Mis-Illustrating Abortion

[lafinjack]

According to The Guttmacher institute, 90% of all abortions occur in the first trimester. According to WebMD, a 12-week old fetus is 2.5 inches long and the typical woman will have gained three to five pounds. Most of these women’s pregnancies are essentially undetectable to an observer

Comments

[brewsternorth]

Very good post!

Also, I believe the more gruesome pictures (or lifesize models) of aborted fetuses used by anti-choice campaigners are often taken similarly from late-term (*much* rarer) abortions.

[brewsternorth]

...And I am disappointed in even AlterNet (who otherwise have a good social justice reporting record in the main) and TNR falling for that trope.

[lightningxsnow]

Yeah. Also, the fact that realistic pictures of any medical procedure will not look pretty. Tonsillectomies look pretty disgusting if you google image search that....save the tonsils! Tonsillectomy is murder! :P

[darth_snarky]

Before my mom had her gallstones taken out, she got a video from the library showing that kind of surgery. It wasn't pretty. Still, gallstones: nobody wants to keep those!

[stellar_kar]

Thank you also for that other link about the imagery.

[akashasheiress]

My political youth organisation recently made a statement about supporting abortion-access. One of the online newspapers put a picture of one of those plastic ''fetus'' dolls as a picture, another one put one of a woman in labour.:/

[darth_snarky]

Jeez, in the Telegraph one she looks ready to pop.

It's definitely a worthwhile issue to bring up--what's worse, I have a hunch a lot those articles pictures came from someone lazily searching for pregnancy stock photography, which of course pretty much only includes photos after it becomes very, very obvious. It always amazes me (and not in a good way) how small decisions like that can wind up really affecting the wider conversation about a major issue.

[columbasimplex]

Then there's the broader, possibly more subtle issue at play, that a woman can be represented in toto by a big pregnant belly. It's sort of akin to how in EVERY documentary show where a woman is giving birth in a hospital delivery room, all the staff around her, including her own doctor, calls her "Mom" like it's her name, even going so far as to have her husband speak for her (I guess because when you think of women as nothing more than emptyheaded, personality-free baby gestation chambers, you've got to talk to someone with some SENSE about having a baby. "OK, Mom, you may feel some pressure now." "I know Mom has a birthing plan, but Mom needs to understand that we need her to start pushing in 37 second or we're going to give Mom a C-section." It all seems to come from the same principle that the most important part of a woman is her babymakin' area

[columbasimplex]

Ooh, that's an interesting connection I hadn't thought of! Both seem to be connected to the idea of visually "dehumanizing" the person in the image. A pregnant woman is just a big ol' belly, and an obese person is just a waddling butt at the mall. These may be "just" stock photos, but how they're composed and then how they're used carries some pretty intense social baggage.

[lafinjack]