Debilitating Cuteness and the Abortion Debate

A Visual Culture Debates Invisible Things, and None of Us Are Better for It

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The relationship between the visual and the moral is an important relationship: it’s one of those elements of moral thinking that you can almost randomly walk throw a dart on a timeline and land on someone who’s made this connection between attention, morality, and visuality. What we see is what we learn to see is what we learn to love. It’s the place where physical representation in leadership positions shakes hands with concerns over what’s appropriate to broadcast on television: we learn by looking as much as we do by thinking, because the visual shapes our desires and our affection.

Theologically, the question turns on a few axes, mostly having to do with the appropriateness of depicting God in any kind of image form, a question which gets really tricky if you confess (as Christians do) that Jesus of Nazareth is God in the flesh. At stake here is, at one level, the question of whether the essence of God is that which we can know, and thus depict, as the second commandment warns. To try to depict God in some kind of visualized way is serious business, even when depicting the Incarnation, because of the link between our love and our vision. Most Christians (most) ultimately came down on the “it’s fine because of the Incarnation” side of the debate, but it’s with good reason, though, that icons remain such a divided subject between Protestant Christians and Catholics and Orthodox.

The moral insight that we learn to love as we view takes a lot of different forms, positively and negatively. But I want to look at the ways in which this connection between visual medium and morality come together in the abortion debate, starting with why the following billboard, two blocks from my house, encapsulates much of how the abortion debate unravels: