Mary Pezzulo does the hard work I can’t do on Lauren Handy

pril is the cru­ellest month, mix­ing mem­o­ry and desire.

Peo­ple who fol­low me will know I lost my daugh­ter six­teen years ago to a still­birth. That was on April 18, which is soon—the day after East­er this year. It’s weigh­ing on my heart.

I was going to write about J.D. Fly­n­n’s soft­ball inter­view with Lau­ren Handy but I find I can’t write it. I’d have to watch video and see pic­tures to give it the crit­i­cal response that it deserves, and I don’t have it in me to do that.

Which makes it good that Mary Pez­zu­lo has. She watched the painful thing so I would not have to. Her arti­cle is very good, as all her arti­cles are. She says what I would have said, and maybe bet­ter:

Mean­while I have seen many, many peo­ple whose birth trau­ma or trau­mat­ic mem­o­ries of abor­tion were trig­gered by the pho­tos and videos the past sev­er­al days, lead­ing to ter­ri­ble suf­fer­ing.

I have seen many, many pro-choice peo­ple more con­vinced than ever that pro-lif­ers are ghoul­ish and insane.

I have seen no minds or hearts changed. None at all.

Graph­ic and dis­turb­ing atten­tion-seek­ing media cir­cus­es don’t change people’s minds about abor­tion. If they did, they would have by now. We’ve had many. They don’t work.

Read it all.

Also on Twit­ter, Maris­sa Nichols points out that, not only was Lau­ren Handy’s stunt dis­re­spect­ful to the bod­ies of the babies involved, but that it works against the aim she claims to want to achieve. The hash­tag #Jus­tice­ForThe­Five has emerged, but Handy is “not a foren­sic pathol­o­gist and essen­tial­ly tam­pered with evi­dence.”

That’s impor­tant. The con­di­tion of those five bod­ies may have been altered—whether inten­tion­al­ly or inadvertently—from their orig­i­nal con­di­tion and noth­ing can now be proven by them. Noth­ing is admis­si­ble in court.

Nichols’ last point in her tweet also bears men­tion. Stunts like Handy’s are “reduc­tive of the issue as one woman’s attempt to emote with trig­ger­ing graph­ic images.”

Abor­tion is an evil, but it is a com­pli­cat­ed evil and the evil of it can’t be reduced to a trig­ger­ing image or video. Nor can the myr­i­ad of com­pli­cat­ed rea­sons that women who have abor­tions seek them in the first place. Stunts and the­ater and shock images over­sim­pli­fy the com­plex­i­ties and belit­tle the real per­sons involved in them.

A per­son­al note: When you engage in stunts involv­ing pic­tures and videos of dead babies, you’re play­ing with the emo­tions of more than just peo­ple who have had abor­tions or who defend abor­tion, but with par­ents who want­ed their chil­dren and will nev­er get over that grief. That per­suades no one except the already per­suad­ed, and turns peo­ple against you and your cause.

I have a fuller post about the evil of exploit­ing the dead here.