Please join us on Monday, March 23 at 6pm when historian Rose Holz speaks on "The Unexpected Origins of Modern Pro-Life Imagery: The 1939 Dickinson-Belskie Birth Series Sculptures and Dr. Dickinson’s Religious Case for Abortion." The lecture will take place at the Augustus C. Long Health Sciences Library, Lobby Level, Hammer Building, 701 West 168th St. at Fort Washington Ave.
The 1939-40 New York City World’s Fair had a surprise hit attraction in a series of sculptures depicting human development from fertilization through delivery. Sponsored by the Maternity Center Association (MCA) and created by the team of obstetrician Robert L. Dickinson and sculptor Abram Belskie, the “Birth Series Sculptures” had a long second life in book form as the MCA’s acclaimed Birth Atlas, which went through numerous editions into the 1960s.
Holz will discuss the creation and dissemination of this hugely influential yet surprisingly overlooked work of art and its subsequent second life in the Birth Atlas. The Birth Series sculptures were reproduced in a wide variety of forms and sent out across the United States and overseas, giving rise to modern views of pregnancy decades before Lennart Nilsson’s much-heralded in-utero photographs in Life magazine in the 1960s.
Strikingly, this imagery also foreshadowed by several decades the rise of modern pro-life imagery, even though Dickinson was a firm supporter of abortion for both medical and religious reasons. Thus embedded in the Birth Series is a story that defies modern abortion debates and thus opens up unusual opportunities for dialogue in a hotly contested and deeply entrenched issue.
The lecture is free and open to the public. Registration is required.
