2000 CONFESSIONS
December
November
October
September
July/August
June
May
April
March
February
January

Little Notes
Letters

Talk About Movies
Roamin' Catholic
Follow Me




Contents © 2000
by Jim Holman.
All rights reserved.

APRIL 2000 CONFESSIONS

IS VIOLENCE OBSCENE?

The January edition of this paper contained an excerpt from a Marie Claire article in which Micheline Jenkins wrote about time spent in an abortion clinic. While there, she asked an employee, Sally, if she could see the fetal remains at the end of the day. She wrote, "I wondered how the doctors and nurses could stand to look at them every day. Besides, I didn't want to pretend abortions hadn't really been performed."*

There exists within the ranks of the pro-life movement a division on the issue of displaying images of the slaughtered innocents: large posters often (until recently) seen at abortion protests, posters displaying dismembered bodies, bodyless heads, and the like. One side, I suppose, sees them as a necessary evil: "It's an ugly image, but abortion is an ugly thing, and people need to see that. We are at war, but the casualties are hidden. Denial of the humanity of the fetus is essential to the enemy's position; we need to take away the possibility of denial, and these pictures help. Look here -- arms, legs, head, face. Is this not human? Is this not murder?"

The other side -- and I lean in their direction -- is not comfortable with such a display. Confessing this discomfort is not easy -- it might be seen as a sign that I lack the stomach for war, or that I fail to comprehend the magnitude of the evil being fought. Or worse, it might be seen as a sort of vicious daintiness, akin to calling aborted children "the products of conception," or using "fetus" instead of "baby" when speaking of the aborted, when any mother or doctor will say "baby" when the child is to be brought to term.

I am not ready to accuse myself of these things, but I'm still uncomfortable, and a friend recently put a name to my discomfort. He said that pictures of dismembered bodies are obscene. If I recall correctly, his view was that, however noble the end, the means remained evil, a violation of "the dignity of the body."

Among my fellow Catholics, the notion that the body has some intrinsic quality which makes treating it in certain ways unacceptable normally comes up in discussions of birth control. And "obscene" usually gets attached to pornography and sacrilege. I was surprised to hear them used here, but it seemed right. Displaying photos of dismembered remains somehow seems an additional crime against the murdered child, a wrongful treatment of the victim's body. It is something that should not be seen. (I know we admire paintings of martyrs: would we grant similar admiration to photographs?)

I am not as intelligent as I would like to be; I cannot sort all this out. But neither can I dismiss it. My mind keeps going back to a line from Proverbs that my mom wrote on a card and posted on our refrigerator: "Set no wicked thing before thine eyes." Also, to the line from Thomas More's Utopia explaining why only criminals served as butchers: "Every brutal act brutalizes the brutalizer." I am tempted to extend this to "Every witnessed brutal act brutalizes the witness." (The clinic employee, reported Jenkins, asked if anybody wanted a sandwich immediately after announcing that the remains could be seen.)

Another friend once pooh-poohed the extravagant violence of the movie Braveheart while condemning the brief exposed breast: "When a boy goes to bed at night, what he remembers is the breast." The sexual image is more clearly an immediate occasion of sin, I'll grant. But whence comes the age-old tandem complaint against sex and violence in the media? Are not both in some way an objectification of the person, a use of their humanity for some further end?

Secondary to the question of the obscenity of these images is the question of their effect. I believe that violence, though sometimes unavoidable, begets violence, and by extension, violent images provoke violent reactions. This may be the desired effect; apathy is a real enemy. But the apathetic often recoil at the sight of what they see as fanaticism, and if there is some real objection to be made to this display, they may be more likely to regard pro-lifers as fanatical.

As for those who are not apathetic, I am not on the front lines in the way that others are, so I cannot pronounce, but I wonder: is a woman considering an abortion likely to be swayed by a picture of a dismembered fetus more than she would by a picture of a healthy one? Are pro-choice passersby likely to have their hearts touched, or to feel that their faces are being rubbed in their own filth? I once heard from the pulpit a quote from some saint or another: "Do I not conquer my enemy when I make him my friend?"

I know we need to stand up in the face of injustice, to cry out on behalf of the oppressed, but might there be some line we ought not cross? I think here of the line from Macbeth: "I dare do all that may become a man; who dares do more is none."

TOP