Fetus, 18 Weeks, Lennart Nilsson, 1965
This was the first time that the world was publicly shown what the human fetus actually looks like. It was in Nilsson’s essay, Drama of Life Before Birth, and it sold out within a matter of days just because it gave the world a view of what the fetus looked like. LIFE published the essay and explained that all but one of the fetuses pictured were photographed outside the womb and had been removed—or aborted—“for a variety of medical reasons.”