ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Bringing “pro-life” message to the parish and the street: Visual anti-abortion materials in late communist and early democratic Poland (1970s-1990s)

• In Event: Representing Pregnancy: Science and Culture in the 20th Century 2

English Abstract

In 1985 a Polish anti-abortion activist Andrzej Winkler brought from Germany to Poland the American pseudo-documentary The Silent Scream, produced in 1984 by Bernard Nathanson. In the ensuing years, The Silent Scream and other foreign “pro- life” films were shown in Polish parishes and circulated among “right to life” groups. Since the mid-1970s, Polish anti-abortion activists were also in the possession of“pro-life” photographs produced in the US and transferred to Poland by American act ivists as Father Paul Marx or John Willke. “Pro-life” images were reproduced asfull-sized photographs to display them during Catholic marriage counselling or at exhibitions in churches. After the 1989 democratic transition, “pro-life” films and photos entered the public sphere, being shown in the television and displayed during anti-abortion pickets and demonstrations in the Polish streets. This paper analyzes the reception, adaptation and circulation of anti-abortion visual materials in Poland, focusing on the responses of local anti-abortion activists and a broader public to mainly American “pro-life” visual transfers. I probe the role of anti-abortion films and photos during the communist times, when they were displayed mostly in Church-controlled spaces and venues, and after the democratic transition, when they fully entered the mainstream public space. I examine the role of visual materials, and the fetal personhood frame that they were establishing, during the 1993 and 1996 anti-abortion campaigns. I also study how in the last decades of communism local and foreign images of fetuses and embryos reached the public through publications in popular press and books.

Author

• Sylwia Kuźma-Markowska, University of Warsaw