ABSTRACT
When Life magazine published Lennart Nilsson's photographs of living human fetuses on April 30, 1965, as the first pictures of their kind, this was not strictly true. In the first place, although the cover photograph seems to have been appropriately labeled by Life as "the first portrait ever made of a living embryo inside its mother's womb" because by "using a specially built super wide angle lens and a tiny flash beam at the end of a surgical scope, Nilsson was able to shoot this picture of a 15-week-old embryo," all the rest of the pictures were of embryos that "had been surgically removed for a variety of reasons" from their mothers' wombs. In other words, they were dead embryos.1
