Gross-out bloody-fetus images: Do they change anybody's mind?

Gory pro-life displays like the one at the Liberty Bell last week just seem to make people mad. We looked at some science behind fear and disgust triggers and using them to try to change deeply held beliefs.

The pro-life group Created Equal set up the display at Independence Mall.
Maria Pouchnikova

Last Friday, a bunch of fresh-faced activists from Columbus, Ohio, set up large orange warning signs around Independence Mall — WARNING: ABORTION VICTIM PHOTOS AHEAD. This was, frankly, a little disingenuous — if you could see the warnings, you could also see their graphic, bloody photographs blown up on signs and playing in a slideshow with musical accompaniment on a 12-foot-tall video screen.

Right up front: This is fine. The First Amendment covers ugly things. The Liberty Bell is a magnet for people desperate to tell America their truth, and the courts have been very clear that they are allowed to speak it to the tourists. In 2010, an appeals court sided with a pro-life activist who in 2007 was arrested when he refused to stop haranguing tourists with a bullhorn and graphic abortion photos.

Between 2010 and 2013, the National Park Service estimates it has issued roughly 170 day permits per year for "First Amendment events," as they're called, at Independence National Historical Park. It's likely you only noticed a few, if any. Protests that use inflammatory tactics are effective at getting attention. But are they any good at changing minds?

City Paper set up shop in the park last Friday to ask people who'd walked past the display set up by the pro-life group Created Equal one question: "Did seeing these images change your mind?"

The answer was almost uniformly, "No." There was one outlier in the dozens of people we spoke to: a 65-year-old Asian man from Philadelphia who said, "Maybe a little bit." There was also the young Asian man in a Wharton jacket and headphones who somehow managed not to notice the enormous display. "About what?" he asked.

Though we didn't ask what people thought about abortion or the display, many felt compelled to tell us.

A young African-American woman from Philly: "I've never been pro-abortion anyway, but the pictures really should change some people's minds — it's really messed up."

"Fuck no," said two young white women, one in town from Georgia to visit the other. "We were actually just saying that it was disgusting, and that if I had a child here, I'd be very upset."

An older African-American couple visiting from Cleveland, the man wearing a cross necklace walking beside his partner's wheelchair: "It hasn't changed my mind — I believe that abortion is murder," said the woman. Her companion nodded.

A 31-year-old white woman visiting from Memphis: "It actually makes me more solid in my beliefs. I think this is a disgusting display." Her companion, a 60-year-old white man: "I'm pro-choice too; this is bullshit. It's what the whole damn country is about — choice."

A 55-year-old white man pushing a heavy bicycle said that he thought the images were fantastic, and necessary. "What changed the Vietnam War is when reporters went into the field and actually showed the carnage — that's what helped get the anti-Vietnam War demonstrations going. People need to see all the blood and guts."

It's true — frightening or disgusting visuals grab and hang on to our attention in a way that comes in second only to pornography. It's human nature.

Fear and disgust are hard-wired preferences that keep us away from things that might be dangerous. In general, "disgust" keeps us away from microscopic things that might kill us if we eat them — spoiled or infested food, feces, vomit, dead bodies, disease. Fear keeps us away from situations in which something might kill and eat us.

Interestingly, fresh blood and gore appear to hit both our fear and disgust triggers — studies have found that gory pictures and video raise the heart rate more than simply disgusting things like vomit or maggots.

Unsurprisingly, having your fight-or-flight button pushed by gory images doesn't prime people to hear nuanced philosophical arguments. It mostly makes them ready to fight.

Seth Drayer, director of training for Created Equal, looks like one of his earnest, clean-cut college-age volunteers plus maybe five years. There were no bullhorns on Friday, though the images were unavoidable and the music loud. Nobody was even trying to strike up conversations with passers-by. Created Equal tries to offset their gruesome images with almost absurdly polite behavior.

"Sometimes we're connecting on emotional levels with people, and so we have to learn how to try to defuse anger, how to chat with someone on a perhaps difficult topic in a way that is not going to elevate emotions," said Drayer. "We take a lot of inspiration from the Freedom Riders of the 1960s." Created Equal frequently draws parallels between themselves and the civil rights movement; their slideshow opens with an image of Martin Luther King Jr., and the trance-y beat behind it samples his voice.

Drayer wore a very obvious GoPro camera strapped to his chest; it's clear why when you check out a video he shot this July in Columbus that figures into an ongoing lawsuit. Because of the weird vantage point, half the time all you can see of the woman yelling at Drayer in the video is a close-up of her gray Burger King work shirt.

"You fucking dipshit, that is not what a fetus looks like. OK? It's a clump of cells at 12 weeks!" The woman's shouted problem is one that a lot of pro-choice people have with the images pro-life activists use — they claim they're misleadingly labeled. Many of these images are of sketchy provenance, so it's never really been settled.

The woman eventually kicks over the sign. "And get that camera out of my face," she yells, shoving Drayer and walking away. Drayer follows her while calling the police as she kicks over another sign half a block away, yelling, "Fuckwit! ... Your signs deserve to get fucked up!"

"Occasionally we do have someone who's angry, in our face and yelling, but that is not the norm," said Drayer. In Philly, a few people confronted the protesters, but not many, and nothing loud. Few people acknowledged them at all.

"To have people change their minds right on the spot — it's unusual, frankly," says Mark Harrington, national executive director of Created Equal. He says that's not the point — his organization is more about the long game. "The photos don't go away, and neither does the video. They stay in people's heads. ... We talk about putting the stone in people's shoe that they can't get out."

Emily Alley isn't sure about the stone-in-the-shoe theory. As far as she knows, the 2013 study she did for her thesis at the Uni­versity of Kansas is still the only one specifically measuring the impact of graphic abortion ads, and it was on short-term effects.

For her thesis on polemical advertisements, Alley asked study participants to rank themselves as pro-life or pro-choice on a scale of one to 10. Two weeks later, she brought them back in, had them sit through three very graphic Randall

Terry anti-abortion ads that were broadcast on TV in 2012 (one aired during the Super Bowl). Then she asked them to rank themselves again.

"There was no statistically significant change in people's beliefs," Alley found. "In fact, in the most extreme cases, the people who considered themselves very pro-choice considered themselves more pro-choice after viewing the advertisements."

She has caveats: Those were outliers, her study was made up of a couple hundred undergrads, more research should be done before drawing broad conclusions about the use of graphic imagery in pro-life ads. "But I would say there is no evidence to say it is effective."

Other studies have found that scaring people into having safer sex by showing them graphic images of people with AIDS doesn't work, and that disgusting anti-smoking ads showing cancerous lungs just tend to make true-believer smokers want a cigarette.

But, Alley says, abortion is different. There's nobody arguing the pro-cancer side, and no one wants to get HIV. Few women are super-psyched to actually get an abortion, but the numbers don't lie: Women want them, women have wanted them, women will continue to want them.

"When you drive across the state of Kansas, where I'm from, you see a lot of signs on the side of the road that are very graphic, very hostile, very confrontational," Alley says. She says these signs inspired her study. "I thought to myself, 'You know, it's not that I necessarily disagree with the message, but this doesn't move me to want to agree.' And I don't know that I could see anyone possibly being convinced by something like that. It maybe makes the person feel better who put up the sign."