How would you feel if a relative or loved one was violently killed, by decapitation or stabbing?

Imagine getting the news; imagine how you would feel. Imagine if you had to go identify the corpse or look at crime scene photos.

Now, imagine that somebody was posting photos of your loved one’s stabbed or decapitated body online, without your permission, in order to advance a political agenda. Imagine the body was naked and uncensored, dripping blood.

Wouldn’t you be furious?

What if they were doing this on a public Facebook page that kids and teens might find, with no filtering and no warning, in order to get a rise out of as many people as they could?

You already know from my title that the perpetrators of this act are Priests for Life (USA), again. This time it’s not Father Frank posting a video of himself with a naked and dirty aborted infant desecrating an altar; he’s cut right to the chase and is posting extremely violent and graphic images of late-term aborted children. Two days ago it was a little boy with no head, blood all over his neck stump and shoulders, photographed from behind naked so you could clearly see his penis. Yesterday morning it was a close-up of a gaping stab wound in the back of a baby’s neck. He’s made them into memes, each with a quote from an abortionist. The headless boy has a quote from a Gosnell assistant, even though Kermit Gosnell’s clinic was already shut down years ago and everyone, including pro-choice people, agree that what he did was heinous.

Now, I know a certain number of the pro-life crowd likes to use images like this, though I’ve usually not seen ones as graphic or sexually exploitative as the image of the little boy, because they “reveal the reality of abortion” and “they really work.” Consequentialist, much? It’s not true and it’s no excuse anyway. When I picketed abortion clinics, I witnessed for myself that these graphic and disturbing images only made women run into the clinic faster. The only headway we ever made was by putting down the signs and talking to people. And this isn’t just my observation. Many pro-life leaders have begged people to stop showing graphic and disturbing images of aborted children. Abby Johnson even mentioned that, when she worked at Planned Parenthood, they loved it when protesters brought the graphic images on signs. The signs didn’t change anyone’s minds, and they made the clinic’s patients think that pro-lifers were crazy.

The signs also have the added effect of re-traumatizing people who are already suffering– post-abortive mothers; women who have had miscarriages, stillbirths or traumatic pregnancies; people who have PTSD from other forms of violence.

Besides all of this, they are wrong because they are dehumanizing. These photographs do not present to us a human being, a child of God with intrinsic dignity, and then try to persuade us to protect that dignity. They present a graphic and horrifying, gory scene in order to arouse our anger and disgust, and that’s all they do. They are used as tools of political persuasion, riling us up and making us angry. They are using people– not commemorating a tragic death, not drawing us into a relationship with a vulnerable other. They are using the corpses of human beings to arouse emotions. They are pornography, plain and simple.

If it weren’t for Father Pavone’s disgusting antics at the beginning of this month, I would think that Priests for Life (USA) had the best of intentions. However, we all know by now that they’re only posting these images to defy and tease the bishop and members of the Catholic faithful who have condemned them, and to shill for Republicans like the racism-condoning Planned Parenthood supporter Donald Trump who offered Pavone a job on his Catholic Advisory Board. I come to this unsavory conclusion that images like this were not posted on Priests for Life’s page prior to this month.

Further, one only has to look at Priests for Life’s Facebook page to see the kind of trolls they’re attracting– a woman posted that she was unfollowing so that her children would not see graphic images, and she was immediately attacked by a foul-mouthed troll. I posted my objections to Priests for Life earlier and got cursed out by another troll. These are the supporter’s Priests for Life is attracting – they are not pro-life, and they are emboldened to abuse women by Priest’s For Life’s downward spiral.

I encourage my readers to report these images and Priests for Life’s Facebook page to Facebook, as graphic violence and as nudity where there’s nudity present, and report again whenever they post another. This is a horrendous degradation of human beings who have already suffered unspeakable indignity, and it has to be stopped.