During our U.S. Civil War, from 1860-1865, few Americans knew what was really taking place on the battlefields. One man in 1863, Alexander Gardner, a photographist in the new field of photogravure, dragged his wooden cameras and metal plates into the killing fields and captured pictures of Americans slaughtered by one another.

By way of couriers on horseback, Gardner urgently forwarded his photo plates back to New York publishers, and, for the first time, American families saw the horrific images of their fathers, brothers, husbands and sons, their precious men folk, lying dead and mutilated in once serene pastures. The result was the education of a nation; the industrialists of the Northeast used their financial powers and the war came to an abrupt end. No one can ever dispute the ascendancy of a picture.

On 1/22/93, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch Newspaper rejected a pro life advertisement submitted and paid for, at no small price of $25,000, by the Missouri Right to Life. The ad consisted of a simple black and white photograph of a child's plastic doll with it's arms and legs disconnected and laid next to its disconnected head and torso. The omnipotent Post-Dispatch said it "wanted to protect its St. Louis citizens from the horrifying doll pieces" (sic). It was too 'controversial' a photo and though it said no words, it spoke volumes of truth. Beginning in 1994, and each year thereafter, Sen. Bob Smith used the simply sketched yet empathetic Partial Birth Abortion drawings, a total of 5 black and white pencil sketches, to successfully convince the members of both houses to pass the ban on Infanticide. The pictures did what weeks of speeches could not do previously.

Somewhere along the line, we seem to have acquiesced to the pro aborts who ironically protest, "don't show those horrible pictures of aborted babies.... they're scary and you'll frighten people with them...you're cruel to show those pictures.... Don't let my kids see those gruesome pictures." Those aborted baby pictures are a gruesome reality and precisely why Americans need to see them and see them often.

Our good pro life groups over the years of the hard struggle, seem to have fallen into the trap of "secular civility," whereby they stopped showing the vivid photos of our aborted little boys and girls, photos that have the effect to change peoples' hearts and minds. Good news, however, in Great Britain this year Pro Life group Precious Life distributes hundreds of thousand of videos and CD-ROMs featuring graphic images of abortions to some 240 cooperating schools in England and Scotland as part of a £1 million pro life publicity drive to educate their people in truth.

On Monday, June 25, 2001, and for the next 6 months, a confidential number of trucks rolled out of the Los Angeles-based Center for Bio-Ethical Reform with billboard-sized photos of dismembered babies pasted on all sides, intending to make abortion impossible to ignore or trivialize. A new campaign uses old tactics in an attempt to refocus the debate over abortion. The pictures show tiny, severed body parts of first-trimester babies. The photos are all accompanied by the word "Choice." The Center's aim is to stigmatize the words 'abortion' and 'choice' with a picture that is horrifying, shocking, yet very truthful.

The awesome power of the new, crystal clear, color 4-D sonogram or ultrasound, when compared to the earlier less clear pictures from older machines, when used to detect the living, moving baby inside the mother's womb, has been shown to reduce the number of abortions significantly. The 2/8/90 issue of The Journal of the American Medical Association quoted North Carolina physician Joel Hylton, referring favorably to the early, blurry black and white sonograms available at that time: "Who can deny, after viewing these sonogram pictures, that the fetus is alive and is a separate genetic entity? Its humanity also cannot be questioned scientifically. It is certainly of no other species. That it is dependent on another makes it qualitatively no different from countless other humans outside the womb."

If only it could be that every woman about to abort her baby would be required, by law, to have a sonogram, creating an emotional bond at the mother's first glance at her baby, dare we hope that all might be spared?

In a recent bold move, the Thomas More Center for Law and Justice of Ann Arbor, MI in August, 2001, successfully convinced the city of Great Falls, MT to drop their ban on pro life demonstrators carrying graphic posters of mutilated aborted babies. The City's statement of retraction: "We will refrain from limiting in any way any pro-life advocate or group from expressing their opposition to abortion in a public forum through the display of hand-held signs containing images of aborted children based on the content of their message." The original complaint from the City was that so many motorists were 'rubbernecking' and slowing down to look at the horrific pictures, that traffic became blocked and congested. Police will now direct traffic manually at the places of demonstration — the education of a city.

Courageous 5-day "Face the Truth" protests in Maryland this summer drew much attention across the state as pro life demonstrators carried 5 foot posters of aborted babies on the streets. Mrs. Andrea Hussle, the tour's director, likened abortion to the atrocities of the Holocaust. "In those cases, individuals did little until the pictures of the horrors were published. Once people saw the pictures, they took action," she said. "We're hoping to raise the level of consciousness that it really is a baby." Passerby Robert Tansey of Frederick said it was hard to look at some of the pictures. But, he said, "It's just an educational process to show people what's really going on." Sister Nancy Hanson of Baltimore explained, "We're here to present the truth with these pictures, even if it's an ugly truth."

Mr. Joe Scheidler from Chicago said: "Call us names, give us the finger. It doesn't matter. America's got to wake up. We have a holocaust on our hands. People driving by will go home and tell their families about the goofy people who held the signs. But they'll remember the pictures." Bring back the pictures. It was these graphic photos from Father Paul Marx, back in the 1980's, which educated my husband and me into the reality that abortion kills innocent, living babies.