Since an aborted fetus is not yet a baby, and certainly not yet a toddler or small boy as shown, why use pictures of children at all? If you're intending this to represent the aborted fetus' future self, a picture of a big ugly thug or an old woman would be just as good.
— Maggie McNeill (@maggiemcneill.bsky.social) 2025-05-04T07:33:35.413Z
You could go all the way to the other end of the life-cycle & show a bare skeleton, and it would be just as representative of an embryo or fetus as that sappy picture is.Children should be taught this kind of critical thinking in school so as to make them resistant to emotional manipulation.
— Maggie McNeill (@maggiemcneill.bsky.social) 2025-05-04T07:38:39.956Z
Long, long before US evangelicals decided that they were going to be anti-abortion, Catholics were; Jerry Falwell himself only started preaching against it in 1978:
Evangelicals considered abortion a “Catholic issue” until the late 1970s…Evangelicals in the late 1960s and throughout most of the 1970s by and large refused to see abortion as a defining issue, much less a matter that would summon them to the front lines of political activism…and some groups with historic ties to evangelicalism pushed for legalization…When the Roe decision was handed down on January 22, 1973, W. A. Criswell, former president of the Southern Baptist Convention…[said] “I have always felt that it was only after a child was born and had a life separate from its mother that it became an individual person…what is best for the mother and for the future should be allowed.” Baptists, in particular, applauded the Roe decision as an appropriate articulation of the line of division between church and state, between personal morality and state regulation of individual behavior…[even Jerry] Falwell…did not preach against abortion until February 26, 1978, more than five years after the Roe v. Wade decision…
And yet, Catholic education has traditionally put such a strong emphasis on critical thinking skills that some wit once pointed out that the Church was its own worst enemy because it provided children with the tools that undermine faith. I once wrote a paper arguing that anti-abortion propaganda relying on graphic pictures was immoral because it attempted to emotionally manipulate the audience rather than making a moral argument; my teacher, a nun, had some choice words for me, but still gave me an “A”. I see that evangelicals are not so principled.
