Shocking photo at centre of US fury too sad to show you

It’s an image so distressing that we can’t show it to you, and so powerful that it became the ultimate symbol of the abortion rights movement. Warning: Disturbing content.

Warning: Disturbing content.

It’s an image too shockingly sad to show you, and so powerful that it became a symbol for the abortion rights movement. Because what happened to the woman featured in the photo is unimaginable.

In the image, which was taken by a police officer, 28-year-old Gerri Santoro can be seen lying naked, slumped facedown on the ground with her torso lying over her bent legs, her lower half covered in blood and surrounded by what appears to be towels.

She had checked into the Norwich Motel in Connecticut, US, on the night of June 8, 1964 with her lover Clyde Dixon. Six-and-a-half months pregnant, she was prepared to let Mr Dixon perform an illegal abortion using a catheter.

However, she started haemorrhaging and Mr Dixon panicked, leaving Ms Santoro to bleed to death. Her cause of death was determined to be caused by an air embolism due to a back-alley abortion.

Her body was found by a maid the next day.

Nine years later, the black-and-white image was published by Ms. Magazine along with the headline “Never Again”. It went to print shortly after the US Supreme Court handed down its opinion on Roe v Wade in 1973, a ruling which gave American women the right to terminate a pregnancy.

The same ruling which has now been overturned.

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A photo of Gerri Santoro influenced the abortion debate.

Mr Dixon later turned himself in to police and served one year in jail over the death of Santoro.

Later it emerged that he had borrowed tools from a friend whose wife was a doctor, and sought advice including from a textbook, so he could perform the abortion.

Ms Santoro, remembered as a fun-loving woman, had two daughters to a previous relationship, a man who she’d married quickly. Relatives say she had shown signs of being physically abused by him. The couple had stayed together for years and moved to California, before Ms Santoro fled back to her childhood home with her daughters.

Then she fell pregnant to Mr Dixon, and upon hearing her estranged husband was coming to visit town, she was terrified what he may do when he found out she was pregnant to another man.

Abortion rights demonstrators gather. Picture: Suzanne Cordeiro/AFP

The editors who had published the picture of Ms Santoro’s body say the picture displays the dangers of a world without access to safe abortion.

“I, and the editors at Ms, all felt very similarly that she represented every woman, potentially every woman who was forced to have an illegal abortion,” journalist Roberta Brandes Gratz told the ABC about the photo.

“It became iconic. It showed the world what the fate of women was, for those who could not have a legal abortion.

“It says everything that needs to be said about the issue in one photograph.”

There’s fury over the recent overturning of Roe vs. Wade. Picture: Elijah Nouvelage/Getty Images/AFP

At the time of going to press, the editors say they didn’t know the identity of the woman in the picture.

The publication of the image distressed Ms Santoro’s family, particularly her daughters who had believed their mother had died in a car accident.

“Although it didn’t name any names, it dawned on me that this was the picture of my sister,” her sister Leona Gordon said of realising the true identity of the woman in the photo.

“It brought all of these horrible things back to my mind that I’d been trying to forget.”

Since then, Ms Gordon released the documentary Leona’s Sister Gerri in 1995 to give her sister’s life an identity.