The photo is haunting: A tiny baby boy, his minute legs pulled toward his visibly ribbed chest, one hand resting on his bottom, the other pulled up to his face. He appears to be sucking his thumb, perhaps to console himself. He is dying.
“This is baby Samuel,” wrote South Australian pro-life activist Dr. Joanna Howe in an Instagram caption. “Born alive after an abortion at 16 weeks, he sucked his thumb in the Butterfly Room at a [Queensland] hospital. He lived for over 30 minutes. He was perfectly healthy prior to his abortion. He was left to die. No one picked him up, wrapped him, or gave him any medical care to alleviate his pain and suffering.”
In a sane, moral society, this photograph—despite being slightly blurred and clearly taken on a cell phone—would be for the abortion wars what the photo of the young girl Kim Phúc, fleeing naked and in terror after a 1972 napalm attack, was for Vietnam. Both highlight the suffering of children; both expose the horrific cost behind our polite public defenses of our public policy. These photos stir the conscience.
But we are not a sane or moral society. After Howe published the photo of baby Samuel, which she says was given to her by a whistleblower who took it in the room for grieving parents at Townsville University Hospital in Queensland, the authorities swiftly set to work to suppress it, and the hospital has launched an investigation into how it was shared. The photo went viral in Australia, and then around the world.
The Guardiannoted with concern that the “distressing picture of a foetus being called ‘baby Samuel’ is now being used by a broad range of anti-abortion activists,” but did not explore why the photo of the dying child was so distressing—to do so would be to violate the media outlet’s commitment to abortion rights. Instead, the outlet noted that it “is understood Queensland Health, the Queensland government, THHS and others are doing everything they can to get the image removed from social media.”
Even the authorities—from the hospital to the state government—recognize that the photograph of Samuel’s dying moments is too powerful to permit. The soothing lies of the abortion industry can only survive when babies are killed quietly, their suffering muffled by the bodies of their mothers, or left to die alone, uncared for, uncomforted, and most importantly, unseen. For the hospital, the crime was not what was done to the baby boy—it was a “serious breach of confidentiality.” This is the morality of Nazi bureaucracy.
