I work in the reproductive rights field. Every day my colleagues and I work to destigmatize abortion and encourage people to be open and honest about their own abortion stories. One of the most compelling things we discuss is that most pregnancies are terminated at around 7 weeks. As a matter of fact, that’s when I had my abortion. At 7 weeks along, whatever was hanging out in my uterus was itty bitty and looked nothing like a baby, as the anti-choice movement wants people to believe.

In recent years, the pro-choice movement has been trying to shift the focus of the abortion debate away from late-term abortion, while the anti-choice movement continues to push the falsehood that abortion is common even after the fetus is viable outside the womb. In reality, only one percent of all abortions happen during the 3rd trimester.

When the anti-choice movement negates 99 percent of the reality of abortion in order to fit a brutal, murderous narrative, it shows their true colors. It shows that their goal is not to save unborn children, but to control the fate of people who get pregnant. It is to tell people who fall pregnant that their circumstance is deserved, and that their feelings about it have ceased to matter. They have been downgraded from autonomous human to incubator with one event.

With all this careful messaging and conscious effort to shift the conversation toward abortion as normal healthcare, I have a question. I’ve noticed a trend that has, frankly, really pissed me off. Why why WHY do people who write pro-choice articles, essays, op-eds or whatever else almost always use photographs of hugely pregnant people to accompany their work?

Isn’t that exactly the wrong message? Doesn’t the image of a woman in her third trimester of pregnancy as the backdrop for an article about a person’s right to choose abortion reinforce the opposite of its intention? I think so. It makes me wonder if the folks picking these photos don’t realize how harmful it is. Or, which I think is an even more interesting possibility, is the problem that if they aren’t in their third trimester, they aren’t pregnant enough to look pregnant.

Let’s say that’s the case. Someone took a picture of Sam, who is pregnant, but is only 6 weeks along. No one can tell that the photo represents pregnancy. But still, shouldn’t we use that photo instead?

It would be so much more compelling to have pictures of pregnant people in the first weeks of pregnancy as the backdrop for our movement’s words. Then it would show what we have been trying to say all along: that abortion has never and will never be about the murder of unborn children. It is about health care options and a pregnant person’s right to do what they deem appropriate with their body.

But hey, I only work here. What do I know?

Alex Ferencz is the Reproductive Rights Outreach Director at ProgressNow Colorado. She works to destigmatize abortion by sharing her own story.