Many leading figures of the anti-abortion movement recall their conversion by image. As governor of California, Ronald Reagan had signed into law a bill that legalized abortion in certain cases through nineteen weeks. Then he watched a televised debate in which Mildred Jefferson, the first black woman to graduate from Harvard Medical School, used graphic slides to describe “the mush of the developing baby.” He was moved to write her a letter: “You made it irrefutably clear that an abortion is the taking of human life. I’m grateful to you.” Troy Newman, who went on to lead the clinic-picketing group Operation Rescue, was radicalized by a picture of an aborted fetus much like the ones that he would later plaster on his “truth trucks.” Bernard Nathanson, the one-time cofounder of the largest abortion rights advocacy group in the country and an OB-GYN who claimed to have performed 5,000 abortions, defected after watching the procedure in real time over ultrasound. “For the first time,” he wrote, “we could really see the human fetus, measure it, observe it, watch it, and indeed bond with it and love it.”
In 1985, Nathanson made his own anti-abortion documentary. The Silent Scream is most famous for a scene in which he takes us through an ultrasound of an abortion. As the vacuum approaches, the twelve-week-old fetus appears to buck in pain and fear — at one point, Nathanson claims, silently screaming. A group of doctors responded that a fetus of that gestational age does not have a cerebral cortex and therefore cannot feel pain; Nathanson had created the effect of anguish by speeding up the ultrasound as the instrument was inserted. In the film, Nathanson assures us that while it had once been possible for “a doctor” to ignore fetal life, the dazzling advances in imaging would make even “a feminist and a strong pro-abortionist” never again “discuss the subject.” Reagan, now president, agreed. “If every member of Congress could see that film,” he said, “they would move quickly to end the tragedy of abortion.”
I watched The Silent Scream quite calmly, over lunch. But the trash can, the hysterotomy, the blackened late-term intact fetuses — these got to me. Fetal photography is correct in its most basic claim: that more developed fetuses look a lot like babies. The abortion rights movement has never quite known how to respond. Calling the fetus “a clump of cells” is in many ways accurate — 80 percent of abortions take place within nine weeks, when the embryo is slightly more than a centimeter long and bloblike in appearance — but historically has been unconvincing when placed next to the image of a fat-cheeked fetus sucking its thumb. “Bodily autonomy,” “equality,” “choice”: these terms are offensive or at the least unintelligible to those who strongly or somewhat agree that abortion is “the same as murdering a child” — as of May of this year, some 39 percent of American women.