American Propaganda
"Right to Life" demonstration, at White House and Capitol, 1978 US photograph: Marchers on the fifth anniversary of Roe v

"Right to Life" demonstration, at White House and Capitol

Hand-lettered signs at the January 1978 Right to Life march in Washington

A January 23, 1978 photograph of the Right to Life march in Washington, on the fifth anniversary of Roe v. Wade. Library of Congress, public domain.

Techniques named on the archive record

Glittering generalities
Date
January 23, 1978
Made by
Anti-abortion demonstrators at the annual March for Life, Washington, D.C.
Medium
Photograph
Country
United States
Regime
Carter Administration
Source
Identified Openly sourced: the speaker is who they say they are
Source
Library of Congress , retrieved September 27, 2026
Source
Public domain (USN&WR photo collection; LoC: No known restrictions on publication) Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington, D.C. 20540 USA http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.pnp/pp.print

Object, image, and catalog record from the FRAME archive. Text on this page is CC BY 4.0. Image rights are as the archive records.

Full record at propagandaarchive.org

A Library of Congress photograph of January 23, 1978 shows marchers in Washington, D.C., on the fifth anniversary of Roe v. Wade, carrying hand-lettered anti-abortion signs.

What the photograph shows

A crowd of marchers fills the frame, many holding homemade signs. The largest ones are legible. One carries a fetal photograph with the captions "Life" and "Death." Others are partly hidden behind the people in front, and the archive left those out rather than guess at them. The words that can be read are these.

ABORTION IS

MURDER

SAVE MY

LIFE

I WANT TO LIVE

[photo captions on the same sign:] Life Death

ABORTION

CLINICS

BREED

DEATH

AMERICA

PROTECTS

EVERYTHING

[illegible]

BABIES

Who is speaking

The catalog names the speakers as anti-abortion demonstrators at the annual March for Life, photographed on January 23, 1978, with the White House and the Capitol named in the title. The picture comes from the U.S. News & World Report collection at the Library of Congress. These are private citizens with their own signs. No agency issued them, and FRAME files the source as openly identified.

How to read it

Several signs speak in the first person for the unborn child: "save my life," "I want to live." That voice is the movement's core argument made visible. The archive tags the wording as glittering generalities and loaded language, and its own note is careful: the march is open advocacy, and the tags apply to slogans that state a moral conclusion rather than a claim that can be tested.

That is the fair reading. "Abortion is murder" is a moral and legal position that many Americans hold and many others reject. A sign is not the place where that dispute is settled, and no one should expect it to be. What the photograph documents is the right to make the claim in front of the seat of government and be seen doing it.

The opposite side's official messaging is on the record too. In 2024 the Biden White House posted a social card on abortion bans that carries its own rhetorical choices. Both deserve the same reading: what is claimed, what is left out, and who is speaking. The abortion debate case study reads these signs beside the abortion-rights posters of the same decade.

Sources

  • FRAME object record, "Right to Life" demonstration, at White House and Capitol, January 23, 1978.
  • Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, U.S. News & World Report photograph collection, item 2016646416, retrieved by the archive 27 September 2026. Rights as recorded: public domain; no known restrictions on publication.