Contested Pictures of Persuasion: American Images of Foetuses in Swedish Antiabortion Campaigns of the 1970s and 1980s

Abstract

This chapter explores the circulation, use and public discussion of images of human foetuses travelling from the US to Sweden in the period before and after the introduction of abortion on demand in Sweden in 1975. In this period, new antiabortion groups formed and started to use graphic images of aborted foetuses in their campaigns. This chapter highlights the transnational and transmedial character of this material by demonstrating that many of the images originated from American sources and that many different media were used to spread them, for example, books, brochures, films and slides. Furthermore, this chapter analyses the public discussion about this material, focusing on the uses of words such as “truth”, “information” and “propaganda” in the debates.

That images of human foetuses are often used in antiabortion campaigns is a well-known phenomenon. If beautiful images of the unborn or ultrasound scans are used to create reverence for “life” or evoke emotional responses of affection in the viewer, gruesome images of dead and bloody aborted foetuses are used to create shock and disgust towards the thought of an abortion. The roots of these strategies are often located to the 1960s and 1970s and are strongly associated with the American pro-life movement, which formed in the years around Roe v. Wade in 1973.¹ This was a period when abortion laws were liberalized in many countries in the western world, while photographs of human foetuses were circulating transnationally and started to be exchanged between newly formed antiabortion groups. For example, Swedish photographer Lennart Nilsson’s images of human foetuses gained international fame when they were published in the American magazine Life and the pregnancy advice book A Child Is Born in 1965, and they were subsequently used in American antiabortion campaigns in the 1970s and 1980s.² However, it is less well known that other types of images of foetuses travelled from the US to Sweden during the same period and were used in the campaigns of Swedish antiabortion groups.

This chapter explores the circulation, use and public discussion of images of human foetuses travelling from the US to Sweden in the period before and after the introduction of abortion on demand in Sweden in 1975. The purpose of this chapter is twofold: First, it aims to highlight the transnational and transmedial character of the material used by the Swedish antiabortion groups in this era. As such, this chapter aims to contribute to existing research on Swedish abortion history and the visual culture of the human foetus during the late twentieth century.

Second, this chapter analyses how concepts such as “truth”, “information” and “propaganda” were used in discussions about the images. Visualizations of human foetuses are a pertinent example to use in exploring understandings of these concepts, as they have often been discussed using exactly these terms. On the one hand, images of the unborn are, in various ways, treated as a source of information about gestation. For example, ultrasound imaging provides doctors and midwives with knowledge about foetuses, and pictures of foetuses are often used as a pedagogical tool in sex education. This use of images as a source of knowledge is also mirrored in the rhetoric of antiabortion groups, in which images are often understood to disclose a hidden “truth” that citizens have the right to know.³ On the other hand, massive feminist criticism has been levelled against images of human foetuses for representing the unborn in deceptive ways that reinforce threats to reproductive rights. Here, the “truth” of the images has been one issue. It has, for example, been pointed out by many that even though Nilsson’s images claimed to represent “life before birth”, most of them did not depict living foetuses, but dead ones photographed after abortions.⁴

My analysis builds on a variety of media material distributed by a number of Swedish antiabortion groups in the period from the mid-1960s to the mid-1980s, including films, brochures, journals and books, together with material from Swedish television and the press in which these campaigns were discussed. A more comprehensive study could have encompassed a longer period, thereby also including the well-known Swedish antiabortion group Ja till livet (Yes to Life), which was established in 1991.⁵ However, as the aim is to explore the visual strategies of the new antiabortion groups that formed around the time of the introduction of abortion on demand, I have decided to focus on a more concentrated time period. The material has been generated from searches in various Swedish library catalogues and databases. This chapter is further inspired by approaches within fields such as New Film History and cultural historical media research, which emphasize aspects of production, distribution and reception, and relationships and interactions between different media in specific historical contexts.⁶

Visualized Foetuses in the Public Domain

The late twentieth century is often understood as a crucial turning point in the history of the visual culture of reproduction. In the late 1980s and 1990s, feminist scholars started to use the term “the public foetus” to describe what they understood as a new and problematic visibility of the foetus that had developed in the western world over the past decades. In these discussions, the spread of Lennart Nilsson’s famous photographs since the mid-1960s and the increasing use of ultrasound technology in maternity care since the 1970s were used as prime examples of how foetal imagery was spreading in a way that threatened to undermine women’s newly gained reproductive freedoms.⁷ Many pointed out that Nilsson’s images depicted the foetus as free-floating and separate from the maternal body, a representational practice which contributed to constructing it as an autonomous individual that should be granted personhood and citizenship.⁸

One can, however, ask in what ways this really was a new visual culture. The history of visualizing the unborn is rich and multifaceted, and pregnant and foetal bodies had been represented and displayed publicly in various ways long before the 1960s. Examples include wet specimen collections in museum exhibitions, illustrations in medical atlases and pregnancy advice literature, and sculptures and animated films intended for sex education.⁹ At the same time, scholars have pointed out that there was also a change in how the foetus was depicted in the mid-twentieth century. Lynn Morgan argues that although photographs of foetuses had existed earlier than the 1960s, what was new in this era was that the foetuses in the pictures were claimed to be alive. In the widely circulated photo book The First 9 Months of Life by Geraldine Lux Flanagan, published in 1962, many photographs of aborted, dying foetuses were included, but throughout referred to as living “babies”. As mentioned, the same is true for Nilsson’s images, which were not presented as picturing abortions, but rather used to symbolize developing life. Hence, these pictures were important factors in a development that made foetuses into “icons of life”.¹⁰ Others have analysed the aesthetic means by which this was accomplished, for example how foetuses were humanized, made to look beautiful and how the pictures were created to evoke a sense of wonder in the spectator. As such, Nilsson’s images were similar to other emblematic pictures of the period, such as the “blue planet”.¹¹

The foetus as a symbol of “life” thus gained a strong foothold in the 1960s and onwards, and images like these have since been widely disseminated in sex education and pregnancy advice, as well as being used in campaigns against abortion. At the same time, scholars have discussed how another type of photographs of foetuses was also spreading during this period. Two central actors in this development were the Catholic physician John C. Willke and his wife Barbara Willke from Cincinnati. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, they toured the country to speak against abortion and became key figures behind the visual strategies developed by the US pro-life movement. Lennart Nilsson’s images were seen as very valuable by the Willkes, but they soon started to use another type of image in their campaigns as well—pictures of aborted foetuses that clearly represented them as dead or dying, for example, by showing bloody, disfigured bodies, or foetuses placed in buckets or trash bins.¹² Richard L. Hughes demonstrated that this was a strategy inspired by the anti-Vietnam war movement. While the pro-life movement later became allied with the political Right, it initially had many ties and similarities to other social movements of the 1960s and 1970s, not least the antiwar movement. Many people who had been engaged in the antiwar movement later became leaders of the antiabortion movement, and they used similar tactics of protest and modes of persuasion. In the early 1970s, the Willkes started to collect graphic images of aborted foetuses with the potential of arousing similar feelings of outrage and sadness in their viewers as the shocking photographs of dead children from the My Lai massacre had done. The Willkes used the images in their campaigns and a number of them were published in their widely circulated book Handbook on Abortion from 1971.¹³ In the decades following the 1960s and 1970s, two very contrasting types of images of foetuses were thus proliferating—wondrous images of humanized and beautiful foetuses signifying “life” and shocking images of mutilated and bloody foetuses signifying “death”.¹⁴

Foetal Images in Swedish Antiabortion Campaigns Before 1975

In Sweden, legal abortion had been introduced in 1938, but the law only allowed abortion in very specific cases, and it was in practice very difficult for women to get access to abortion. In the 1960s, however, views on abortion changed drastically. In the early 1960s, when major debates started on many issues related to sexuality, liberal and Social Democratic youth and student organizations began questioning the existing abortion law, which resulted in a heated debate, mainly between so-called cultural radicals and Christians. This led to the commissioning of a public inquiry into the matter in 1965 and eventually the introduction of abortion on demand in 1975.¹⁵ The Swedish development also pushed reform in the other Nordic countries, and liberalized abortion laws were eventually introduced in all the other Nordic countries during the 1970s.¹⁶

While the use of foetal images in antiabortion campaigns is mainly associated with the period from the 1970s and onwards, Swedish examples can actually be found already in the 1950s and 1960s. In 1952, a small scandal erupted in the city of Uppsala, when an uncensored medical film of a late abortion shot at Lund University Hospital was shown by physician Axel Ingelman-Sundberg at a public debate meeting to an audience of around 250 people.¹⁷ Abortion-critical physicians were also the driving force behind the production of Lennart Nilsson’s famous photographs during this era. In Sweden, Nilsson’s pictures have been largely associated with progressive sex education rather than arguments against abortion. However, Solveig Jülich has demonstrated that the reason Nilsson could get access to obstetrical clinics and take the pictures was that he collaborated with physicians who saw a value in the photographs as a means to raise public opinion against abortion. His early pictures of embryos and foetuses were also first published as part of abortion-critical articles written by medical doctors in the magazines Se (See) and Idun-Veckojournalen (Idun Weekly Journal) in the 1950s and early 1960s. When A Child is Born was launched in 1965, however, public opinion on abortion was changing and the pictures were hence re-framed into the context of pregnancy advice, as it would not have been commercially viable to be associated with an antiabortion agenda.¹⁸

Attitudes towards abortion on demand thus shifted quickly and radically in the 1960s, but the wave towards increasing liberalization also led to reactions among those concerned about the development. For instance, the political party Christian Democratic Coalition (Kristen Demokratisk Samling, today the Christian Democrats) was founded in 1964 and remained opposed to abortion on demand until the late 1990s.¹⁹ Groups focused specifically on the abortion issue also formed, and displaying foetal bodies in discussions about abortion became a practice which gained a great deal of media attention. This was illustrated in 1969, when a controversial programme about the abortion issue was aired on Swedish television. Here, a number of different abortion methods were explicitly shown to the viewers, including a scene in which an aborted foetus of 17–18 weeks was displayed in close-up. Even though the programme did not explicitly argue against abortion, the choice to show graphic imagery of this kind was met with much criticism in the press.²⁰ But it also seems to have sparked new engagement in the issue. In the Christian newspaper Dagen, the programme was praised: “Trying scenes from operations illustrated eloquently how the Swedish industry of death operates”, as its front page declared next to a picture of the small hands of a 12-week foetus, reproduced from Flanagan’s The First 9 Months of Life (which had been published in Swedish in 1963).²¹ In 1971, when the public inquiry into the abortion issue had been published, Dagen’s editor Olof Djurfeldt took the initiative to start a working group called Rätt till liv (Right to life) and published a book of the same name, which was described as an alternative to the public inquiry.²² The name was chosen as a response to the inquiry’s title Rätten till abort (The right to abortion), but was probably also inspired by the use of this expression in the American antiabortion movement, for example in the name of the National Right to Life Committee, established in 1967.²³

In 1974, the year that the Swedish Parliament would vote on the abortion issue, other opponents of abortion also decided to use the strategy of showing foetuses as a method of persuasion. One of them was Irma Wright, a gynaecologist from Gothenburg. In 1974, she was invited to a debate on abortion on the popular TV programme Kvällsöppet and brought an aborted foetus of 12 weeks with her in her handbag. When showing the foetus to the host before the show, however, she had to promise not to display it in the programme. Even though she did not show the foetus, the newspaper Aftonbladet reported on the incident in large letters on its front page.²⁴ In a written statement, Wright later claimed that her aim had not been to shock the viewers. “Is it really more shocking to carry a foetus around than to kill it?” she asked rhetorically.²⁵

Wright also wrote a debate article about the matter in Läkartidningen, an established journal for medical doctors, and in a magazine called Operation Sverige (Operation Sweden).²⁶ The latter was published by an organization that was also called Operation Sverige, which had been started in 1968 and that was strongly opposed to the Social Democratic government of Olof Palme. Many among the members and contributors to the magazine had backgrounds in different Christian groups and connections with right-wing extremist or Nazi movements in Sweden.²⁷ The issue in which Wright’s article was published was focused on abortion. On the cover, the headline stated that “The Palme government allows around 30,000 living human foetuses to be murdered each year!”, next to a picture of a pile of aborted foetuses in a black plastic bag, originating from the Willkes’ material (see Fig. 1).²⁸

Fig. 1

The same picture of aborted foetuses published on the front page of Operation Sverige in 1974 (Fig. 1), in the brochure Rätt till liv? in 1980 (Fig. 2), and in the Swedish edition of Handbook on Abortion in 1980 (Fig. 3)

These visual strategies of antiabortion activists in the early 1970s were noted at the highest political level. In the Parliamentary debate preceding the vote on the new abortion law in 1974, one of the Social Democratic members mentioned the front page of Operation Sverige and also said that foetal images had been sent anonymously to Members of Parliament in efforts to protest the proposal.²⁹

Swedish Right to Life Groups and the “Yes to life” Campaign

The Swedish abortion debate of the 1980s has been characterized as lukewarm compared to the more intense debates that would follow in the 1990s.³⁰ In the early 1980s, the new abortion law had been in place for more than five years, and antiabortionists were thus in a marginalized position in opposition to the official standpoint. Nevertheless, there was also a sense that views on abortion were turning. In the fall of 1980, Prime Minister Thorbjörn Fälldin publicly said that he was personally opposed to abortion, except for cases of rape or when the health of the mother was endangered, a statement that triggered both concern and debate.³¹ The early 1980s were also a period when a number of new antiabortion groups were given attention in the media because of their use of graphic visual material.

The groups that appeared in the late 1970s and early 1980s were started on different initiatives, but they eventually formed a network around the issue. One of the groups that was most visible in the media was founded in 1979 in the small town of Borås and called themselves Rätt till liv just like the group started by Djurfeldt in 1971. Djurfeldt’s group was, however, still active and was eventually turned into the nationwide organization Rikskommittén Rätt till liv.³² In 1980, they published a second book with one of Nilsson’s images on the cover.³³ The same year, another publication in which Djurfeldt was involved would, however, receive much more attention—a thin brochure of eight pages titled Rätt till liv?, distributed by the Christian publishing houses Salt & Ljus in Järfälla and SAM-förlaget (owned by Svenska Alliansmissionen—a nonconformist congregation based in Jönköping). The brochure had a warning on its cover, saying that it contained “pictures that might be inappropriate to show to children and sensitive persons”. The text in the brochure argued against abortion from a clearly Christian point of view, but what made it controversial was that it included a translated supplement written by the Willkes with many of the pictures that had been published in Handbook on Abortion, most of them in colour. For example, the pictures displayed images of foetal body parts after abortions made with dilation and curettage and vacuum aspiration methods, and whole foetuses after late-term abortions made through hysterotomy and saline injection. It was stated that the brochure was part of the material in a campaign called “Ja till livet” (“Yes to life”), which was represented by a black-and-white symbol of two hands holding a foetus.³⁴

The brochure was met with strong, mainly negative, reactions. Established media and medical professionals generally described it as “horror propaganda” or a “horror campaign” and used negatively charged words to dissociate themselves from the method of showing pictures of aborted foetuses to abortion-seeking women.³⁵ In an editorial, Expressen, for instance, called it “a way of oppressing and humiliating human beings with sadistic pleasure—human beings who are already beaten”.³⁶ In contrast, representatives of the groups behind the brochure usually referred to it as “information” about reality and the “truth”, while also admitting that the images had a potential to shock. “The dreadful thing about these pictures is that they are true”, Djurfeldt wrote in a reply to Expressen’s editorial.³⁷ And in Göteborgs-Tidningen, Gunnar Melkstam of Svenska Alliansmissionen argued that the images were necessary information comparable to that about, for example, the Vietnam war and the Holocaust.³⁸ The impression that the images could make was also understood quite differently. Many of those who criticized the brochure argued that it created feelings of guilt among women who had gone through an abortion and risked terrifying those who were considering one.³⁹ Melkstam, in contrast, saw the pictures as a way to protect people from negative feelings: “The pictures are horrible, but the intention is not that anyone should be scared. [—] The brochure can protect people from having abortions. Its result can be that many people avoid feelings of anxiety. The brochure is preventive”, he said to Expressen.⁴⁰ Others argued that the feelings of guilt that the images could cause were necessary—“the feeling of guilt is the first step to liberation”, one advocate of the images said in a discussion on television.⁴¹ A similar line of argument was also expressed in the brochure itself, where it was stated that realizing and confessing one’s sins was necessary to receive God’s forgiveness,⁴² notions related to ideas about conversion and redemption prevalent in American right to life activism.⁴³

But it was not only American images of foetuses that were circulating in the media during this time. In November the same year, the newspaper Göteborgs-Posten published a Sunday supplement on the abortion issue, containing large images in colour of the foetus that Irma Wright had been stopped from showing in television in 1974.⁴⁴ Around the same time, it was also reported by several newspapers that a private counselling office for abortion-seeking women that had opened in Malmö, and which was supported by Rätt till liv, aimed to let women seeking abortion hold a doll of a foetus and look at Lennart Nilsson’s images of foetal development to dissuade them from going through with their abortions.⁴⁵

These different images and strategies were not only discussed in the media but also raised in a debate in the Swedish Parliament. Bonnie Bernström of the Liberal Party had written an interpellation about the matter asking the Minister of Health and Social Affairs if she would consider introducing ethical guidelines regarding abortion counselling and taking a stand against the “horror propaganda” used in campaigns against abortions. The Minister of Health, Elisabet Holm of the Conservative Party, answered by referring to the already existing guidelines and said that she agreed with Bernström that “horror propaganda in any form belongs neither in abortion counselling nor in the abortion debate”. She also stated that she had communicated her position to representatives of the Rätt till liv movement and that her impression was that they would discontinue this practice.⁴⁶

Nevertheless, in December 1980, Expressen reported on two new “horror books about abortion”.⁴⁷ The books referred to were Handbook on Abortion, which was now published in Swedish translation, and a booklet called Argument i abortfrågan (“Arguments in the abortion issue”), produced by Rätt till liv in Borås. The latter contained some images of foetuses from Handbook on Abortion, but none of bloody foetuses or foetuses torn apart.⁴⁸ Handbook on Abortion was distributed by Salt & Ljus, SAM-förlaget and Proklama in Eskilstuna, as well as Rätt till liv, Borås. The book had been given a framework which put it in Swedish context. Without mentioning the book’s many controversial images, Olof Djurfeldt argued in the foreword that even though it was written for an American audience, the abortion debate was international, and the book hence still made a valuable contribution to the Swedish discussion.⁴⁹ Throughout the book, footnotes informed the reader about the Swedish situation. One of the chapters in the book presented the American right to life movement, and at the end of the book this was supplemented with a list of Swedish right to life groups. There was also a list of other materials that were available to order, such as booklets, postcards, stickers, posters, films and slides.⁵⁰ In the article in Expressen, a member of Rätt till liv argued that the books were not propaganda, but that many saw a value in their disclosure of the “truth”. On the other hand, Elisabet Holm, who was also interviewed, found the material harmful, and Bonnie Bernström said that she wanted to see legal action taken against it.⁵¹ Bernström’s statement was criticized afterwards by several commentators, who argued that such ideas went against the freedom of the press.⁵² According to a later newspaper article, 5000 copies of Handbook on Abortion were published and it was sent to every Member of the Swedish Parliament.⁵³

The ideas about “truth” and “propaganda” communicated by the antiabortion groups were also expressed in their own material. In 1981, Rätt till liv in Borås produced a short film for the campaign, also called Ja till livet, which is a clear example of this. The film tells the story of a teenage girl called Eva who becomes pregnant by mistake. After going through a vacuum aspiration abortion—which is explicitly shown in the film—she experiences doubts and is overwhelmed by guilt when one day looking at the images in Lennart Nilsson’s A Child Is Born. After this, she starts to seek the “truth” about her abortion. Angered by the “evasive” descriptions she encounters in informational brochures by the National Board of Health and Welfare and others, she sees a doctor at the hospital where she works who agrees to tell her about foetal development and shows her a number of picture slides of foetuses at different stages of development. At the end of the film, she has come to the conclusion that the foetus she aborted was a “life”. The film also connects abortion to genocide, as Eva’s boyfriend watches a documentary about the Holocaust in one scene. Produced by a minor film company called Cymbal Film, the film probably had limited distribution. It was given a 15-year age limit by the National Board of Film Censors and was harshly criticized in the press.⁵⁴ However, before the film’s premiere, Rätt till liv also made a short feature about the film which was shown on the TV programme Magasinet (a programme on societal issues) in December 1980 as part of a longer discussion on abortion.⁵⁵ In this way, the organization got the opportunity to spread their opinions and parts of their material on national television.

It is reasonable to conclude that the discussion about foetal images in the early 1980s was polarized and unequal. While a small group of Christian antiabortion activists advocated the material, politicians, journalists and people interviewed in mainstream media generally took a clear stand against it. However, a dissenting voice in the debates was journalist Maria-Pia Boëthius. Boëthius supported the abortion law, but thought that it was paternalistic to argue that images of aborted foetuses should not be shown: “Should our dear ‘Big Brother’ know what twelve-week foetuses look like, while we easily frightened subjects should be spared?” she wrote. Later in the text, she continued by arguing that an image in itself could not be propaganda:

Is the image of a twelve-week foetus really horror propaganda? I don’t think so. It is a picture of reality, that we have to look at with open eyes. We are in a bad situation when we start to take decisions based on corrected or withheld truths. It is something different when it can be connected to a horrible or moralizing or threatening or untruthful text. Then it can be horror propaganda. But the image in itself is not.⁵⁶

The Silent Scream in Sweden

The discussion about foetal images in antiabortion campaigns seems to have diminished after 1981, but it resurfaced in 1985, when the US antiabortion film The Silent Scream (Jack Duane Dabner, 1984) was imported into Sweden. This film, which is one of the most well-known US antiabortion films, features Dr. Bernard Nathanson, a former obstetrician and gynaecologist who had become an antiabortion activist. It shows a video screening of an abortion as filmed through an ultrasound scan and furthermore displays several graphic colour photographs of aborted foetuses. The film’s name refers to the “silent scream” that Nathanson claimed the aborted foetus exclaimed during the procedure. Since its premiere, the film has received severe criticism by medical experts, sex educators and feminists for being scientifically incorrect and misleading.⁵⁷ In Sweden, it gained attention in the media as clips from it were shown on the television programme Magasinet in March of 1985 as part of a feature about the US antiabortion movement. The programme also included a feature about Rätt till liv in Borås, in which some of their picture slides were shown. In the studio, there was a panel of discussants consisting of social welfare officer Ingrid Olsson, gynaecologist Karl Gösta Nygren of the National Board of Health and Welfare, Pentecostal pastor Peder Teglund from Rätt till liv in Borås and author Margareta Garpe, who was active in the influential feminist organization Grupp 8 (Group 8).

The discussion in the studio became intense. Teglund’s main point was that the National Board of Health and Welfare was hiding the “truth” about abortions. He called their information “propaganda” and argued repeatedly through the programme that women needed to be informed about “the truth” in order to take a decision about abortion. When one of the hosts asked him about the relationship between his group and the American antiabortion movement, he replied that they had very little contact. He said that The Silent Scream was a good film, but that Rätt till liv had not yet decided whether to use it, and he also dissociated himself from the violent methods used by the American groups reported about in the programme. Nygren was the guest who expressed his disagreement with the antiabortion groups using the strongest words. He said that parts of Rätt till liv’s “propaganda” were “extraordinarily […] unethical and horrible” and criticized them for representing abortion in “an incorrect way, an exaggerated emotionally charged way”. He called The Silent Scream “completely untrue”, said that it made him “tremendously upset” and explained that he had tried to stop it from being shown on television. When Teglund brought up some facts about foetal development, Nygren argued that an abortion was not about the anatomical details of the foetus, but about “being forced to refrain from becoming a parent”. Olsson argued that women were not as ignorant as the antiabortion groups described them, but that most knew very well what an abortion meant, and that films like The Silent Scream only led to increased feelings of guilt. Garpe, finally, criticized Rätt till liv for using words such as “human being” about the foetus, and the political aim of the antiabortion groups to change the existing law. Women were in most cases completely capable of making their own decisions, she argued, but she also said that she did not believe in covering up the truth, as that strategy only led to campaigns like those by Rätt till liv.⁵⁸

Reactions to The Silent Scream were largely negative in the mainstream press, where words such as “[h]ysterical”, “fanatical” and “horror propaganda” appeared to describe it and the opposition against abortion in the US in general.⁵⁹ Even Alf Svensson, leader of the Christian Democratic Coalition, took a stand against the film.⁶⁰ It is not known to me whether Rätt till liv ultimately decided to show the film, but it was screened at meetings organized by the Christian organization Maranata, whose leader Arne Imsen claimed to have imported the film in the first place, and it remained in circulation among Swedish antiabortion groups well into the 1990s.⁶¹

Conclusion

The use of images of foetuses in Swedish antiabortion campaigns was not new in the period between the late 1960s and early 1980s, but the changing legal framework of abortion during this period meant that a number of new antiabortion groups formed and started to use a new type of material, in which images of aborted foetuses played a central role. These groups were small, and they did not represent everyone who was opposed to abortion or Christian, but their campaigns still attracted a lot of attention in mainstream media, which gave them a broad visibility and even caused discussions in the Swedish Parliament. The groups used a wide variety of media in their campaigns: books, brochures, postcards, stickers, picture slides and films. Material from the US was used in these campaigns in different ways: photos from different American sources were reproduced in Swedish publications, and American material was also translated and distributed in Swedish. The visual material was not exclusively American, however—Lennart Nilsson’s photographs were, for example, also used. Furthermore, the arguments used in the campaigns were similar to the ones used by American groups (e.g. the conversion narrative in Ja till livet, or the comparisons made between abortion, war and genocide), and they employed similar words and expressions in their rhetoric—most clearly through their use of the expression “right to life”. It is, however, difficult to ascertain to what extent the Swedish groups communicated with their American counterparts. Teglund said on television that they had very little contact, but this might have been a strategic statement as the programme he participated in was reporting on the violence used by US antiabortion activists.

The way in which the foetal images in the material were discussed in the media speak of a number of issues related to notions about “propaganda” and “information”. One of the most obvious ones is that the concept of “propaganda” was used by both sides in the debate as a derogatory term about the material produced by the other side. Rätt till liv used the term to describe how the state covered up the “truth” about abortions by using “evasive” language and leaving out information. On the other side, commentators used the word about Rätt till liv’s material to describe how it presented the abortion issue in an overly emotional way, most clearly through their use of images perceived as shocking. Here, one can discern different views about what the “truth” about an abortion was, and how knowledge about this truth should be communicated. On one level, there were notions about an objective truth and medical facts. Rätt till liv understood the images to offer an indisputable “truth”, which their opponents did not disagree with per se. Discussions about, for example, how the images were arranged or what they really showed or left out were absent from the debates. Instead, opponents of the material argued that it was “untrue” mainly because it was slanted through incorrect and emotionally charged descriptions. On a different level, however, there were also arguments saying that the “truth” about an abortion was not found in the images. For instance, Nygren argued that an abortion was not about all the details regarding foetal development.

Another central discussion concerns the influence of the images. Recurring words used in the press reports about Rätt till liv’s material were “horror”, “guilt” and “harm”. These words suggest that a central view among those critical of the material was that it had a negative emotional influence on its viewers. Rätt till liv also understood the material to have a strong impact, but saw this as a desired effect in order to disclose the “truth” about abortion. Arguments were additionally raised about how the feelings of guilt that the images produced would lead to a kind of spiritual liberation or redemption. The implied audience for the material, who were understood to be influenced or enlightened in these ways, was clearly women, and the discourse around the images consequently suggests that many of those who were critical of them understood women to be a vulnerable group, while those who defended the use of the images saw women as an ignorant group in need of information. At the same time, Boëthius argued that it was a form of paternalism to protect women from seeing images of aborted foetuses and that women needed to have full information before taking important decisions. Consequently, the discussion about this material was not only about foetuses, but perhaps more centrally about women, and about women’s susceptibility to certain kinds of “propaganda” or “information” in relation to their new role as decision-makers about abortion.