Lennart Nilsson, Photographer Who Inspired Pro-Lifers, Dies At 94

On Saturday, Swedish photographer Lennart Nilsson, the man who spearheaded a revolution against the forces that champion abortion, died at the age of 94.

Nilsson became internationally famous in the mid-1960’s when he used very thin endoscopes to photograph babies in utero, some of whom were aborted babies obtained from women who terminated their pregnancies under Swedish law.

As TIME reported in 2013:

What most people don’t recall—or, more likely, never knew—about Nilsson’s achievement is that, in fact, many of the embryos pictured in the photo essay “had been surgically removed,” as LIFE told its readers, “for a variety of medical reasons.” In other words, while Nilsson (and Karl Storz in Germany and Jungners Optiska in Stockholm, who manufactured special macro-lenses and wide-angled special optics to Nilsson’s specs) revolutionized photography with mind-expanding devices and techniques for photography, it’s worth recalling that not all of the embryos or fetuses seen in that groundbreaking 1965 LIFE article lived very long beyond the moment that Nilsson made their portraits. Doomed to a mortal end, they gained a kind of immortality through a photographer’s inspired vision and tenacious pursuit of what so many, for so long, deemed the impossible.

Those pictures were first published in Life Magazine, then published in his best-selling book A Child is Born in 1965. The book sold millions of copies.

Dr. Randall K. O’Bannon, NRLC director of education & research, commented, “When the supporters of abortion were arguing that the baby was nothing more than a ‘blob of tissue, these photographs were exposing that lie on the magazine racks of checkout counters all across America.”

As AFP noted, “He is commonly credited with the first photographs of the AIDS virus and the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) virus, using a scanning electron microscope.” Nilsson also covered covering the liberation of Norway in 1945.