Monica Miller is one of the handful of people in the world who have encountered thousands of abortion victims face to face.
This year marks the half-century anniversary of Monica Miller’s pro-life activism. During the past half-century, she has sidewalk counseled outside abortion clinics, prayed outside of political conventions, retrieved babies from dumpsters and pathology labs, photographed them, buried them with the dignity they were denied in life. In 2009, the New York Timespublished a series of her photographs, featuring the faces and severed limbs of abortion victims in America’s paper of record.
During a presentation at Protect Life Michigan’s internship in July, Monica recounted stories from her essential memoir Abandoned: The Untold Story of the Abortion Wars. Between February and September of 1988, she, her husband Edmund, and several others retrieved boxes of aborted babies from a loading dock in the Chicago suburb of Northbrook. The babies, killed at around a dozen clinics across the country and shipped to the pathology lab, were unboxed, photographed, and buried.
In Abandoned, she recounted the experience of taking the children from their cardboard coffins:
I had been staring at arms but did not see arms. I had no prior context by which my brain could recognize them. They were the dismembered limbs of a completely torn and mutilated body and, up until that day, my eyes had never been confronted with such a reality. It was as if an alien word had been spoken, a word I could not at first fully understand until, after much straining, I finally comprehended the message. Someone was trying to speak to me through the silent, shocking vestige of this broken body.
In the darkness of her nights among the dead babies on the loading dock, Monica felt that she was on the edge of the world. It was a place of radical loneliness, with the unloved nameless who had been “cut off from all human communion.” To recover the bodies of these little people was to bring them back into the human family, even though it was simply to commit them to the earth and to mourn them. Some were sent back to their hometowns for burial; over 1,200 were buried in Milwaukee’s Holy Cross cemetery.
I first met Dr. Monica Miller in 2013 at a “gathering of the clans” summit in Chicago for pro-life groups that use abortion victim photography in their public outreach. We didn’t call it abortion victim photography then; we still used the phrase “graphic images.” In a single presentation, Monica persuaded everyone present in the hotel ballroom that we should change the way we talked about the photographs we use, because to use abortion victim photos was to be witnesses, calling others to be witnesses, as well.
Most of us thought of our work in terms of “exposing the injustice.” That is the truth, but as Monica taught us, not the whole truth. Our work was also about allowing the victims of this injustice to take their rightful place in our society; to allow them to be seen. She did not change the way we saw our work, but she did broaden it. Abortion victim photography is not just about horror and gore; it is about the recognition of mutual humanity leading to a real shift in perspective:
What truly needs to happen is for our culture to take the loss of these human beings personally—as abortion is the killing of a personal someone. There is hardly a tool that can be imagined that makes the loss of these personal someones real to a world that would rather just not be bothered. Abortion is a killing intent on keeping the lives of the pre-born hidden, as if these persons never existed. The display of the images reverses this injustice. In this sense the victims of abortion have a right to bother you.
Monica is exceptional in the pro-life movement: not only a strategist, but a philosopher of abortion victim photography. She has never lost sight of the children at the heart of this great moral struggle. The classic cautionary saying warns us to never meet our heroes, because we will be disappointed. Perhaps that’s true, most of the time. It is not true for those of us who are privileged to know Monica Miller.
Protect Life Michigan hosted an event to celebrate Monica’s fifty years in the pro-life movement last month, and staff from the Canadian Centre for Bio-Ethical Reform and the Ohio-based Created Equal joined them. Monica’s words have been quoted by activists across North America and Europe; her philosophy of witness now animates many of the pro-lifers who use abortion victim photography. We are all very grateful to her, and had the opportunity to tell her so.
After her presentation, one of the pro-life interns asked Monica if she’d seen miracles during her years in the movement. Monica, the woman who had spent countless hours on the edge of the world with abandoned, nameless children, laughed. “Every time a woman walks out of an abortion clinic,” she replied, “it’s like Lazarus walking out of the tomb.”
