a winning ad slogan: our product is not very toxic

By Diogenes ( articles ) | Sep 29, 2010

NARAL ProChoice Virginia has a new video ad, entitled “This is what I learned at a Virginia Crisis Pregnancy Center.” In its own way the ad is outrageous. Yet pro-lifers might want to welcome it.

In the video a series of young women appear before the camera and make a claim that, they say, was made by a counselor at a crisis-pregnancy center. The ad concludes with NARAL’s counter-claim that all these claims were false.

But the claims allegedly made by the crisis-pregnancy center are not all false. Abortion does increase a woman’s risk of subsequent miscarriages and of contracting breast cancer. Abortion does entail the risk of serious complications. Sexual promiscuity does raise the risk of AIDS and other sexually transmitted diseases. Condoms don’t eliminate those risks. Abstinence is the most effective method of birth control.

It’s true that some of the claims made on the video are exaggerated. (We have only NARAL’s word for it that the crisis-pregnancy center made the claims in those inaccurate ways.) Still a sensible young woman, hearing that an abortion carries all these risks, would want to know more. If she did her homework, she would learn that all of the claims have some validity.

Think about it: If you were marketing Sudz Beer, would you want to broadcast an ad ridiculing a rival’s claim that every bottle of Sudz contains 3 teaspoons of arsenic? How about if tests have shown “just” 1 teaspoon of arsenic in each bottle?

So the net effect of the NARAL video is to place questions in the viewer’s mind: questions about the risks of abortion and of sexual promiscuity. The very questions that the crisis-pregnancy centers are raising.

NARAL complains that the crisis-pregnancy centers are confusing women. But this video illustrates the profound confusion in the minds of the NARAL folks, who think that they’re plugging their own cause by introducing the claims of their critics.