Why I disagree with aborted foetus shock tactics

One of the thigs that kept coming up during recent controversy about abortion campaigns was the way that images of foetuses was used.  CBR UK/Brephos made a big thing of how Christians or members of the public should not be offended by an image of a living foetus in the womb as displayed at Keswick.  What they were quieter about was that their normal strategy is to have a dual display with the image of a living foetus on one side and an aborted foetus on the other.

Now, yes, I agree that portraying the image of a living foetus is not offensive.  I have previously explained why it could still be distressing for some.  This doesn’t mean that it shouldn’t be used. It does mean that we should have pastoral wisdom about its impact and not rush to assumptions and judgements concerning people’s reactions.  Additionally, the context wherein normal practice of campaigners is to put up the second image as well, may mean that people who knew this won’t have looked closely but just assumed the image was of the latter.

Now, regarding displaying the second image, again, just because that might offend or be distressing to others doesn’t necessarily mean it shouldn’t be used. However, my view is that it should not and here is why.  It’s not that I’m concerned about causing offence.

Rather, we don’t, generally as a rule post images of dead, human bodies about, whether on the internet or on large scale posters.  This would be true if we were campaigning on other matters affecting life and death.  Why?  Well, I think that crucially, the reason we care about human life is that we believe that we are made in God’s image and therefore should be treated with dignity and respect.  This applies to how we treat the bodies of those who died. We seek to treat them with dignity.  It is in fact one of the horrors of abortion that even after the baby’s death, their body is not treated with dignity. 

If we care about the life of the unborn, then we should treat them with dignity and this means that we should be very wary of doing anything that treats them as there to be employed in our campaign.  This is so, even, perhaps especially if our campaign is meant to be for them.