I object to randomly showing huge color photos of mutilated babies to preschoolers, now I support Hitler???

The main thrust of this latest trend seems to rest on silencing points of view opposing those of folks who cannot come up with reasoned and referenced arguments supporting their own points of view: to wit, there is an elephant in the room… don’t look… don’t look!

The only “elephant” in this room is the repeated refusal of certain posters to come up with anything concrete that shows that it’s more effective in preventing abortions to show these photos in places reasonably accessible to small children than in showing these photos in other ways.

Instead we get namecalling, claiming the argument is about “never showing these pictures ever,” mockery, grossly inflated statistics, derision, rejection of any evidence because it is n’t about “these particular pictures in this particular setting at this particular time of day on this particular date” and discussion of the fun and educational value of watching chickens get their heads cut off and run around spewing blood.

One piece of solid objective evidence, guys. One piece.

Same old unselfconscious elitism. The fruit of the poisoned 16 C tree.

Elitism???

 

[bmmckinney]

I thought it would be worth posting for some people to have a quick lesson in the history of social reform. People often wonder why the prolife movement has failed… well after seeing this movie and understanding what is effective and what is needed that question is answered:

youtube.com/watch?v=L6154ooAKA4

Notice that Rosa Parks did not start the civil rights movement which is often claimed but the graphic image of a victim who had no “choice” in his victimization.

 

[bmmckinney]

flickr.com/photos/bmmckinney/932676364/in/set-72157601066099027/

flickr.com/photos/bmmckinney/932721716/in/set-72157601066099027/

flickr.com/photos/bmmckinney/931824795/in/set-72157601066099027/

Go to 6:56 and above to see a parent’s response with little children: youtube.com/watch?v=n67mMxDT7uo.

Its amazing that the only desenters in this argument are of the oppressive “race” or born people. Karen, it is a cold comfort to aborted babies that you say you care about them but won’t do what is necessary because you care more about some born children’s feelings. I guess its no surprise when you haven’t been aborted, haven’t had your arms torn off limb by limb, been disembowed, been decapitated. It is no surprise that born people wish to keep themselves in a safe place and can’t full comprehend the horror of abortion.

This is a clip you should want Karen, I specifically put it in my documentary for people like yourself:
youtube.com/watch?v=NEaNL1Z3YGE

 

[Teflon93]

Who was a more effective proponent of civil rights—Martin Luther King, Jr or Malcolm X?

Do you think that the display of graphic photos to young children would be a likelier tactic of the former or the latter?

It’s not a facetious question—goes to the heart of what’s effective and what isn’t.

Certainly, graphic photos shown to adults is a different story.

 

[bmmckinney]

Well let me give you a great story. My partner that I do prolife work with has a young daughter, she sawone of his graphic photos in the garage when she was 4 years old. She asked him why the baby was broken. How sad… but she didn’t cry, she was curious and her daddy loved her the way a father should even before that moment and when she was told by her father about abortion she didn’t cry. She is happy her father is a hero and not a bystander. She would have been sadder still if her father had said well babies are being killed and these photos help save those babies better then anything else legally and morally but I don’t want to upset children like you. That would have been rediculous.

Malcom X would have been the rescuer of Operation Rescue. We have learned that this didn’t work either. MLK would have been CBR, that worked and history has told us that it is the only thing that WILL work. People need to swallow their pride and join their efforts. But that won’t happen until the established and ineffective prolife leaders accept they didn’t get it right and they need to embrace the effective tactics.

 

[KarenNC]

Its amazing that the only desenters in this argument are of the oppressive “race” or born people. Karen, it is a cold comfort to aborted babies that you say you care about them but won’t do what is necessary because you care more about some born children’s feelings. I guess its no surprise when you haven’t been aborted, haven’t had your arms torn off limb by limb, been disembowed, been decapitated. It is no surprise that born people wish to keep themselves in a safe place and can’t full comprehend the horror of abortion.

What the heck??? Now my argument is untenable because I am alive? I am “oppressive” and have no credibility because I am not dead???

Have I been making some rash assumption? That people who can type on a computer are pretty much by defnition alive and therefore were not aborted? Exactly how are the people who are on this board defending this practice not of the “oppressive race of born people who haven’t been aborted”?

If such typists are indeed people who were not born or were aborted, then I think you should definitely contact the appropriate office of the Church to verify a miracle.

 

[KarenNC]

these photos help save those babies better then anything else legally and morally

Proof. Evidence. Hard data. One single study. One single solitary objective measure. Just one (but given your track record with citing evidence accurately on this thread, please include the source for verification).

 

[bmmckinney]

Karen I am guessing you were born after Roe vs. Wade. I have often looked at people born in bewilderment who argue against the use of a proven and effective tactic, by far the most powerful one and amongst the only ones that has ever worked, and wondered how they can stand there and say that they shouldn’t be used but its understandable because they weren’t in real danger of being aborted legally by their mothers and fathers.

There isn’t an unborn baby alive that supports abortion or would NOT want the graphic reality of abortion to be used to help protect her life from a doctor who will cut her to pieces while she lays peacefully inside of her mother. People who claim to be prolife and want to protect feelings of born people don’t comprehend the real horror of abortion. Because if you did you wouldn’t be bringing this continual laughable argument that proves you are either an abortion supporter or you simply care more about a child’s feelings then you do about another child’s life. You can’t be both prolife and profeelings, you can’t chose like that, because the baby ends up being murdered just about every time, if you are ok with some children being upset possibly by saving other babies lives then you are heroic and have a backbone.

 

[Ani_Ibi]

As with the Holocaust, written accounts necessarily seem more distant, and less real, less urgent, than pictures. We are visual creatures.

In the end, it will be necessary to deploy imagery to awaken the indifferent to what really happens during abortion, just as it was necessary to depict the horrors of the Holocaust so as to bring its perpetrators to justice and steel the will against such things in the future.

If you recall Coppola’s Apocalypse Now. Kurtz speaks of a pile of severed arms being used by his enemy for deterrance. The image was not of the arms being severed. The image was the relic. The tangible. The spirit-imbued remnant of a horror for which no words exist. This is what Kurtz deems to be “The horror! The horror!”

continued…

 

[Ani_Ibi]

Joseph Beuys’s work was about such imagery of War, specifically of the Shoa. But he even challenged the ineffectiveness of the image, opting for a kind of relic installation to communicate directly with the human soul.

…Beuys’s work… is a response to the “rules of the beautiful” (Lyotard) that a complacent public desires from its artists;

a public that would have simple, easily pleasing, pretty pictures to gaze at and admire, to deal with as commodity, accept as necessary embellishments to its comfort, with perhaps a hint at transformation or enlightenment.

Beuys… won’t accept the narrow confines of a beauty that is a “form of defense from the inertia of the everyday”… Beuys insisted on a recognition of the whole, not just those aspects of the whole which were capable of giving pleasure and instant gratification… link

continued…

 

[Ani_Ibi]

Please read the following. It is an important contribution to understanding the ways in which we see, the ways in which we do not see and the ways in which we see that we do not see.

Representation and Event: Anselm Kiefer, Joseph Beuys, and the Memory of the Holocaust

… The Auschwitz Demonstration

is a vitrine containing a collection of objects dating from 1956 to 1964 and assembled by Beuys in 1968. 25

They include a cast metal relief image of a fish, a faceless clay figure of the crucified Christ and an old wafer carefully positioned in a discolored white soup dish, a desiccated rat on a bed of dried grass in a round wooden sieve, a bent and broken carpenter’s ruler in another grass-lined sieve,

a drawing of a starved girl with a sled, a folding photographic map of Auschwitz ripped from a book or a brochure, four rings of blood sausages with plus or minus signs painted on either end, sun-lamp goggles, more moldy blood sausages and sausage fragments arranged on a corroded metal disc with a discolored mirror in its center,

two round medicine vials containing fat, a brown bottle containing iodine, a blank aluminum tag on a string, and two rectangular blocks of wax on top of a double-burner electric hot plate… 26

Beuys’s work is successful in evoking the shocking brutality of the Holocaust without instrumentalizing the victims through direct photographic representation… The technological components, in other words, might suggest that the Germans who wielded them were unavoidably separated from their victims due to the distancing nature of much industrial technology…

Because the executioners no longer had to see, hear, or select their victims in order to kill them, and because the numerous “ordinary” Germans who participated in the destruction of life did so only in ancillary roles (driving and scheduling trains, participating in deportations, manufacturing and transporting materials that were then used in mass murder, etc.), the magnitude of the Nazi horror could, through this interpretive strategy, be deflected upon the industrial means that were used to carry it out.

continued…

 

[Ani_Ibi]

Think of what Beuys is showing here! Not only the horror but the greater horror of denial, misrepresentation, gentrification! He is taking the white gloves off.

Also, who will understand a Beuysian installation of abortion? Art and truth are one thing. Understandability is another thing among those immovably poised to understand nothing which disturbs their pleasure.

Somewhere between laying out wrecked and dessicated relics of the abortion mills on the one hand and photoshopping pregant women in pink gaussian blur on the other hand resides an effective direct communication with the human soul and its moral law.

What if these large posters were displayed at the National Art Gallery in Ottawa? At the MOMA? At the Louvres? Ask yourself why they have not been.