This week, Newsweek has decided to take on what it's calling "America's Abortion Wars." It's a reasonable choice of topic — Planned Parenthood has been slammed with anti-choice propaganda and repeated attempts at defunding (even though it doesn't use federal funds to provide abortions), and just a few weeks ago, Robert Lewis Dear launched a terrorist attack on a Colorado Planned Parenthood center that killed three people, explaining in court that he was "a warrior for the babies." As far as the state of abortion rights in 2015 goes, "war" about sums it up.

Which is why I was flabbergasted by Newsweek's cover image: a computer-enhanced illustration of a well-developed, relatively late-term fetus with no sign of the actual person in whose uterus it is presumably housed.

At a guess, it looks to be between twelve and fourteen weeks along – just at the upper limit of the fetal age for most abortions, or a bit older – although given the nature of its digital, um, "improvements," it's hard to tell. For one thing, if the Newsweek fetus is twelve weeks along, it looks about five times bigger than the translucent, two-inch-long fetuses you normally find at that stage; this image looks less like an actual pregnancy, and more like an adorable computer-generated alien.

Or, to be blunt: More like a baby. And, given the presence of the word "ABORTION" in all caps, we can assume it's not going to be around for long. Intentionally or not, the Newsweek cover sums up what's wrong with how we talk about abortion: Everything is about the fetus, which is humanized, and the actual pregnant person is erased.

Granted, I'm only talking about the cover, here — not the story inside, but there's a long history of fetal images being used to scare people and rile up anti-abortion sentiment. It's why mandatory ultrasound laws exist. It's why anti-abortion protesters hold up gory, bloody images of fetuses at protests, and why "crisis pregnancy centers" (anti-abortion organizations that market themselves as abortion and pre-natal care clinics) show unsuspecting pregnant people movies like "The Silent Scream," which purports to show an ultrasound of an abortion in progress. Supposedly, you can see the fetus screaming in pain.

Doctors have been forced, time and time again, to issue public statements about the inaccuracy of these images. (In "The Silent Scream," for example, not only is the reportedly 12-week fetus not screaming, medical research concluded in the Journal of the American Medical Association that it doesn't have the developed nervous system that would allow it to feel pain.) But the tactic has entered the mainstream of conservative politics — even when that means that conservative politicians have to lie. Carly Fiorina, for example, appears to have either imagined or hallucinated the abortion video she described on stage at a Republican debate, in which — and I quote — you can see "a fully formed fetus on the table, its heart beating, its legs kicking, while someone says, 'We have to keep it alive to harvest its brain.'"

Compared to Fiorina's statements, the Newsweek cover may seem relatively responsible and subdued. But it's still misleading about how abortion works. For one thing, the image on the cover is not exactly representative. In reality, nine out of ten abortions take place inside the first twelve weeks of pregnancy, meaning that the Newsweek fetus represents the upper end of the range, not the average; in many cases, the embryo being removed is less "futuristic Gerber baby," more "lentil-sized clump of cells."

Furthermore, even in cases in which someone aborts a pregnancy after twelve weeks, the pregnancy is in many cases not healthy: Second and third-trimester abortions often happen because the mother's life is at risk, or because of severe birth defects that don't show up until later in the pregnancy. These aren't livable disabilities — they're conditions like anencephaly, in which the fetus fails to develop a skull and upper brain, and could not possibly survive outside the womb. Surgical abortions are also undertaken during miscarriages, to prevent infection. So even in cases where a fetus was carried long enough to look very human, it probably wouldn't look like a healthy, happy baby.

But talking about the fetus, and what it looks like, is beside the point. All of these scenarios involve a decision made by one person: a woman. (Or non-binary person, or transgender man.) Deciding whether to stay pregnant is not about the fetus. It's about them: their lives, safety, and futures. By focusing exclusively on fetuses, and promoting the imagery of endangered, persecuted "babies" in the womb, people who oppose abortion are able to totally avoid talking about the ways in which their positions endanger and persecute the actual people carrying those fetuses around.

Newsweek may not have intended this, but putting the phrase "abortion wars" next to a fetus ignores so many of the casualties of these wars. It ignores Robert Lewis Dear's victims, murdered abortion doctors, and rape victims forced to carry their rapists' children to term. It erases poor women forced to have children they can't afford, and people who aren't able to pursue educations because they had children too early. It leaves out any person who wants to control their own body, but can't, because of abortion restrictions. Put "abortion wars" next to their faces, and you get a whole different message – one that's much closer to the truth.

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