Documentary
9 min / 2003

This film changed me.

It is a video, taken in the womb, of an abortion. It is evil uncovered and brought into the light. Just as it took pictures of dead Jews, stacked like cordwood, to drive home the horror of the Holocaust, and it took the newspapers carrying pictures of the lynched teen Emmett Till to reveal the wickedness of what was happening in the American South, so too, visuals are important in the abortion debate.

Ours is a visual culture and graphic pictures of bloody, broken, tiny bodies communicate what abortion really is (Eph 5:11). These images cut through words like “choice,” “rights” and “freedom” and make plain the fact that abortion is murder.

While this short video, Harder Truth, is one I believe should be widely shared and seen, it contains pictures that are deeply disturbing so it should be shown with care. When you share this, the audience should be warned about what they are about to see.

And what are they going to see? While there is no verbal narration, the film begins with two minutes of text detailing what is going to be shown and why it is being shown. Then there is two minutes of a baby in the womb, developing from zygote to fetus. Then, just after the 4-minute mark, we see what an abortion actually is and what it does to the baby. The final four minutes of the film show remains of aborted babies: bloody broken bodies, tiny detached arms and legs, and crushed skulls.

I’ve shown this at dozens of presentations and, as the video itself suggests, when I show it I tell the audience that anyone who wants to look away should feel very free to do so. I also find that, while the film is very short, its nine minutes of content can be overwhelming and I often show only a middle selection of two or three minutes.

The toughest consideration in showing this film is, how young is too young? As pro-life apologist Scott Klusendorf notes, girls as young as 12 can, in many jurisdictions, get an abortion without their parents’ knowledge or permission. Twelve is very young. But if they are old enough to get an abortion isn’t it important they know the real truth of it?

I’ve been asked why I bother showing this to pro-life audiences. After all, we don’t need to be convinced abortion is wicked, do we? Well, yes, we do. Abortion happens in even 100% pro-life churches too, and the reason it does is because sometimes those pro-life convictions are only an inch deep. That shouldn’t surprise us. Abortions are all done behind closed doors. The victims are invisible. We might hear that 100,000 babies are murdered each year in Canada, and ten times that amount in the US, but those are just numbers, and too big for us to really fathom. So when a young teen finds herself pregnant and, mistakenly or correctly, thinks her parents will disown her if they ever find out, will inch-deep convictions stop her from taking the “solution” the world is readily offering?

So there is a need then, to show even our Christian, pro-life, young people, the grim reality of what abortion is.

Every bit as important, we need to tell our daughters that we will love them and will help them if they ever have an unplanned pregnancy.

WARNING: THIS VIDEO CONTAINS GRAPHIC IMAGES OF AN ABORTION.