Hi, my name is Andrew Karen. I serve as the president of Tiny Heartbeat Ministries. We are a Christian anti-abortion nonprofit dedicated to providing the educational arm in the Pacific Northwest using abortion victim photography. We conduct gospel centered pro-life outreach at college campuses, high schools and outside of abortion clinics.

Abortion victim photography, also known as AVP, is pictures of aborted babies. These photos are real and often quite graphic. AVP is an incredibly powerful tool when used appropriately but has grown to become quite controversial amongst the pro-life movement and especially in the church. Today I want to share with you 3 reasons why we use abortion victim photography in our ministry. Then I’ll discuss some of the objections people have to AVP. Please be a good Berean yourself and search the Scriptures to see if these things are true.

1. Biblical

First and foremost, we use abortion victim photography because we believe it honors and glorifies Jesus Christ to do so. Ephesians 5:11 says, “Have nothing to do with the fruitless deeds of darkness, but rather expose them.” The authors in the Bible didn’t have photography back in the day, so I can’t point to a verse that specifically commands using photography to expose evil. But I think there are principles in Scripture that do guide us as to how God wants us to treat this issue. So here’s my question for you:

Does God withhold graphic portrayals of truth in the Bible?

Let me ask it again: does God withhold graphic portrayals of truth in the Bible?

Almost every single objection I have ever heard against AVP could easily be applied to many instances in Scripture when God commands a graphic testimony against evil. Think of when Moses strikes the Nile River and turns it to blood, or when the prophet Jeremiah takes the leaders of Israel to the Valley of Hinnom to prophecy against them. The Valley of Hinnom was a burning garbage dump where the Israelites used to sacrifice their children to idols. Jesus later uses it as His graphic allegory for Hell. God kills Ezekiel’s wife, the delight of Ezekiel’s eyes, as an object lesson to show the people of Israel what will happen to them in the coming judgment.

Time doesn’t allow me to go through the other Old Testament examples such as the flood, Sodom and Gomorrah, the sacrificial system, Isaiah preaching naked, Elijah slaughtering the 400 prophets of Baal, public stoning, and much more.

But what about in the New Testament?

Does God withhold graphic portrayals of truth in the New Testament?

Most people forget that the bloodiest book of the Bible is in the New Testament, the Book of Revelation. In the Book of Revelation, people actually beg for rocks to crush their brains rather than to have to face the wrath of the Lamb of God. In Acts we see this clearly with Ananias and Sapphira. This married couple comes into church and they lie about how much they are financially giving to God. God kills them. In church. In front of everyone. Then the church members dragged their dead bodies outside to bury them.

What about Jesus?

Surely Jesus would never show a bloody graphic image in public where children might see it, right?

And yet our great God saw fit to crush His only begotten Son publicly on a bloody Roman cross for all to see. If the captain of our salvation sweat drops of blood as he went to be the sacrifice for our sins, surely we should not shrink at the sight of blood ourselves.

Does God withhold graphic portrayals of truth and Scripture? He does not.

2. Historical Precedent

Let’s take a look at some more recent historical examples of victim photography. I named my son after William Wilberforce. Wilberforce was a British politician who almost single handedly led the movement to abolish the slave trade throughout the British Empire. It took him 30 years of desperate campaigning. Early on in his campaign, he realized that the horrors of the slave trade were all but invisible to the British people who lived in ocean away from the plantations. So Wilberforce made it visible to them. He and his associates disseminated as many drawings and diagrams as he could find to persuade the hearts of the people. You may recognize some of their handiwork from your history books, such as the Brookes slave ship diagram.

Over a century later, Lewis Hine would pose as a Bible salesman in American factories in order to photograph the abuse and exploitation of young children. His photographs were circulated in the newspapers and led to the child labor laws of the early 1900s.

In 1955, Emmett Till, a 14-year-old black boy, visited a relative in Mississippi. He was from the north and did not understand the risks of being black in Mississippi in 1955. Allegedly, he whistled at a white woman in a grocery store. A few nights later, that woman’s husband and half-brother kidnapped him, mutilated and shot him, and threw his body in a nearby river. After his body was discovered three days later, Emmett’s mother made one of the most difficult decisions she would ever make. She decided to have an open casket funeral so that the world might see what happened to her baby boy. Emmett’s face appeared on the front page of the newspaper.

Later on that year, Rosa Parks was told to move to the back of the bus. Rosa remembered the picture of Emmett and she didn’t leave her seat. And thus the civil rights movement was born. All because of one picture.

Think about it.

Abortion victim photography just might be the only kind of victim photography that the media is too afraid to show and they’re afraid to show it because they recognize the power it possesses to persuade people to become anti-abortion. The media shows graphic images all the time when the injustices depicted align with their worldview.

Do you think you would know the name George Floyd if his death had not been videotaped and then the video circulated in the media?

Why do you think PETA, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, uses graphic pictures of animals in slaughterhouses in order to persuade people to stop eating meat?

Why do we show pictures of those that died in the Holocaust and our history books and movies?

Social reformers of all types recognize the power of victim photography in virtually every other circumstance, because the picture is worth 1000 words. Aside from God’s word himself, the visual evidence for the barbarity and cruelty of abortion is the most powerful tool we have. We must use it. If we withhold it, we actually participate in the cover up of abortion.

3. Self-Evident

Abortion protests itself. God has given us all a conscience and written eternity on our hearts. He says in the 6th commandment, “You shall not murder”.

Everyone knows in their hearts that abortion is an evil act, they just don’t realize how evil it truly is. Using abortion victim photography reveals the truth that everybody already knows. They’re suppressing that truth because they love their sin. See Romans 1.

Abortion takes away the baby’s voices.

Abortion victim photography gives them their voices back.

These babies deserve to have their picture shown. This is their only baby picture. They have a right to have their voices heard. Their blood cries out to the Lord from the ground.

I want you to imagine a woman who had been so severely beaten by her ex-husband that she had a gaping scar across her entire face. And this woman began to give workshops around the country about the need to recognize and stop domestic violence.

One day she came to speak at a church conference for pastors who were interested in hearing her testimony. Right before she got up on stage, the coordinator of the conference asked for a favor and told her this: “We have some men in here who have a past with domestic violence. They’ve gotten forgiveness from the Lord for their sins, but hearing your testimony will be very difficult for them.

So we’d like you to wear a veil when you speak, so they don’t have to see your scar.”

I understand why you might be hesitant.

What if a child sees this picture and is traumatized?

Well, what’s worse, for a child to see a picture of an aborted baby, or for a child to become one?

Well, what if people are turned away from a conversation because of the ugliness of these pictures?

Well then, so be it. May that picture stay in their mind forever.

You might ask, well, isn’t this just fear tactics and emotional manipulation?

No, it’s not, because it’s the truth. These pictures are real, and since the abortion industry euphemisms, everything behind pithy slogans like “My body, my choice,” it is our great task to take away the veil to uncover what the abortionist wants to keep a secret, to expose the fruitless deeds of darkness and let the Lord do His work of conviction of sin, righteousness and judgment in the hearts of men and women everywhere.

Finally, I want to end by sharing two personal testimonies.

While ministering with Created Equal outside an abortion facility in Washington, DC, a mother came up to our team staring at the picture on the sign depicting an aborted baby. She was pregnant and had come for an abortion.

She looked up from the sign that our team member held and said “I can’t do that to my baby.”

We took her to the pregnancy center for a free ultrasound and counseling, and she chose life that day. She saw abortion for what it really is.

While I was studying criminal justice at Washington State University, I had been doing research on the Holocaust. Specifically, I was researching the Buchenwald concentration camp. Buchenwald was one of the largest concentration camps during the Holocaust and was home to horrors beyond words. But what surprised me the most was Buchenwald’s location. I had figured that the Nazis would have tucked it away somewhere far from the civilian population, but to my horror, Buchenwald sat on a hill overlooking the peaceful German city of Weimar. Many of the citizens of Weimar were Protestant Christians, attending churches throughout Buchenwald’s tenure.

But those Christians did nothing.

As I discovered this, I arrogantly said in my heart that I would have lived like Detrich Bonhoeffer or Corrie Ten Boom. I would have stood up for those dying a few miles away that very same week in my studies. I sat in my dorm room doing research online and came across a picture I’d never seen before. It was a picture of a murdered baby. An aborted baby.

Then my world came crashing down on me.

I already knew the statistics. Over sixty-three million unborn babies have been murdered in the United States since 1973. Over sixty-three million. That’s over 10 times the number of the Holocaust. I knew this already. I had already come to know the Lord, and I had already been walking in step with the Holy Spirit. But although I knew the facts, I had never seen the facts.

And when I saw that picture, I wept like a baby. On the floor in my dorm room, I heard that still small voice begin to boom in my heart saying, like Nathan the Prophet said to David, “You are that man. You are a citizen of Weimar.”

And that’s when I knew what I had to do.

I needed to take that picture of that murdered child, print it out, and stand in the center of campus to show everyone what abortion really is. The day I finally obeyed that command was one of the best days of my life. That day gave birth to Tiny Heartbeat Ministries, which the Lord has now used to save many babies from abortion.

These pictures changed my life. The babies in these pictures changed my life. Because those babies are made in the image of God and as a Christian man, I have a duty to protect my Heavenly Father’s precious image. I hope seeing these pictures will be life-changing for you as well, and I hope you will take great care in honoring God by showing these pictures to our cold, dark world.

Proverbs 24:11-12 says this: “Rescue those led away to death, hold back those stumbling to the slaughter. For if you say, ‘Behold, we did not know this,’ does not He who weighs the heart perceive it? Does not He who keeps watch over your soul know it, and will He not repay each man according to his work?”