Pro-Choice Supporter Takes Truth-in-Advertising to the Subway

If you want to fight for truth-in-advertising surrounding abortion, you can send a letter to Congress. You can send a letter to your city council. Or you can plaster your personal story up on top of a deceptive ad.

The New York City subways have been graced with the presence of an ad series by AbortionChangesYou.com. Think: faces of sad women, accompanied by rueful phrases such as "I thought life would be the way it was before ... abortion changes you." The website is pretty much the same thing: more sad women, or sad family members, expressing how awful they feel for having had/let their loved one have an abortion. It doesn't come across as supportive in the least: it comes across as a massive guilt-trip.

Well, it seems some pro-choice activist decided that the dialogue was awfully one-sided and downright deceptive, and decided to take matters into her own hands. She posted on the offending ad: "Now I can go to college & fulfill my dreams," as seen at this Feministing post. Some anti-choicers have called this defacement, but it's hardly the graffiti common to the Big Apple — it is a thoughtful commentary pointing the fact that abortion can have a positive impact on a person's life, which you'd never be able to tell from the ad campaign or website.

The organization profess to simply want to offer support to women and be an apolitical "safe space." Yet there are no stories from women happy with their choice to have an abortion. Susan Dominus in the New York Times calls this a "Pretense of Neutrality," given that it seems designed to manipulate women and promotes anti-choice resources that "present the truth of the impact and extensive damage abortion inflicts on the mother, father, extended family and society." Dominus continues, "An 'Abortion Changed Me' campaign — that might be therapeutic. But 'Abortion Changes You' — that sounds like propaganda masquerading as therapy."

Dominus also calls attention to an actual "safe place" for discussing abortion and supporting women: The Doula Project, which "works to create a society in which all pregnant people have access to the care and support they need during their pregnancies and the ability to make healthy decisions for themselves, whether they face birth, miscarriage, stillbirth, fetal anomaly, or abortion." Judgment-free.

For some people, abortion can be a simple decision: an embryo isn't a life, and if this isn't the right time to have a child, you don't have one. For others with different beliefs, the decision can be far more difficult, even painful, taking into consideration many factors. These women do need support, but that means real support, from an organization that isn't focused on shaming them. This is why places that offer comprehensive support like The Doula Project are so vital.

As is accurate information for women about abortion: so if you don't have the opportunity to add another voice to an agenda-driven subway campaign, you can send a message to Congress asking for truth-in-advertising and medically accurate information from anti-choice clinics. Women deserve to be told the truth.

Photo credit: Annie Mole