Certain images have power that goes way beyond what a thousand words can convey. One example is an image tweeted on June first this year by LifeNews.com showing a smile on a baby that hasn’t been born yet next to a similar smile on the baby after birth. That makes expressions like “fetal tissue mass” as descriptors of in-utero children look like the sick jokes they are.

Baby before birth. Baby after. pic.twitter.com/2ARhNjJOO6

— LifeNews.com (@LifeNewsHQ) June 1, 2023

Perhaps understanding the potential to undermine the logic of abortion, someone wrote to the so-called “fact-checking” website Snopes asking if it was genuine. (Hat tip: Protestia)

Here's what Snopes wrote in response:

Despite this reader's skepticism, we soon found data that showed both of these images were real, and that neither of them had been doctored.

To begin figuring this out, we performed a reverse-image search to find other stories that featured these same pictures.

The best search result that we found came from the Manchester Evening News.

In 2014, the news outlet reported about the June 30 birth of Leo David Hargreaves, the same little boy who was pictured in the LifeNews post.

At the time, Leo's parents, Leighton Hargreaves and Amy Cregg, were living in Church, a village in Lancashire, England.

The article from the Evening News featured an un-cropped version of the sonogram with a date stamp of May 13, 2014, and said that it had been taken at 31 weeks into Cregg's pregnancy.

According to the data that was displayed on the sonogram's borders, it was captured in "4D Real Time" mode on a General Electric (GE) SRI II (second generation Speckle Reduction Imaging) machine. (snip)

The article also showed a collage of pictures that included the "after" photograph that appeared in the LifeNews Facebook post. This indicated that both images showed the same little boy.

Anyone who argues for late-term abortions must explain why the two images of a smiling child are of two completely different creatures, one of which may be exterminated without penalty and the other of which merits the protection of the law.

I congratulate Snopes on its diligence and honesty.

Photo credit: Twitter