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PBA120Y: Why Victim Photography

Recommended Co-requisite: PBS120Y

Presentation

Slides are available here: http://media.trtl.ca/abortion/victim-imagery.html

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  • press “s” if you want to see the presenter's view, along with all the notes

Intro needed…

“The biggest misconception that we in the pro-life movement must fight is the idea that we are fighting a never-ending battle. Many have resigned themselves to the idea that we must fight abortion, one crisis pregnancy at a time, and find the courage to go on by moments of beauty in their day-to-day work. While this work is infinitely valuable, let us remember one thing: We’re not here to fight a battle. We’re here to win a war of ideas. We’re here to end the killing.” - Jonathon Van Maren

All of CCBR's projects incorporate abortion victim photography. A major component of our EndTheKilling plan is the saturation of Canadian culture with images of aborted pre-born children.

  1. History: Our strategy has worked for social reform movements in the past
  2. Resistance: The abortion movement has said our strategy works and is a threat
  3. Results: We have the fruits of our work to prove our success

History

  • What is our goal? We want our culture to reject abortion as an unthinkable “solution” to a crisis pregnancy. In order to end the killing of the pre-born, we need to make abortion unthinkable in the same way that other injustices (such as slavery and child abuse).
  • It is ahistorical to say that abortion is a permanent part of Canadian culture. Throughout history, other social reformers have confronted injustice and changed the unchangeable.
  • Every single successful social reform movement used specific strategies:
    1. They exposed the injustice with evidence and images.
    2. They confronted the culture with the truth.
    3. They were willing to endure persecution from those perpetuating the injustice.

Abolitionists

  • The British abolitionists are one of the first examples of a group consciously employing those strategies in order to bring about an end to the slave trade. Abolitionists like William Wilberforce and Thomas Clarkson forced slavery into the mainstream consciousness so that the British had to confront it.
  • slave trade deeply ingrained, out of sight; empty ships would leave England, go pick up slaves in Africa, leave the slaves in the Americas, and come back laden with goods; most people had never even seen a person with dark skin
  • That began to change thanks to the potter and entrepreneur Josiah Wedgewood. Wedgwood was a prominent slavery abolitionist. His friendship with Thomas Clarkson – abolitionist campaigner and the first historian of the British abolition movement – aroused his interest in slavery. Wedgwood mass-produced medallions depicting the seal for the Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade and had them widely distributed, which thereby became a popular and celebrated image. The Wedgwood medallion was the most famous image of a black person in all of 18th-century art.
  • people wore medallions as brooches, bracelets, pinned it up in their hair, on cufflinks
    • Thomas Clarkson wrote; “ladies wore them in bracelets, and others had them fitted up in an ornamental manner as pins for their hair. At length the taste for wearing them became general, and thus fashion, which usually confines itself to worthless things, was seen for once in the honorable office of promoting the cause of justice, humanity and freedom”.
  • but simply showing the humanity of slaves wasn’t enough—some people argued that their lives as slaves were actually better than their lives in Africa, and would be even worse if they were freed—the abolitionists had to show the inhumane nature of slavery
  • In 1788, they began using one of their most powerful tools: a drawing of the inside of the slave ship “Brookes.”
    • [The diagram] gave measurements in feet and inches while showing the slaves closely lined up in rows, lying flat, bodies touching one another or the ship’s hull… The diagram began appearing in newspapers, magazines, books, and pamphlets; realizing what a powerful new weapon it had, the [abolitionist] committee also promptly printed up more than seven thousand copies as posters, which were hung on the walls of homes and pubs throughout the country
    • abolitionists afraid to show this pic to elderly supporters, thought it would give them a heart attack; historian Eric Metaxas said that for the people of the day, to look upon this picture was like looking into Hell
    • In the face of hundreds, after the abolitionists started exposing the reality of slavery, it took only 20 years to end slavery in the British empire, and nations around the world soon followed suit

Anti-Child Labour Movement

  • Lewis Hine—National Committee Against Child Labour Practices
    • in the early 1900s hired Lewis Hine to show people what was happening to children in factories
    • They were being forced to work hard labour often from 6am to midnight, working on starvation wages, losing any chance of childhood and education; many also lost limbs and sometimes lives while they worked
  • Hine disguised himself, hid his camera under his jacket, and took pictures of these children (show pics); in second photo, some of these boys had accidentally had their fingers chopped off while they canned fish—and they weren’t even allowed a break but had to keep on working
  • His life was threatened several times because of what he was doing; he would put pictures on large displays where he knew lots of people would be—like fairs, and when people complained he said, “Perhaps you are sick and tired of child labour pictures; well so are the rest of us, but I propose to make you so sick and tired of child labour pictures that when the time for action comes, these pictures will be a record of the past.”
  • 12 years after he started taking these photos the number of child labourers was cut in half, and not too long after that laws were put into place to protect children from being abused by labour, and those are the same laws, in America, that protect children today

Civil Rights Movement

Other Movements

Syrian refugee crisis: has been going on since March 2011; 6.6 mill people internally displaced, 22,000 people lost their lives

  • countries knew it was happening but no one doing anything; majority of the public didn’t know/care
  • wasn't until Sept. 2015 when a Syrian boy by the name of Alan Kurdi, 3 yrs old, washed ashore on the Mediterranean sea, when consciousness awakened to the fact that something had to be done
  • pressure on government skyrocketed, and though people may disagree on the best way to deal with it, that one image spurred millions of people to demand action
  • all of these cont. b/c hidden – need to make imposs. to ignore; Gregg Cunningham (“Injustice…”)

Resistance

  • We’re also encouraged by the response we’ve gotten from people who support and promote abortion, who make their livelihoods from the lives of children
  • Frances Kissling of Catholics for a Free Choice and Kate Michelman, former president of NARAL Pro-Choice America
    • 2008: “In recent years the anti-abortion movement successfully put the nitty-gritty details of abortion on public display, increasing the belief that abortion is serious business and that some societal involvement is appropriate.”
  • Kissling 2012: “The fetus is more visible than ever before, and the abortion-rights movement needs to accept its existence and its value. It may not have a right to life, and its value may not be equal to that of the pregnant woman, but ending the life of a fetus is not a morally insignificant event.”
  • Joyce Arthur is the executive director of the Abortion Rights Coalition of Canada
    • In a webinar she gave a few years ago which one of our volunteers attended, the volunteer asked in the Q&A portion: “What is the biggest threat to reproductive rights in Canada?” and she responded that it was CCBR and our pro-life activism on campus, especially our GAP displays
  • The very existence of the RRJC…
    • Erynn Brook from the RRJC– FB status: “There's a lot of people moving through this area on little sleep and little food, and as a media-literate community we all need to recognize the power of violent images and how manipulative it is to target students in these conditions.”

Results

FIXME For individual presentations, best to tell personal stories; what to include for the website?

  • Statistical effectiveness
  • Testimonies

These testimonies represent just a fraction of the fruits we have seen. Time and time again, we see that images of abortion victims change hearts and minds, and save lives.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0_Zy1jSGJpo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oUIQlfx1zGA