How many women know the answer to this question? I’m guessing not many. As we watched the 1974 film “Taking Our Bodies Back” I’m sure I was not the only one witnessing an abortion for the first time. And it was shocking. Not because of how grusome it was, or scary, or morally painful to watch – but because it was none of these things. I was shocked by how simple it was.
A google image search of abortion brings up mostly gruesome and horrifying images of dead and dismembered fetuses, likely often used as “pro-life” propaganda. I scrolled through pages of images (and did related google searches), without finding a single one of an actual abortion procedure like that shown in the film. The closest I came was the diagram on the left: a suction aspiration or vacum aspiration abortion, which is preformed in the first trimester and accounts for the overwhelming majority of abortions performed:
Yet the images that dominate the abortion discourse are not only propaganda, but propaganda that is deliberately misleading about the reality of abortion – images that show the result, or dramatically replicate the results of 2nd trimester abortions or partial-birth abortions (or sometimes even still-births) – images that always remove the woman from the picture, taking away her personhood in outrageous hypocrisy. For more on the imagery lies in “pro-life” propaganda, read this post by Robin Marty, “What an Abortion Really Looks Like.”
The power of the image cannot be overstated, yet the image of a woman having a safe, simple, and short abortion procedure – the reality in the majority of cases – is completely absent from the discourse. Even Planned Parenthood’s video about what to expect when getting an abortion doesn’t include any visual representation of the abortion itself (not even in the form of a diagram, as shown above):
Why is it that women have to turn to a film that is almost 40 years old in order to see what should be readily available information – what an abortion looks like? The internet and new media have failed to provide women with accurate imagery of what a typical abortion looks like, information that is readily available for other common medical procedures (google image appendectomy, and you’ll see lots of medical diagrams and some photos of actual procedures as well). This allows for exaggerations and blatant lies to take root as fact.
I found hope in http://thisismyabortion.com , a website devoted to pictures a woman surreptitiously took while getting her abortion. As the photographer wrote “My intention in documenting and sharing my abortion is to demystify the sensationalist images propagated by the religious and political right on this matter.” Yet how come it takes a woman documenting her own abortion in secret to provide us with honest images of abortion? In 1987 article by Rosalind Pollack Petchesky, “Fetal Images: The Power of Visual Culture in the Politics of Reproduction,” , she writes:
“finding ‘positive’ images and symbols of abortion hard to imagine, feminists and other prochoice advocates have all too readily ceded the visual terrain.”
I say it’s past time we tried to take that terrain back.
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