The abortion industry has a public-relations problem. Make no mistake: in this case, it’s not the medium, it’s the message.
It’s hard to tug on people’s heartstrings when your business is stopping hearts. In spite of this, abortion providers like Planned Parenthood have made a number of disastrous attempts to pull this off. There was the commercial last year by “Avengers” director Joss Whedon that suggested if your local Planned Parenthood clinic closed down, women would die, lose their jobs, and not be able to go to college.
Before that, there was a series of city-sponsored ads in New York Subways featuring grouchy-looking babies with captions like, “Got a good job? I cost thousands of dollars each year.”
But I think the most tone-deaf and openly anti-baby pro-abortion ad ever made showed up on social media earlier this month. The video, which was actually produced a couple of years ago by a left-wing political group called “The Agenda Project,” features a cooing baby girl serenaded by a Brahms lullaby, accompanied by the captions: “She deserves to be loved. She deserves to be wanted. She deserves to be a choice.”
Apparently, I wasn’t the only one who immediately thought that this video must be satire. But it’s not. The Agenda Project is a real organization that has influenced national politics in the past with over-the-top ads. Remember that bizarre, disturbing commercial from 2011 that featured a Paul Ryan lookalike throwing a wheelchair-bound grandmother off a cliff?
Many have mistakenly concluded that the “she deserves to be a choice” ad was sponsored by Planned Parenthood, since it closes with “#StandwithPP.” To be clear, Planned Parenthood wasn’t involved in the production. Still, the video is in line with a long tradition of gruesome, outrageous, and downright self-destructive messaging by abortion-rights activists.
For example, comedian Sarah Silverman’s remark earlier this year that pro-life laws make her want to eat an aborted fetus. Mary Elizabeth Williams’ Salon article entitled “So what if abortion ends life?” and the “Shout Your Abortion” campaign, which aims to normalize abortion by encouraging women to proudly tell their stories.
This isn’t what we at BreakPoint call “nut-picking” (you know, seeking out only the craziest examples from the fringe of the pro-choice movement). As we’ve pointed out before, there’s been a marked and discernible shift in abortion rights rhetoric from treating abortion as something that ought to be “safe, legal, and rare,” to promoting and even celebrating it in the most in-your-face ways possible. I’ve even wondered aloud if there’s a pro-life troll running Planned Parenthood’s Twitter feed, given their blindly ironic tweets.
What I think we’re seeing is an increasingly desperate and embattled pro-abortion movement. And it makes sense… Imaging technology is ever-improving; neonatal and prenatal medicine are breaking new frontiers almost daily. High-profile cases like Kermit Gosnell’s “house of horrors” reveal what the abortion industry has become.
In light of all this, it’s increasingly difficult to buy the tired old pro-abortion lines that the unborn are “clumps of tissue,” and that abortion is “women’s healthcare.” In our age of 3-D ultrasounds, we know exactly what abortion is and whom it kills.
The kind of unwitting honesty revealed by the revolting messaging coming from modern abortion defenders these days needs to be shared, widely. They must now make their case to a public more aware than ever of the humanity of the unborn. When scare tactics and bad comedy don’t work, we see the deadly logic of abortion: a beautiful, giggling baby that, we are told without a trace of remorse, “deserves to be a choice.”
No, she deserves to live. But a movement that tries to make death look and sound like a loving choice, deserves to die.
